New Report: Personalized Learning at a Crossroads

Creating more personalized learning environments is exciting but challenging work for schools and school systems.

In a multimedia report released today, Betheny Gross and Michael DeArmond at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) share findings from a two-year study of two ambitious initiatives to scale up personalized learning funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. CRPE researchers studied how the initiatives played out in schools and central offices by observing classrooms in 39 schools, surveying 4,508 teachers, and conducting over 450 interviews with teachers, principals, superintendents, and central office staff.

The results underscore the difficulty of innovating inside a system that was not designed to support innovation. Among the findings:

• Personalized learning had strong supporters among educators. Enthusiastic teachers put significant effort into changing their practices and experimenting with new ways to engage students.
• But teachers were largely left to define personalization for themselves. Their decentralized efforts created confusion for some students, uneven quality, and few schoolwide models.
  
• Without systemwide strategies and supports for innovation, few schools had developed replicable strategies for personalized learning.
  

CRPE research director Betheny Gross said, “We can’t just ask teachers to change the instruction to be more personalized. We have to change the system around them to support this change.”

Based on early lessons from the initiatives, the report recommends four ways that system leaders can strategically support a fundamental and innovative shift in teaching and learning:

1. Help schools get clear on the problems they are solving and what will change to address them.
   
2. Create flexibility in the system, at both the school and classroom levels.
   
3. Build supports for adult learning and knowledge management strategies for innovation.
   
4. Identify which schools should innovate and which schools should adopt and adapt.