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Here’s how even the biggest district can tailor instruction to every student’s needs.
By Eileen Murphy Buckley
Teachers, principals, superintendents, parents, and politicians may have different philosophies of education, but at the end of the day we all have one goal in mind: empowering students to become critical thinkers. As a teacher for 15 years and then as the director of curriculum and instruction for 115 schools in Chicago, I saw firsthand that critical thinking skills are hard to teach and hard to learn. And implementing the kind of personalized education required to truly nurture these skills is especially challenging on a large scale, where districts serve multiple stakeholders with multiple needs using multiple apps and no central system.
While technology is part of the solution, it does not in and of itself guarantee innovation. Students sitting in cubicles with computers, unengaged, is not innovation. Educators like myself have known for decades what it takes to facilitate personalized learning in the classroom. And research proves it. True learning takes collaboration, individualized feedback, and engaging topics worth learning about. Above all, it takes reading and writing across subjects. Decades of research from the University of Chicago shows that reading and writing across content areas as little as three times per month leads to career and college readiness.
So if that’s all it takes, how do we ensure that every student, in every school and every district, benefits from these research-based best practices? It’s not about making more curriculum. It’s not about finding new ways to assess the kids. It’s about creating and scaling great instruction. Here are three key steps that districts can take to personalize instruction system-wide.
- Commit to maximizing student outcomes.
To implement personalized learning at scale, instructional leaders must overcome fear of change and embrace new technology in significant enough ways to matter to the school and district leadership, align their resources accordingly, and make decisions guided by efficacy data in the classroom.
Brad M. Wieher, the district division coordinator for English language arts, reading and ELL at Bloom Township District 206 in Chicago Heights, Illinois, calls personalized learning “our recipe for success.” To offer personalized learning to a wide range of students, the district offers reading courses from strategic to college prep to honors. In these courses, Wieher said, “We utilize resources like ThinkCERCA to tailor literacy instruction to each student’s individual needs and provide both teachers and students with the growth data needed to continuously drive instruction forward through calculated increases in text complexity.”
- Embrace rapid cycles of iteration.
I know what it’s like to feel the heavy responsibility of making decisions with taxpayer dollars and our children’s future. But since becoming an entrepreneur, I’ve learned some powerful lessons about rapid, continuous improvement. Like other startups, my ed-tech company, ThinkCERCA, was built on a “build-measure-learn” mentality. Identify a problem you want to solve, determine a metric for success, build a viable solution, and measure its success. Success is about learning and iterating quickly to get to the best solution faster. District and school leaders can easily apply this same mentality to learning.
For example, Farmington Municipal Schools in Farmington, New Mexico, conducts short-cycle assessments every quarter to align learning goals and develop individual teacher action plans. According to director of curriculum and instruction Nicole Lambson, “Teachers and administrators are involved in item analysis of each short-cycle assessment, allowing an in-depth look into the skills needed to be successful on assessments and tasks that align to Common Core shifts and expectations.”
- Support teacher innovators.
Districts that support teachers integrating technology-based resources into meaningful units of study are the most successful. As a first step, I strongly encourage every district leader to offer grants for early adopters.
Since student outcomes take time, make sure that any pilots these early adopters undertake are long enough and the sample size large enough to generate actionable results. If the timeline is shorter, collect evidence that indicates a strong promise of student results based on improved teaching and learning practices. It also helps to create institutionalized innovation spaces for rapid but true product testing so others can see great implementations for themselves.
Lambson says two of Farmington’s middle schools enlisted the support of literacy expert Dr. Katherine McKnight, who “provided opportunities for center-based literacy instruction and encouraged teachers to break away from traditional systems and lean on the innovation, creativity, and curiosity that our students come with naturally.”
Technology alone is not a solution. The goal should be to find technology that makes it easier and faster to implement research-based practices, freeing teachers to spend more time one-on-one with students. As Wieher concluded, “ThinkCERCA has provided our students with the necessary tools and individualized literacy platforms to move them towards becoming active readers, writers, and thinkers. It is these honed skills that will help promote academic success in all of their coursework, both in high school and beyond.”
Eileen Murphy Buckley is the founder and CEO of ThinkCERCA, a leading provider of personalized literacy solutions. She taught English for 15 years, was the founding English department chair at Walter Payton College Prep, and is the former director of curriculum and instruction for more than 100 of Chicago’s highest performing schools. She is also the author of the book 360 Degrees of Text (NCTE, 2011).