Abstract:

As our data-driven, cloud-based, knowledge-centric lives become ever more mobile and digital, educational systems everywhere are struggling to keep pace. Gaining and maintaining student engagement with their learning is the ultimate challenge. Engagement occurs most frequently when the teacher-student interaction is positive and in sync with students’ needs, interests and aspirations. Engagement is also associated with the willingness to persist in accomplishing challenging schoolwork, which fuels a cycle of success. In a personalized learning (PL) environment, teachers intensify engagement by taking into account students’ preferences, motivations, languages and cultures in planning for student learning. The premise behind PL is that empowering individual students to have more input into how they access and construct knowledge, and how they express their understanding of what they know, will result in better school experiences, and lead to better engagement and academic success.

Consistent with efforts across the 32-nation OECD, some Canadian provinces launched a new personalized learning (PL) K-9 curriculum in 2016. Such initiatives have been designed to transform education by situating students as co-enquirers and co-contributors of what, when and how they learn, guided by their teachers. Theoretical articles on PL abound, but only a handful of empirical school-based studies exist and they clearly show that PL enhances curricular engagement and academic attainment in Math and English. Although scholars recognize the promise and potential of the PL approach, they also cite poor conceptual clarity and a dearth of empirical studies as hampering both PL theorizing and classroom implementation. Because the research on personalized learning remains overly theorized and under-substantiated, many teachers are perplexed about how to put the PL theory into practice with all of their students. Most needed is a clear description of what is involved in implementing a personalized learning approach in the K-9 classroom; i.e. a solidified approach that is feasible and accessible for classroom teachers.

To address this gap, the author suggests a new conceptual framework for understanding the essential components of personalized learning. The C.R.E.A.T.I.V.E. framework is distilled from a review of the personalized learning literature (2007-2017) and identifies the following critical components of PL related to: choice, role of the teacher, environment, assessment, technology, inquiry, voice and equitable access to curriculum. The author discusses the relevance of each of the eight components and how they work together to make personalized learning feasible in the dynamic classroom of increasingly diverse learners.

Keywords:

Personalized learning, innovative approaches to teaching and learning, elementary school methodologies, middle school methodologies.