Slippery slope of Personalized Education

Is it more madness than method?

Originally published in the Moultrie News.

What are your thoughts on Personalized Education?

Personalized Education or Personalized Learning (PL) is a teaching method that customizes the learning path for individual students based on their personal preferences, skills, and experiences. It involves:

• Tailoring instruction to student's strengths, goals, and learning preferences.

• Allowing students to pursue topics that excite them.

• Constantly assessing students to shape their learning path.

• Delivering lessons in different ways to ensure students’ preferred methods are used.

Depending on the teacher and school, other components may be included, but these are the basics.

If you walk into a PL classroom, you'll likely see students working at different paces and using different methods, including digital apps, teacher-led small group lessons, and peer-to-peer instruction.

The result can be chaotic. Let's say the course is Earth Science and the unit is astronomy. Some students might be gathered around the teacher, listening to a traditional lesson on planets. A few students might be drawing a solar system model. Some might be reading articles on planet formation. Many may be watching videos or playing interactive games about planets on their electronic devices.

Technology and digital content play an outsized role in PL. The method often has kids scrolling through prescribed topics and then clicking, watching, clicking, playing, clicking, and answering repeatedly. This might reasonably be considered self-paced, but it could also be regarded as mind-deadening. If you believe the evidence that excessive screen time is detrimental to learning, you'll be aghast by PL’s reliance on it.

PL’s lavish use of “Gentle Parenting”-like lingo (“student-centered,” “voice and choice,” “child empowerment”) is catnip to modern moms and dads who believe such practices naturally extract their children's innate genius. But does it? Consider some of PL’s drawbacks.

For one, it makes slow students even slower. Working at your own pace sounds great unless “working” is not a trait in your wheelhouse. PL provides ample opportunities for lazy or apathetic students to bog down their progress in quicksand.

Meanwhile, genuinely slow learners may indeed gain better knowledge of the material that's covered; the problem is how little of it is covered. Is having a deeper understanding of Mercury, Venus, and Mars really better than surface knowledge of the entire solar system?

As for high-octane learners, PL doesn't necessarily get them to the finish line faster. Instead, it often has them “drill down” to mark time until the unit ends. Students who quickly master the concept of moons, for example, don’t necessarily move on to meteors; they just learn more about moons.

For teachers, PL can be unbearably stressful. The PL classrooms I've observed all have one thing in common: teachers on the brink. The relentless assessing and digital preparation that PL demands result in high teacher burnout.

Perhaps PL’s most flagrant fault is that it adds a giant log to the fire that's cooking kids in a modern stew of self-centeredness. One would be hard-pressed to find a learning method that more aptly accommodates today's culture of child-entitlement. In the real world of adulthood, adaptability is essential: we have to adjust to jobs that don’t cater to our strengths, bank accounts that don’t suit our desired lifestyles and relationships that require give and take. In the past, the ability to adapt was implanted in childhood, but too often today, it isn't (see my recent columns on overindulgence).

Now comes an educational method that touts letting children choose what they learn, how they learn it, and when it’s learned. This teaches them that the world adapts to their desires. It makes them the center of the universe. How can the results be anything less than horrifying?

Finally, PL’s premise — that children are the best guides of their own learning — is ludicrous. Children do not know what’s best for them. They have few experiences and little knowledge on which to base their impulsive judgments. Why would anyone allow a child who’s never been anywhere to navigate a long, crucial journey?

The likeliest destination for such a trip is precisely where many predict PL is headed.

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Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.