As I’m now coordinating the Personalized Learning Initiative for Bridgeport Diocesan Schools, I thought that I would share some of my personal learning goals for the year. Already this experience has served to ground my research in practice. My challenges and related goals for learning fall into three domains: 1) maintaining a focus on the principles of personalization 2) change management and implementing effective professional development, and 3) technology infrastructure.

Maintaining Focus on the Principles of Personalization

Already, in this first couple weeks of September, I know how easy it could be to focus on the technology, on the platforms, on the bugs tools, toys, furniture – all of the false idols of personalized learning. Personalizing learning is about teachers learning about and working with each student, inspiring and using students’ interests to develop and follow a personalized learning plan with the student, and developing each students’ capacity for independent learning. These require human connections, interpersonal relationships, and expert teachers. These are the true foci of personalized learning.

Change Management and Implementing Effective Professional Development

Here, again, I am putting learning and experience into action in ways that are making me grow. I believe that effective professional development is embedded in practice, ongoing, and align practice with school and district goals. Now we get to plan and deliver. We ground our work in a firm belief that all students come with unique talents and gifts and are deserving of respect. From there, we invite teachers and others to envision a learning program that fully honors these beliefs. By the first week of September we’ve shared the vision and some training on one instructional design – the center-rotation model of blended learning, and on the adaptive learning platform we’ve adopted (Edmentum Exact Path). There are still massive holes on our collective capacity. I will be paying particular attention to developing our capacity to facilitate the innovation zones (makerspaces), developing moral digital citizens, conferring with students, instructional leadership in buildings personalizing learning, and using the data from the learning platform with students to guide instruction and student learning.

Technology Infrastructure

Here’s something I hadn’t thought about before – how do you get kindergarteners to log in to a Chromebook, get to a website, enter a URL, and provide a user-name and password for their adaptive learning platform? So, this year, I’m learning the ins and outs of Single-Sign-On software, enterprise-level user account management, mobile device management (iOS and Chrome), and selecting and deploying an adaptive learning platform. You’ll hear me often talk about how personalizing learning isn’t about the technology, but that the technology helps bring personalized learning to scale and provides valuable data for teachers and students to reflect on and plan with together. Well, that is all well and good when the technology that we use works – and that takes a lot of time and coordination across systems, staff, and buildings. What’s next for my learning? I need to know what programs and apps might work well to facilitate learning for elementary school-aged children. In particular, what does an innovation zone look like for kinders? What is digital citizenship and online safety to a 5-year old? These are areas for growth for me.