Beyond the Building: Leveraging Technology to Customize Learning
How lucky I am to host the American Reinventor series and better understand how our School systems are in thoughtful, innovative and caring hands. In this brilliant article coming out of our American ReInventors session late last month, Dr. Willlis' innovative and motivating spirit is helping the entire organization improve their MINDSET and move towards continuous and positive growth at every level. Thank you Dr. Willis!
Beyond the Building: Leveraging Technology to Customize Learning
Tamara Willis, Ph.D., Superintendent of Susquehanna Township School District
As educators, we are currently at a crossroads between a “return to normal” and the “new normal”.
Buried in all the discussions about school reopening lies a more fundamental question - what type of education system will be sending our students back into?
Will it be the one from before the pandemic, where one-size-fits-all learning was defined by “seat time” in physical school buildings?
Or will it be a new model, where we leverage technology to create personalized, “always on” learning experiences that prepare students for an ever-changing world?
Personally, I hope it’s the latter. From where I sit in Susquehanna Township, Pennsylvania, here are some of the trends I’m reflecting on as we prepare for a post-pandemic education system.
Learners Deserve Agency
Learning can happen anywhere and anytime. As such, students should be empowered to forge their own educational pathways.
The traditional view of education involved a teacher acting as a “sage on the stage” during the rigid hours of the 7-hour school day. She would impart certain knowledge to students, who would be asked to memorize and recall it on assessments. Students were passive observers in the learning process, spectators in their own education.
Today, we need a much different paradigm.
True learning requires students to co-create their educational experiences with teachers. Students weigh in on what to learn, how they like to learn, where they’re thriving, and where they wish to improve. In this framework, a teacher serves as more of a “learning facilitator” than a traditional “instructor”.
In Susquehanna Township, learners in our middle school regularly meet with an assigned Advisory Teacher. Together, they review progress toward the student’s individual learning targets. The students become agents of their own education, whether they’re advocating for additional time or offering pieces of evidence in order to move forward. For the first time, our learners act as education partners, not just “recipients.” critical partners in their educational experience.
The Information Age Is All About Customization
As schools reopen, do we want our education system to return to a 126-year-old “one size fits all” industrial model? If our mission is to help students thrive in the current job market, going back to the old ways will not get us to this goal.
We’re now living in an information age that is rooted and grounded in customization. Shopping can be done online. Movies and TV shows can be selected by the viewer at any hour. Consumers choose what we want, when we want it, and how we want it. As consumers, we choose when and how we engage with service providers. It’s time that public education be more deliberate in meeting the needs and preferences of its consumers.
We must base our programming decisions around the “end user”, which of course in this context is the student. And now that we have increased access to technology, it’s important that we harness it to foster customized and personalized instruction. Whether students are learning synchronously or asynchronously, in-person or virtually, they deserve the full spectrum of learning experiences to be successful in school.
Philosophical Shifts Precede Structural Changes
In Susquehanna Township, none of this would be possible without a group of teachers and staff dedicated to building better solutions for learners. We spent our first year on our initiative (well before the pandemic) laying a philosophical foundation for the changes we wanted to see. We brought all of our stakeholders together and began brainstorming ways to reimagine education. We all read Mindset: The New Psychology of Success and The Inevitable, to better understand how learning must adapt in an era of technological advancement. Then, in the second year, we started implementing pilot programs around personalized learning.
For example, before the pandemic, a “virtual day” in Susquehanna Township would not count as one of our required annual school days. Moving forward, if we want to encourage more learning outside the school building, we must implement policies that make this a more acceptable and accessible option.
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Change is hard. Many people harbor doubts about completely reimagining education. But, as I tell folks, what we have now just isn’t working for so many students. In Susquehanna Township, we conducted a decade-long audit of student outcomes and found that for a certain percentage of our kids, not a single intervention we implemented could prevent them from falling behind. It wasn’t the administrators or the teachers or the curriculum. It was a fundamental flaw in our approach to education.
Implementing these changes will be a long journey and it won’t be easy. But if we can articulate a new philosophy for learning and build the institutions to allow it to flourish, I am confident our students will end up smarter, more satisfied, and more successful in the long term.