{"id":5546,"date":"2018-04-30T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/blog\/cw_post\/personalized-learning-wont-work-without-personalized-supports\/"},"modified":"2020-02-27T16:48:09","modified_gmt":"2020-02-27T21:48:09","slug":"personalized-learning-wont-work-without-personalized-supports","status":"publish","type":"cw_post","link":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/cw_post\/personalized-learning-wont-work-without-personalized-supports\/","title":{"rendered":"Personalized Learning Won’t Work without Personalized Supports"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"This post originally appeared at the Christensen Institute<\/a> on March 21, 2018.<\/em><\/p>\n

Last week\u2019s\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/i>Fixes column<\/a>\u00a0highlighted the enormous promise of\u00a0PowerMyLearning,<\/a>\u00a0a framework and tool that connects teachers, families, and students. The approach marks a departure from run-of-the-mill family engagement strategies like infrequent parent-teacher conferences or once yearly back-to-school nights. Instead, as the article outlines, PowerMyLearning deliberately\u00a0integrates\u00a0<\/i>efforts to engage families with efforts to improve academics by regularly looping families into collaborative homework activities and opening online, data-driven communication channels between teachers and families.<\/p>\n

The model strikes a chord with a reality that I frequently find personalized learning enthusiasts fail to mention: to yield more equitable outcomes, personalized learning will also require personalized supports and connections.<\/p>\n

This bucks a seemingly tidy vision of personalized learning as an overhaul of academics alone. Or worse yet, as a silver bullet in the form of highly customized learning pathways determined through big data and adaptive software.<\/p>\n

Technology certainly holds phenomenal potential to differentiate instruction with levels of precision and scale that a single teacher with many students may struggle to manage. But some notions of that precision can take on an antiseptic quality that assumes a series of 0\u2019s and 1\u2019s amounts to truly\u00a0knowing<\/i>\u00a0students and their families. Moreover, a vision of personalized learning as merely a diligent reworking of academic models is woefully narrow. It risks assuming that all we need is better instruction to drive better outcomes\u2014despite\u00a0plentiful evidence<\/a>\u00a0that nonacademic variables shape learning outcomes as well.<\/p>\n

Particularly in high poverty schools, schools need to have a handle on students\u2019 and families\u2019 circumstances in order to systematically address barriers to learning that might arise. And the better a school system can actually\u00a0know<\/i>\u00a0a student and his family, the better-equipped teachers will be to tailor academic supports in even more \u201cpersonalized\u201d ways.<\/p>\n

Drawing on the science of integrated student supports<\/b><\/p>\n

Where might schools hoping to tackle personalized supports start? Today, a variety of models that aim to bring more than just academics to bear in schools are often dubbed \u201cIntegrated Student Supports.\u201d For those interested, a 2017 Child Trends\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0provides a comprehensive overview of approaches and outcomes in the field to date.<\/p>\n

Based on our own research, such integrated models have innovation theory in their favor. As Michael Horn and I wrote in The Educator\u2019s Dilemma<\/a>, schools struggling to boost achievement likely need to integrate across academic and nonacademic services as far as possible to remain at the frontier of innovations to improve learning.<\/p>\n

Of course, not all integrated approaches are created equal. While schools may take pains to increase health services or to invite parents to be more involved in school, many such efforts fall short of linking back into what\u2019s happening in the classroom. For example, schools could expand access to healthcare but fail to coordinate schedules and interventions with teachers trying to squeeze the most out of instructional time. Or parents could attend events at school, but miss the chance to understand the particular academic areas where their children may be getting stuck. These mark a crucial\u2013and potentially missing\u2013link in true integration. Without that link, there\u2019s little reason to assume that increasing access to supports, services, or parent engagement\u2014despite producing other non trivial benefits\u2014would significantly drive academic outcomes.<\/p>\n

Keeping teachers in the wraparound services loop<\/b><\/p>\n

Based on our research, we hypothesize that when it comes to increasing academic outcomes, the most successful of integrated support models, like PowerMyLearning, aren\u2019t merely expanding access to those crucial services or connections. Rather, they actively keep teachers in the wraparound services and family engagement loop. As a result, teachers\u2019 academic decisions can be sensitive to the non-academic factors present in students\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n

Another model,\u00a0City Connects<\/a>,\u00a0supports this hypothesis. City Connects integrates a range of targeted poverty relief and afterschool services into schools. It has shown impressive academic gains among students, with those gains persisting well past the years students are accessing services.<\/p>\n

Mary Walsh is a professor at Boston College who founded City Connects and has studied and refined the model for many years. She attributes part of its success to connecting teachers to the program. \u201cThe heart of the relationship in what we do is the teacher-student relationship,\u201d Walsh said. \u201cMany teachers will say of course I love all my kids but there are some kids for whom they don\u2019t know exactly how to explain their challenging behavior or lack of academic progress.\u201d In Walsh\u2019s estimate, City Connects not only provides crucial services, but also directly informs teaching. \u201cTeachers tell us \u2018City Connects changed my understanding of where this child is coming from. It helped to explain his performance or behavior. I thought it was X and now I realize that it was Y + Z.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tools for connecting the dots<\/b><\/p>\n

Examples like City Connects and PowerMyLearning are an important reminder that the same way in which personalized instructional models focus on using\u00a0instructional<\/i>\u00a0data to target learning, personalized support models also hinge on high quality, longitudinal\u00a0non-academic\u00a0<\/i>data. Luckily, tools are starting to emerge to make these data-driven practices more feasible.<\/p>\n

Some of these tools are coming from service providers, like PowerMyLearning\u2019s Connect platform and City Connects\u2019 own proprietary Student Support Information System tool. Others are homegrown by schools dedicated to integrating more holistic supports. For example, the Boston Day and Evening Academy, an alternative high school in Roxbury Mass. has built a platform on Salesforce<\/a>\u00a0called Connects that merges students\u2019 academic, family, and social-emotional data in one place that educators can track longitudinally and intervene accordingly. Based on the needs that may arise in students\u2019 lives, the platform then automates outreach to both in- and out-of-school resources.<\/p>\n

Schools hoping to personalize learning should take note. As the rush to personalize academics continues, schools may see the greatest gains if academic approaches are developed in tight integration with critical non-academic supports.<\/p>\n

See also:<\/strong><\/p>\n