Personalized learning has been a hot topic over the last decade and the challenges of education during the COVID pandemic have made it even more timely as educators have struggled to address student learning needs. The tendency of schools to approach instruction through a one-size-fits-all lens has never been more visible to parents and the public.
A team of researchers based at Western Kentucky University has just published an article in the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership highlighting our work on a four-year, federally-funded grant to implement personalized learning in 111 Kentucky schools. The article describes our effort to create an Innovation Configuration Map that helps teachers understand what personalized learning really is and assess their school’s progress in implementing personalized learning strategies.
The WKU team were evaluators for a $42 million grant awarded to the Green River Regional Educational Cooperative (GRREC) and the Ohio Valley Education Cooperative (OVEC) in 2012. While the grant included several components, the overarching goal was to promote personalized learning in 111, mostly rural, schools. As we describe in the journal article, schools had wide latitude in selecting how they wanted to approach personalized learning, and in general educators have yet to develop a common understanding of what we mean by the term.
The WKU team explored research literature on constructs and strategies that seemed most closely related to the idea of personalized learning, including self-regulation theory, growth mindset, mastery learning, self-determination theory, and more. From there, we constructed an Innovation Configuration (IC) Map. Researchers Hall and Hord (2006) originally developed IC Maps as a way of helping organizations track their implementation of various change initiatives.
Our Personalized Learning IC map included four clusters/strands that described changes in the learning process, the classroom climate, and in the behaviors of students and teachers. Additionally, for each of these clusters, various indicators described the kinds of changes that might come about as a result of implementing personalized learning along a five-point continuum from continuing the status quo (no change) through implementing and finally sustaining the change intiative.
Because we lacked the resources to independently assess all 111 schools using the IC Map, the WKU team also developed a self-assessment manual for school-based leadership teams to evaluate their own implementation of personalized learning using the instrument. Then we selected six schools that reported high levels of implementation for site visits that ultimately confirmed the accuracy of the schools’ self-ratings, suggesting to us that the Personalized Learning IC Map possessed some degree of validity. Schools self-assessed with the instrument for two years and researchers found that across both cooperatives schools deepened their implementation of personalized learning.
Our article suggests directions for future research and practitioner implementation using the IC Map. We are eager for others to explore the IC Map and use it both for research and to support their personalized learning efforts. You can find the instrument and the self-assessment manual on our Rock Solid Evaluation Services website. These tools may be used with our written permission. And of course I urge you to read the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership journal article for a more thorough description of the entire process. You can direct any questions about this research to me at gary.houchens@wku.edu.
The development of this Personalized Learning IC Map and the entire evaluation project for the GRREC/OVEC grant was a massive team effort. I want to especially recognized then-graduate assistants Dr. Trudy-Ann Crossbourne-Richards, who did the lion’s share of the literature review upon which the IC Map was based, and Dr. Heather Arrowsmith, who developed the manuscript describing our work. WKU colleagues Dr. Jenni Redifer, Dr. Tony Norman (now dean of education at Morehead State University) and Dr. Jie Zhang (now with the University of Houston) were essential research partners on this project. I commend them all, and also the leadership of GRREC and OVEC and the 111 schools that participated in the grant.
One final thought, and speaking just for myself: I believe we need far more empirical research on this topic. I have had a long-standing professional interest in personalized learning, but I am generally quite skeptical that the casual way in which it has been approached in many schools will have a lasting effect on student achievement. The work of UK educator David Didau has illustrated how hard it is to accurately assess what students truly know and are able to do at any given moment, and that reality may point us toward much more traditional modes of teacher led, whole-class instruction, especially for students from low-income backgrounds. It also suggests that a content-rich curriculum may be far more important in the long-run than faddish, low-impact strategies for “personalization” that may have little grounding in theory or research.
I’m not ready to give up the quest for more personalized approaches to student learning, especially when they are wedded to content-rich curriculum. But I want to see far more empirical research on which strategies have the highest impact and how those compare to more traditional methods. I hope our IC Map will contribute to that effort.
Reference: Hall, G.E., & Hord, S.M. (2006). Implementing change: Patterns, principles, and potholes (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.