Learning Personalized

“Schools are changing, and the pandemic is helping us to change our mindset about that.”

Allison Zmuda spoke with Carlos Nascimento Jr., coordinator of grades 4-9 at the Concept School in Brazil, about the challenges of the 2020-21 school year and his most significant takeaways from that experience.

Students Must Wish to Be in School: Interview with Carlos Nascimento Jr. - Habits Personalized One way Carlos Nascimento Jr. of the Concept School in Brazil got through the 2020-21 school year was by leveraging the Habits of Mind.

Portfolios help us continuously recreate the narrative of our own learning. Powerful classrooms help students arrive at an understanding of themselves through collecting work over time that they can reflect back on. Beyond the chronological history of producing work, being evaluated, and work toward improving, there is the deeper layer where the patterns of their work tell a personal story of where they are at this time.

This post offers guidance on how to make portfolios work, and includes examples of digital portfolios.

Student Portfolios: the Narrative of Learning - Learning Personalized Student portfolios provide an opportunity to collect and then select the work that best recognizes where the student is in the learning journey.

There is a different energy to this work, one in which the student has an increased level of ownership in both the inquiry and pursuit.

This post, written with inspiration from the fabulous staff at Aveson Charter School, contains examples of essential questions (teacher designed) that generated a series of student questions as they continued to investigate, a rubric on levels of questioning, and student frames for developing questions.

How to Help Students Drive Their Own Inquiry - Learning Personalized Driving questions guide research, action, and creation. Student-generated and inspired by Essential Questions, they intended to optimize student ownership.

Imagine your ideal learning space — a place that inspires you to focus, to problem solve, to create, to reflect. What would it look like?

This exercise prompted me to reexamine the spaces where I currently create and wonder how form and function impacts daily learning.

The following suggests ways to take this from a nice conversation to a more significant opportunity to connect and transform our spaces.

What is Your Ideal Learning Space? - Learning Personalized What would your students do if you gave them the task of coming up with your classroom design? How would it change your learning environment?