When Is Personalized Learning Not Personalized Learning

Personalized Learning is a hot new brand in education, the Great New Thing that is going to revitalize education and elevate students to new levels of awesome. And yet, what is being pitched in many school districts is not personalized learning at all.

When we hear the words "personalized learning," we imagine an educational plan crafted to the individual student. Pat really loves dinosaurs, so the teacher creates a reading unit based on books about dinosaurs combined with a writing unit involving research about dinosaurs. If Pat is weak on particular styles of charts and graphs, Pat may get an extra unit that works on organizing information about dinosaurs visually. Meanwhile, Chris needs remedial work on reading, so Chris gets some lower-reading level high-interest materials about rodeos and horses, because that's what Chris loves. On the other side of the hall, Sam wants to be a concert pianist, so Sam's educational program approaches history from the perspective of the history of music, and Sam actually spends less time daily on science so that there's more time for music-related studies.

That, or something like it, would be personalized learning.

But what many school districts are actually talking about is personalized pacing. Chris, Pat and Sam all complete exactly the same reading materials, they study the exact same units in math, and they study history out of exactly the same textbook. The only difference is the speed with which they move through the materials. Chris is weak in reading, so Chris takes three tries to successfully complete the Unit 2 test, while Pat and Sam continue to Unit 3. Pat has trouble with volume problems in math class, so while Chris and Sam move ahead, Pat gets some supplemental materials (aka extra practice) with volume problems. There is nothing personal about their learning program except the speed with which they move through it.

This is not a new idea in education. If you're of a Certain Age, you may remember the SRA reading program-- a box of colored cards, each with a short reading selection and some questions to answer. Finish one card, move on to the next. That was personalized pacing. What's new today is (what else) having a computer do the job of deciding what Chris, Pat and Sam are supposed to do next. This does not require any advanced Artificial Intelligence. A series of relatively simple algorithms can handle it ("If the student gets all ten questions on Worksheet 23/b2 correct, move the student on to Worksheet 24/b1, but if the student misses questions 2, 4 and 7, move the student to Worksheet 23/b5.") The computer can move every student smoothly through the large, highly standardized flow chart.

It is, in many ways, the opposite of standardization. Its promise is that one size really can fit all if you just build enough flexibility into it.

Personalized pacing has value, but adapting it for the classroom brings up the age-old tension in education-- we have a certain amount of work to do, and only a certain amount of time in which to do it. What happens if Chris is six units behind Pat at the end of the semester, or the year, or the twelve years of public education? It's the oldest problem in education, and personalized pacing does not help solve it.

Personalized pacing also runs the risk of reducing education to a checklist of items to complete, leading some students to focus on gaming the system so that they can power through the checklist as quickly as possible.

Additionally, by computerizing the chore of organizing this personalized pacing system, we add the problem of pleasing the program. A teacher has dozens of ways to determine of a student understands the material or grasps the skill; a computer program generally has just one. Every teacher working with these sorts of programs recognizes the student complaint-- "I know the answer, but I can't figure out how the computer wants me to say it."

Despite its pitfalls, personalized pacing can have great value, and teachers have employed it since the first school room was set up. It is not new, and it is not personalized learning. Watch out for people who want to reinvent the wheel and then tell you that if you buy their newly reinvented wheels, your car will fly.

Originally posted at Forbes.