Get Out of Your Seat

Corinne Dedini, Director of Academics

In her opening address to the 2014 iNACOL Blended and Online Learning Symposium, iNACOL President Susan Patrick asserted, “Seat time does not make sense; we’re measuring the wrong end of the kid,” by which she meant that flexible platforms will inspire greater student responsiveness and improve learning outcomes. She went on to describe the role that technology can play in customizing learning paths for students.  Patrick defines this nimble, personalized approach to education as, “tailoring learning for each student’s strengths, needs and interests — including enabling student voice and choice in what, how, when and where they learn — to provide flexibility and supports to ensure mastery of the highest standards possible.”  Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it?  It isn’t—it’s happening!   Is your school on board? 

Most of us in independent education have work to do.   To adequately prepare students for tomorrow’s workforce, we have to expand or replace our list of essential skills—the most important skills are rooted in self-management, critical thinking, and communication.  Michael Horn, author of Disrupting Class and Blended, asserts that one of the greatest barriers to student learning today is that school is no longer relevant to students’ goals, which are more oriented towards skills and passions than content and breadth of knowledge.  Personalized learning is powered by a flexible platform that allows students to create their own pathways.  Here comes the challenge:  In independent schools, the teachers are not only still driving the pedagogy but we are still the owners of the students’ curriculum.  Most of our schools are in some stage of this transition:

Teacher Centered to Students Centered to Student Centered
The problem isn’t so much where a school is in this transition because strategic leadership can harness the power of technology to chart a new direction relatively rapidly.  The problem is that exhausted administrators are slogging through the transition at a time when what we really need is transformation. 
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The essence of personalized learning is the shifting of the locus of control from the teacher to the student.  What might this transformation look like?  While the paradigm shift might be hard to envision, here are some ideas that schools are implementing:

• Upend the scope and sequence so that critical competencies drive the rubrics and the content wraps around the skills.
• Flip classes so that learning is project-based or experiential and so that teachers have more time for individual relationships with students.
• Abandon traditional grading; evaluate iterative skill progression demonstrated through artifact collection badged in a portfolio.
• Habitually check for understanding and adjust accordingly.
• Require a range of learning modalities, some of which happen outside the walls of the classroom or school.
• Empower students to develop a growth mindset by giving them choice in schedule and class progression.

We have laid the foundation already.  It may very well be harder for private schools to assimilate nuanced personalized practices into our approach because we have long used alternate versions of the tools of personalization so purposefully.  But our strong history of educating effectively because we know our students well is eroding.  As the number of families who are able to pay our tuition decreases, the range—and therefore needs—of our student population increases.   We can’t make up the deficits by adding staff, building new buildings, and developing flashy programming.  Vital new skills aren’t taught while students sit in our brightly lit, wireless classrooms.  They require that the role of the teacher be reimagined and the curriculum be transformed.  This is urgent:  If our academic teams don’t lead this transformation, then our business officers and trustees will.  It’s not only time for us to value—and measure—time spent outside the traditional seven class schedule, but it’s time to abandon that schedule and those desk chairs all together. 

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