Updated from an original post by Vicki Davis (11/28/18)

This generation of students personalizes their phones, backpacks, and nearly everything else they get their hands on. The same should be true for their education, especially with the necessary flexibility that COVID-19 has prompted for schools and districts. With students learning from various locations, personalized learning creates an incredible opportunity to engage with and relate to the modern student.

Personalized learning adapts instructional strategies to fit each student’s strengths, weaknesses, interests, and pace. It blends teacher instruction, technology-based instruction, and student collaboration to tap into each student’s learning style and interests for deeper learning.

Here are 4 practical tips and examples to help you start personalizing learning in the classroom.

Effective teachers typically have a good relationship with their students. I’ve never found a student who learned from a teacher they hated. The first moments of connection between the teacher, students, and their parents are critical.

Activities on the first day of school are critical. Some teachers spend all that time rattling off procedures, but I learned something once from a young teacher when my son was in sixth grade. He came home on the first day excited about his new teacher. When I asked why, he said, “Because she found out I was good with Minecraft and asked me questions about it.”

In Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, we learn that a secret of relating to others is taking a genuine interest in them. That starts on the first day of school.

The modern classroom is made up of bricks (the physical classroom) and clicks (the online classroom). Together, they make up the blended classroom. In the physical classroom, my physical body is me. In the online classroom, I have an electronic persona. Using a classroom learning management system (LMS) like Schoology Learning, students can easily turn in work, receive feedback, and make connections.

A curious student is never bored. This is the biggest problem with fill-in-the-blank or multiple-choice questions. The cure for cancer is not an answer on a multiple-choice test. Helping two countries find peace won’t be a fill-in-the-blank. We need students who can ask excellent questions as we stoke the fire of curiosity.

If we focus on personalizing learning for each student while making learning personal through our teaching methods, we have to help students learn about themselves. As artificial intelligence and technology improve and move forward, we’ll see more opportunities to personalize learning.

However, the greatest personalization tool in the classroom remains the creative, engaged, relatable, knowledgeable teacher. That’s you and me, and our job has never been more important. Each child needs to know that they are a person of worth and that their abilities are needed to make the world a better place.

With new technology driving personalized learning, teachers have become more important than ever. Instead of deliverers of content, we are the facilitators of learning and growth. We use integrated classroom tools to develop effective, tailored learning programs for each student rather than deliver one-size-fits-all instruction to an entire class in hopes that each student fits the “norm.”

Tap into the desire to teach content as we personalize learning and develop the powerful relationships that spark between excellent teachers and their students. We can have fun with this! Teaching becomes a lot more enjoyable when we personalize learning because our teaching matches the belief that every child is important. In schools, we don’t make copies. We help produce originals. Personalized learning is one way we achieve that goal.