A few years ago, Benjamin Riley sparked a debate over personalized learning with a blog entry arguing “Don’t personalize learning.”
Not long after, Riley and Alex Hernandez debated “Should Personalization Be the Future of Learning?” in an EdNext forum.
Now Riley is back with a response to some critics and some new ideas of his own in a post on EdSurge: “Bursting the ‘Personalization’ Bubble: An Alternative Vision for Our Public Schools”
In the EdNext forum, Hernandez laid out the basic case for personalized learning:
Personalized learning theory is built on the twin pillars of 1) differentiated learning pathways for students and 2) feedback that enables students to make informed judgments about what they’ve learned, how well they’ve learned it, and what to learn next. The importance of these two pillars for effective education is well established, yet traditional schools struggle mightily with both, mostly because there are only 24 hours in a day and educators are human.
Riley responded by taking a close look at two assumptions that he argued are at the foundation of the idea of personalized learning:
1) students will learn more if they have more power over what they learn (“the path argument”), and 2) students will learn more if they have more power over when and how quickly they learn (“the pace argument”)
Read the full debate at “Should Personalization Be the Future of Learning?”
– Education Next
