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Common Core Dead: Personalized Learning

AlaskaBushPilot

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Joined
Nov 6, 2010
Messages
4,341
If you have been following Common Core, it's been killed for quite a while actually, since the ESSA, Every Student Succeeds Act.

The advocates for Common Core still claim it to be in operation, with a "flexibility" in standards, lol. What is important after ESSA is that federal funding was de-coupled from Common Core. It's actually illegal to make funding conditional on adhering to a national standard.

In fact, they made states all go through this process of developing their own plans. I followed it in our own state, they had us call these meetings with "stakeholders" and took public testimony, etc.

I wrote about something very different in the offing across a number of states, and it has arrived at my own local school district. It is called Personalized Learning.

It's the opposite of the Common Core Principle of making every student a drone to the same curriculum. There's a good video of Bill Gates comparing students to wall sockets back when that ******* was busy plundering the nation with his Common Core hoax. Anyway, here it is:

Personalized Learning

What is Personalized Learning?
Personalized learning is the structuring of schools, classrooms, and instruction so we can better respond to the individual needs of students. Personalized learning shifts from a one-size-fits-all model of education to one which better prepares students for the jobs and needs of the future.


Why Personalized Learning?
To ensure each student achieves their highest potential, we create a student-centered environment that engages, inspires and empowers all learners based on their unique needs and strengths.

Core Four
There are four elements of personalized learning:

Targeted Instruction – Education aligns to specific student needs and learning goals
Data Driven Decisions – Frequent data collection informs instructional decisions and groupings
Student Reflection and Ownership – Ongoing student reflection encourages ownership of learning
Flexible Content and Tools – Instructional materials allow for differentiated path, pace, and performance tasks

I can't say what your own district is doing or what it is called. But there has definitely been a backlash against viewing kids as interchangeable commoddities. Unitized humans.

In retrospect, I sneered at the name "Every Student Succeeds", but I do acknowledge the result, in my state, is viewing kids as individuals with a definition of success for each kid.

I applaud this boot-heel-in-ass kicking of Bill Gates out of education.

Students are drastically unique. They need to be treated as individuals, not wall sockets.

We always had standardized testing. That was a hoax from the beginning. But curriculum wasn't dictated by a federal authority. If your school district wanted to study space aliens, creationism, faked moon landings by NASA, great. Your kids still had to take standardized tests. We just did them with paper and pencil before Gates got it changed into online interactive testing. No paper and pencils.

It's not good to have chaos in curriculum, in subject delivery, and that's what happened with Common Core. The Common Core Math took the biggest criticism from parents and teachers, and that's exactly where the scores on the international PISA test FELL. Common Core did measurable damage to our students' performance on international tests.

2018 is a year for administration of the PISA. I know math is in the fall, not sure of the whole schedule. But whatever damage common core has done is behind us as of this next set of scores.

What "works" with this approach is that kids don't hate school as much. When you start letting them flower according to their own interests and skills, you get excellence in everyone. Just not in the same things.
 
I got to work with kids individually for about 20 minutes a couple times a week as a volunteer. I got to know each one's style and made good progress with most of them.

The school just closed. :(
 
There are a lot of concepts at play here. "Common Core" was never supposed to mean that every student be taught the same way. It was supposed to mean that all schools adhere to a single set of curriculum standards so that all students graduate with similar levels of knowledge. I agree it was corrupted nearly from the beginning, largely by publishing companies eager to sell schools new materials.

'Personalized Learning" is following a similar path. The basic concept is great. I hardly doubt that anyone could disagree with that. How it's implemented, however, is an entirely different story. My wife will have 28 second-graders starting Monday. She has to have small group activities, computer time, and still give individualized attention in a six hour day. That frequently means that most of the class is on its own for several thirty-minute blocks. At most she could devote twelve minutes a day to a single chile. There simply isn't the time for the individualized attention necessary for "personalized learning" to work.
 
How it's implemented, however, is an entirely different story. My wife will have 28 second-graders starting Monday.
I skipped 2nd grade and have no idea to this day what is taught in second grade! As far as I can tell it was my knowledge of multiplication that made the difference.

She has to have small group activities, computer time, and still give individualized attention in a six hour day. That frequently means that most of the class is on its own for several thirty-minute blocks.
I really like working with individual students at this level or any other. But at times it really does amount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It sucks. As long as your wife enjoys teaching, good on her ... but a lot of things get lost along the way.
 
I skipped 2nd grade and have no idea to this day what is taught in second grade! As far as I can tell it was my knowledge of multiplication that made the difference.


I had open heart surgery in 2nd grade. I was out for 2 months. I remember sitting down at a little table in the hospital with my mother with a stack of dittos and just doing them one after another.

My wife happens to work with an underserved population with very poor reading skills. So every moment of instruction counts.

Whether she enjoys it remains an open question.
 
There are a lot of concepts at play here. "Common Core" was never supposed to mean that every student be taught the same way. It was supposed to mean that all schools adhere to a single set of curriculum standards so that all students graduate with similar levels of knowledge. I agree it was corrupted nearly from the beginning, largely by publishing companies eager to sell schools new materials.

'Personalized Learning" is following a similar path. The basic concept is great. I hardly doubt that anyone could disagree with that. How it's implemented, however, is an entirely different story. My wife will have 28 second-graders starting Monday. She has to have small group activities, computer time, and still give individualized attention in a six hour day. That frequently means that most of the class is on its own for several thirty-minute blocks. At most she could devote twelve minutes a day to a single chile. There simply isn't the time for the individualized attention necessary for "personalized learning" to work.

Yes, the publishing companies relished a whole catalogue of new book sales and immediate new editions as they stumbled through untested curriculum.

I think 12 minutes per kid is a lot, actually. I'm a lifelong teacher and coach. With a wee bit of success. This is how I see it from experience.

And they never forget you for it.

What is staff doing in teaching if what they care about is money, Bob. What you'll find is that teachers enjoy success. You really hate work when you don't believe in what you're doing.

The model is not more time. It is more time allocated individually as opposed to collectively. My goodness, it's merely a teacher moving up and down rows. A glance at a time gives you tremendous insight on where each kid is. If they have a question, they ask. You get far more questions when they can do it individually.
 
I skipped 2nd grade and have no idea to this day what is taught in second grade! As far as I can tell it was my knowledge of multiplication that made the difference.

We've had nothing but contempt and patronizing ridicule for the idea of sorting by academic level instead of age in this district, and suddenly our philosophy is adopted, starting six days from today.

And ultimately what it means is that some kids will be in 3rd grade math in first grade. Logically, grade level academically will no longer mean age if they are serious about this.

Third grade seems to be America's "multiplication table" year. Both of ours were done with multiplication tables in first semester of first grade. Naturally, division is being mastered at the same time, so you would have been good at division as well. So why can't they go on to 4th grade math instead of being held back.

We had them doing excel spreadsheets in kindergarten and it turned out to be a tremendous help in everything else. They've had no trouble understanding basic algebra by 2nd grade.

I really like working with individual students at this level or any other. But at times it really does amount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It sucks. As long as your wife enjoys teaching, good on her ... but a lot of things get lost along the way.

What job doesn't suck sometimes.

I am not sure what sucks about it. I sure like it a lot better getting to know the students individually. Let's take the 12 minutes a day estimate. That's an hour a week per kid, 16 in a semester. 32 hours a year. Versus zero in the factory model of teaching. Actually, more than that. That is a college semester basis.

And from the student's perspective, same thing. Add up the personal instruction they have had over 13 years, instead of zero in the factory model... and its 169 hours of individual instruction compared to zero.

Nobody spends more time in school. Neither teachers nor students. But the allocation of time is different. And students are not lock-step by age.
 
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I had open heart surgery in 2nd grade. I was out for 2 months. I remember sitting down at a little table in the hospital with my mother with a stack of dittos and just doing them one after another.

My wife happens to work with an underserved population with very poor reading skills. So every moment of instruction counts.

Whether she enjoys it remains an open question.
It can be a lot of fun but the workload is practically infinite. If you are the kind of person who always feel that they should be doing more, it's a tough gig.

Fred Jones' "Tools for Teachers" is one of the more down-to-earth manuals out there, better IMO than similar texts such as "The First Days of School."

If she comes home shocked about the difficulty of the job, don't be surprised. I'm not quite sure how to fix this but having another adult in the room can make a lot of difference, and I've enjoyed playing a support role. That's often not an option
 
There are a lot of concepts at play here. "Common Core" was never supposed to mean that every student be taught the same way. It was supposed to mean that all schools adhere to a single set of curriculum standards so that all students graduate with similar levels of knowledge. I agree it was corrupted nearly from the beginning, largely by publishing companies eager to sell schools new materials.

'Personalized Learning" is following a similar path. The basic concept is great. I hardly doubt that anyone could disagree with that. How it's implemented, however, is an entirely different story. My wife will have 28 second-graders starting Monday. She has to have small group activities, computer time, and still give individualized attention in a six hour day. That frequently means that most of the class is on its own for several thirty-minute blocks. At most she could devote twelve minutes a day to a single chile. There simply isn't the time for the individualized attention necessary for "personalized learning" to work.

And whne you get into High School with this concept too many students will end up taking nothing but "Skate" courses.
 
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