The idea of personalized learning is seductive – it implies moving away from the industrialized form of education that pumps out cookie-cutter students with the same knowledge and skills. After decades of this approach, it is clear that all children don’t learn the same way and personalization seems to honor those differences. However, that term has taken on several different meanings.

'We often say we want creativity and innovation – personalization - but every mechanism we use to measure it is through control and compliance.'

“When you say personalization, what do you mean by that?” asked Diana Laufenberg, director of Inquiry Schools and a former teacher at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. “It’s not a word that always means the same thing.”

Personalization is often used in the ed-tech community to describe a student moving through a prescribed set of activities at his own pace. The only choice a student gets is what box to check on the screen and how quickly to move through the exercises. For many educators that’s not the true meaning of “personalized learning.”

“That has nothing to do with the person sitting in front of you,” Laufenberg said. “It meets the needs of an individual in a very standardized way, but it doesn’t take into account who that kid is.” For Laufenberg, personalization only comes when students have authentic choice over how to tackle a problem. A personalized environment gives students the freedom to follow a meaningful line of inquiry, while building the skills to connect, synthesize and analyze information into original productions.

Educators at the EduCon conference hosted by Science Leadership Academy eagerly discussed the merits and challenges of personalizing learning. Dozens of teachers agreed that a truly personalized learning experience requires student choice, is individualized, meaningful and resource rich. This kind of learning allows students to work at their own pace and level, meets the individual needs of students, and perhaps most importantly, is not a one-size fits all model. Technology was strikingly absent from these conversations. Instead, the common view of personalization focused on giving agency for learning to the student and valuing each individual in a classroom.