Ohio Testimony
Spotlight on Personalized Learning
Personalized Learning School Tours
Click on the Ohio school districts below to see how they are implementing personalized learning
22-23 LAUNCH Cohort Educators
Amy Azzarello is a 5th grade math teacher in her 24th year, all at Shawnee Middle School. Since beginning the LAUNCH cohort she has explored learning profiles with her students as part of the design team and changed her classroom approach to a more personalized learning environment. She is also participating in the graduate credit option provided to all Ohio educators through Ashland University.
Amy described her shift to personalized learning as “amazing”. “When I teach a whole group lesson, it takes longer, many students lose interest, and I end up having to assign homework. Through personalized learning, I’m getting more time to work with those that need one-on-one or small group attention during class, while other learners are able to progress at a faster pace. I feel they are learning more and filling the gaps more than with traditional teaching” Read more...
Reaching the Classic Underachiever Through Personalized Learning, by Stacey Lucas, English Teacher at Riverside Campus
As educators, we all know that kid - the classic underachiever; the kid who says he can get an A on a test without doing the homework and actually does it. The student who slides by with below average grades when we know he can do so much more. We’ve all been frustrated with this student. We’ve called him lazy and complained about him in the teacher’s lounge: “He’s more than capable of doing the work. Why won’t he do it?”
What we sometimes fail to understand is that school failed this student a long time ago. We failed him when we made him solve the same type of math problem 47 times in three different ways even though he could have shown mastery after the first explanation. We failed him when we made him answer recall questions about a short story two grade levels below his reading level when he understood it on a symbolic, allegorical level. We failed this stud
ent over and over again until he gave up: “Why bother? I don’t need this.” And he’s right.
That kid is one of the reasons personalized learning appealed to me and made me committed to try it in my class. Read more...
Ohio Personalized Learning Specialists
When asked about how she came to the Ohio Personalized Learning Network, Heather Townley felt it was an approach to education that could “change everything.”
“We could look back and say, that was when it changed,” said Townley, who has been an educator for more than 20 years and whose passion for doing teaching and learning differently is what drew her to the network. While teaching incarcerated adult learners in a high-security male prison, Townley explained that she learned “prison is not filled with bad people; it’s people who made a bad choice, had bad friends, lacked an education. I worked with adult men who had children they couldn’t read to because they’d never learned to read. I thought, I have to go back to the kids, to help them before they end up here.” Read more...
Let’s explore what it means to implement personalized learning...
As the sweat forms and heart rates of educators suddenly increase after reading this statement the following comments might be heard… “What? I can not create individual lessons for EACH of my students,” or “I can not do another ‘new thing’! ” or “Are they really expecting me to write an IEP for each student?” or “I don’t think having kids behind a computer all day is a good thing,” or “I’ve heard what some schools are doing with personalized learning and I just don’t think that would work for my kids,” or “I think direct instruction is important, so I don’t think personalized learning will fit into my teaching style,” or finally, “But what about the standards and the state test, how can I prepare my students for that if it is a free-for-all?” ALL of these are legitimate worries and fears. Read more of Amy Harker's testimony here...