Reclaiming Personalized Learning

"The concept of personalized learning is inherently appealing to most K-12 education stakeholders including educators, parents, and children. In its purest sense, the goal of giving every child precisely what they need in order to learn is also congruent with the goal of educational equity. And yet, despite the ubiquitous use of the term, there is little in the way of a shared understanding of what it actually is. In the words of Eliot Soloway, a professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan: Everybody's saying they're doing it-but we have to go one level deeper when we say 'personalized learning.' If schools and technology advocates don't set higher standards for what they mean, the movement "will not be sustainable. It will peter out." Some believe that it can be leveraged to promote equity. The author of the proposed project underscores the point that equity and inclusion are often overlooked in making a case for personalized learning "because the mainstream movement for personalized learning is not one that holds equity and inclusion at the center. It is, instead, one that puts self-interest and competition at the center.""--