As many of you know, Allison Zmuda and I co-authored a book: Students at the Center: Personalized Learning with Habits of Mind. Since that publication, many of our shared educational community has been concerned with how to stay true to the way that we are defining personalized learning:
Personalized learning is a progressively student-driven model where students deeply engage in meaningful, authentic, and rigorous challenges to demonstrate desired outcomes.
To respond to so many requests to provide ideas and tools that help to transform classrooms into a place where personalized learning and habits of mind are growing students’ thinking, we are creating a set of tools that will be bundled together in a toolkit to help students and teachers navigate through rich and complex challenges. Each tool will be relevant for most subject areas and grade levels so that teachers can customize them for their content and with their students.
As you know from your work with Habits of Mind, in order to successfully manage and engage with such challenges, you need to have the attitudes or dispositions to do so. Therefore, we also will identify connections to relevant Habits of Mind for each tool to continue to emphasize the importance of developing thinking dispositions.
Please take a moment and look at the following topics we have identified as categories for possible sets of tools. Each makes reference to how we progressively move toward a student driven environment.Rate each using this key: 1 (not particularly interested/not sure what you mean by this), 2 (interesting), 3 (eager to see):