Designing Personalized Learning for Every Student (eBook)

Today′s students are more diverse than ever before—in cultural backgrounds, learning styles and interests, social and economic classes, and abilities and disabilities. How can schools accommodate these differences while also dealing with the many other demands for change, from the push for tougher standards to the call for more discipline in the classroom? This book offers answers—and challenges schools to reinvent themselves as more flexible, creative learning communities that include and are responsive to a full range of human diversity.

The authors propose a systemic change framework that structures change efforts at district, school, and classroom levels. Their approach rests on three main ideas:

• Locate decisions with groups of teachers.
• Create new roles for teachers.
• Redesign individualized education plans

Using these ideas as a starting point, they describe strategies to help teachers design personalised curriculum and teaching that will accommodate the widest possible student diversity, including students who are officially designated as disabled. They provide a variety of practical tools for gathering information about students, developing long-term curriculum plans, planning lessons, tailoring learning experiences, creating classroom-based assessment systems, writing individually tailored education reports, and reflecting on one’s own teaching.

The book reflects 15 years of collaboration and learning among groups of educators trying to improve their teaching practices in the face of dizzying changes. The authors believe their synthesis of learning and professional development finally undoes the separation of general and special education and accomplishes what they think is the real purpose of schooling—to help all students become active, valued members of their community.