Personalized Learning Isn't Automatically Better
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder challenges the assumption that personalized or individualized learning is an improvement over whole-class instruction.
Key Takeaways
- Don't assume personalization helps - Research doesn't clearly show that personalized learning outperforms well-designed whole-class instruction
- Whole-class instruction works - A good teacher delivering well-planned lessons to the whole class is highly effective
- The hype outpaces the evidence - Personalized learning is marketed as revolutionary, but the results don't consistently support that claim
Transcript
What if personalizing education makes it worse?
I think we often take it for granted that personalization is just automatically and always good.
But if you think about a lot of contexts where we could do something either as a social experience, as a group experience, as a team experience, or individually, we would choose the group experience.
Like if you had a basketball player show up and try out for varsity.
And they said, you know what?
I've only had one-on-one training.
I've never played as part of a team.
I've never played basketball with other people at all.
I'm really good at shooting free throws and dribbling and, you know, doing all the basketball skills, but I've never played in any kind of group setting.
you would think, well, that would be kind of weird.
You would think that would make it kind of difficult to transition into playing what is really a team sport.
And I don't think learning is a team sport in that same way, but I do think it is a social experience And we shouldn't just assume that personalizing it and individualizing it is a good thing.
And there are a lot of efforts these days to put kids on computers and have them spend basically all of their learning time on apps so that they can learn faster, so that they can learn in a more individualized way.
And my thought is, let's not rule out the possibility that that is worse in ways that we will quickly figure out when we start exposing more students to these kinds of models.
Because the early adopters, keep in mind, are volunteers, right?
You have a small number of people who say, yes, that sounds great for me.
They opt in and it works for them.
Well, if you look at the history of online schools, like the k12.com online schools that enrolled tens of thousands of students, almost all of whom did nothing, right?
Most students, when you individualize and personalize and say like, it's all on you, it's individual, it's not a social experience, most kids just do nothing in that context.
And a very, very small number of kids really, really thrive for what are pretty specific individual reasons.
So I'm not saying this kind of thing can't work for anybody, but I don't think we should expect it to work for large numbers of kids.
I think it's going to be a small minority of students who benefit from personalization, and most kids are going to learn more in the social experience of a regular classroom.
Let me know what you think.