Personalized Learning Taking Hold in Fullerton, CA
Superintendent Robert Pletka explains how Fullerton is using personalized learning to let students pursue their interests and form communities of practice.
Connecting kids to communities of practice through personalized learning environments
Superintendent Dr. Robert Pletka discusses personalized learning platforms
“We want our kids to be agents of change”
Dr. Robert Pletka, Superintendent of Fullerton, CA is looking at unique ways of bringing personalized learning to his district. Pletka believes students should start with a voice that reflects their interests and from there form communities of practice.
Fullerton, CA uses Learning Management Systems (LMS) that incorporate gaming activities. Students go on adventures known as quests that level up and show progress in real-time. Pletka forms focus groups that examine how the kids are responding to the learning environments. Many children are particularly intrigued by the way in which the learning platforms show their immediate progress. Some students also respond to the social context of celebrating their successes with other classmates.
More and more districts are realizing the importance of bringing additional personalized learning activities into classrooms. It takes Superintendents with backgrounds and skills embedded in curriculum and teaching instruction to bring forth change.
It’s nice to see leaders like Dr. Robert Pletka who not only have the professional make-up but have chosen to put their ideas into action.
Voice, not just pacing
Products such as Khan Academy, SuccessMaker and TenMarks personalize pacing and content, Pletka said, “they don’t provide opportunities for voice. For us, a big part of our personalized learning is that kids need to have a voice that potentially impacts the community.” In Fullerton, “we want our kids to be agents of change. As agents of change, we have to help kids identify what it is that they’re interested in. What are they passionate about? What is it that they want to go deeper into?”
Fullerton’s version is self-paced, and “as kids demonstrate mastery, they can go deeper or advance to the next level. But it’s also more than that. It’s connecting kids to communities of practice so that they can form their own networks and build their own social and political capital within those networks.”
Quests, XP points and the game board
The district built units of study on an open-source platform “available to any school teacher or district that wants to utilize it.” Students choose quests, some in the community such as geocaching with their families, and earn XP points that level up an avatar, with badges on a player’s card and an optional leaderboard. In nine or ten student focus groups a year, Pletka hears that the badges are not the draw. Students say, “I get a chance to make progress. I get a chance to say I’ve earned a certain amount of XP points today, and that’s greater than it was yesterday.”
Classrooms are gamified too. When students level up, they move their avatar on a game board on the wall, “the teacher will stop for a moment and everybody will clap. Sometimes they have a cheer that. Sometimes they play music. It’s a celebration by the whole class.” The approach celebrates success “both privately in the sense that kids get to reflect on their own progress but also in this big social context. And it’s fun, too.”
Respawn: another try, right away
Fullerton borrowed “respawn” from video games, where a character knocked off a bridge gets another attempt. Students learn a concept, then take a mini-assessment of 8 to 10 minutes. “Right away they get feedback. And if they don’t pass, we re-spawn them.” Response-to-intervention teachers develop the follow-up lessons in advance. A teacher runs a quick report, sees “that about ten kids didn’t get this concept,” teaches those students a mini lesson, and they try again: “in 90% of the cases, the kids can move on.”
Superintendents who know instruction deeply
“There is definitely a shift towards instruction and learning,” Pletka said, driven by No Child Left Behind and California’s new dashboard system. “I think boards are really aware of instruction as important to their own credibility in the state and with constituents.” He pointed to a McREL study of principals: for a minor change, monitoring implementation matters most, “But if it’s a major change, the principal really needs to know the innovation that they’re implementing at a very deep level.” The same holds for superintendents, he said: “The superintendent may not execute every level of it, but the superintendent needs to know those elements so they can move the change forward.”
“My heart hurts that you call this a game”
Fullerton’s iPersonalize was in its eighth iteration, and Pletka runs student focus groups for every version. “I love kids because they just tell you exactly what they think.” In the first version, he asked a sixth grader whether a unit felt like a game. “He looked at me and he said, ‘My heart hurts that you call this a game.'”
“So, epic failure on our first version, but we learned from it,” Pletka said. Now students call iPersonalize a game: “Even though it’s disguised learning, it’s standards-based education, they see it as a game.”
This article was originally published on The Huffington Post.
- eSchool News – The 5 components of a future-proofed technology initiative
- The Progress Index – Preparing students for college and beyond
- The Fullerton Informer – Robert Pletka, Fullerton School District Superintendent puts another 6000 iPads into Fullerton school children’s laps today
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