Tipping the Scales in Personalized Learning

In 2017, Welda Simousek, an author and consultant on differentiation, set out classroom tips for personalized learning: flexible grouping, learning what students need and like, and teaching students to assess themselves. The article and a later edCircuit note on technology appear below as published. After them, a new section looks at what research since then says about personalized learning strategies for teachers.

Tips for the 21st Century classroom

If personalized learning is the direction in which we want to move, how do we “tip the scale” in favor of it, to help us as educators to facilitate the academic success of each student through their learning needs, strengths, and interests? After all, whole group learning, standards, the scope and sequence, and, especially, the standardized assessment we typically use and teach to tend to drive our curriculum.

In personalized learning settings, teachers assess students’ strengths, needs, and interests to better align their teaching with each student’s learning profile while maintaining high standards. This can be accomplished through a variety of methods:

• Flexible student grouping: Groupings that are flexible and dynamic, responding to ever-changing student needs based on continuously collected (formative) data.
• Learning spaces that support personalized learning: Just as groupings are flexible and dynamic, the learning space must accommodate changes based on the groupings needed and individual student learning needs at the time.
• Involve students in discussing data: Students need to be aware of their own learning goals and the progress they are making.

It sounds simple enough, but how do we, as educators, go about setting the stage for all of this to happen? Some of the answers rely on technology, but even without a great deal of technology at educators’ fingertips, it is possible to deliver personalized learning. Here are some tips from many people who manage this on a daily basis:

• Learn about your students’ needs, strengths, and interests: This can be done in a variety of ways, but the important part is that it is not static information. This information must be continually re-gathered throughout the year, as students’ strengths, needs, and interests change and grow.

• Student learning needs can be continually assessed (starting with pretesting students’ knowledge before each unit) through quick written quizzes (which can be self-graded so students get immediate feedback on their proficiency levels), simple “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” techniques, exit slips, or through computer software programs that give students practice questions and quickly diagnose trouble spots, or clickers (remote-response systems that allow teachers to see which student got it right or wrong), etc.

• Student strengths can be assessed periodically by something as simple as asking students, on a continuum, what they believe their ability is in a certain area (see the Novice to Expert explanation* at the end of this article), or by giving students different short tasks to perform in a variety of modes and styles to see where their strengths lie.

• Student interests can be discovered through letting students tell you this through a short inventory**, through one-on-one conferencing with students, or by simply laying out choices for students and letting them pick their pathway.

• Once you have all of this information, you need to have a method for managing all of it. Personalized Learning Platforms (PLPs) are springing up on the market or being developed by school systems for their own needs. Your school may already have a learning management system in place that will allow you to keep track of all of this data. If all else fails, you can create your own spreadsheet of data that you can continually update.

Automate what you can, and allow students to make choices whenever possible: Utilize educational computer programs to do much of the basic-skills practice and assessment so this does not eat up too much of your or your students’ time. Then, whenever possible, instead of you making all of the decisions, allow your students to make choices (remember, they need to have access to their own data on progress to help them do this).

This also means you need to provide students with multiple options for demonstrating their learning, keeping in mind different learning styles as you do so. Student choice is a powerful tool to help students be engaged in whatever tasks they pursue. Allowing students to conduct part of the instruction is also a powerful opportunity to let them demonstrate their strengths and interests, as well as saving you time and energy.

• Practice all the grouping options, how to “get there,” and how to conduct oneself as a learner: Students don’t automatically know how to do individual, small group, or whole group learning unless they are given some guidance. Be sure to create some simple rules for each ahead of time, and then practice moving between the different groups several times so that students can do it quickly and efficiently.

Sitting with your students and developing a “T-chart” for behavior expectations in each setting will go a long way to making things work smoothly. You might have an expectation of “working quietly” for example, and in your head, that looks one way, but in your students’ heads it may look entirely differently. So, write up a T-chart with one side stating, “looks like” and the other side stating, “sounds like” and have your students suggest what it looks like and sounds like to “work quietly.” Now, you’re all on the same page.

T-Chart for “Working Quietly”           

• Learn your new role as a “facilitator of learning:” In the personalized learning world, the teacher is no longer the deliverer of the content, while the students sit passively taking in the content (supposedly). You may need to learn new skills in order to facilitate the learning of your students, including perhaps learning to “flip” your classroom so that the lecture you might have given in class is delivered via video streaming to your students to watch at home, giving you more class time to concentrate on supporting your students in applying the essential and enduring concepts.

• Help your students become better self-assessors and data collectors/interpreters: Just as you no longer want to be the bearer of all the information in terms of learning, you don’t want to have to do all of the assessment of learning. The more your students learn to self-assess and analyze the data from this self-assessment, the better learners they will be.

In the book, How to Get to the Heart of Differentiation, Real Time Assessments, 2nd Edition,*** you can find many different ways to have students self-assess, many of which only take a few moments of time. The Novice to Expert technique mentioned earlier is one. Another excellent one is the Stoplight Method where you draw a large stoplight on a piece of chart paper, and as the students leave the room, they place a post-it note on one of the three colors:

• RED: What is “stopping” or “interfering” with their learning? What are they very confused about?
• YELLOW: What do they have questions about, or what are they unsure about?
• GREEN: What do they know for sure? What is some “securely held content” for them?

If all or most of the above is put into place and practiced in classrooms, the balance can indeed be tipped in favor of personalized learning. This would mean students are likely to learn more content, learn more about themselves, and take more control of their own learning. What a wonderful scenario for our 21st Century classrooms!

* Novice to Expert line: This is an imaginary line (or one made with tape) that goes from one to ten, one being the “novice” or beginner end and ten being the “expert” end. Explain to students that it’s okay to be a novice in something, as long as they work on getting better; it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert. Each student should stand on the line where they think they are in their understanding of a certain concept (do this with about five students at a time). Have each student explain why they’re standing where they are. You should first practice this with a simple question like “How well do I clean my room?” and then go on to the real concept you want to know about.

**How to Get to the Heart of Differentiation, Book 2, Student Strengths/ Interests, by Welda Simousek and Virginia Pickerell contains several sample student inventories. It can be purchased at https://weldaconsults.com.

***How to Get to the Heart of Differentiation, Real Time Assessments, 2nd Edition by Welda Simousek and Virginia Pickerell contains the Novice to Expert line example and Stoplight example, as well as many other simple formative assessments. It can be purchased on Amazon  or at https://weldaconsults.com

A January 2018 caution on technology and personalized learning

In January 2018, edCircuit writer Jim Reams cited this article while asking whether the emphasis on technology in personalized learning was going too far. Jim Reams distinguished between two things. Personalized learning that involves one-on-one tutoring, or teaching in small groups where the educator can step in with individual students, shows promising results. Adding technology is where educators and technologists need to look closely at actual results, because the methods described above, such as flexible grouping, adaptive classrooms and students discussing their goals, do not depend on technology.

Jim Reams pointed to several reports at the time. A high-poverty school in Colorado using personalized learning had mixed results, although one outcome nobody predicted was that students with chaotic lives gained a sense of control and, in some cases, a safe space. Tony Wan of EdSurge wrote in 2017 that entrepreneurs asked how their products work too often answer with vague references to companies such as Amazon and Netflix. Chalkbeat reported that some people trace the mixed outcomes to a reliance on a 1984 study often cited by Mark Zuckerberg, and questioned how relevant that study is to schools today.

Jim Reams concluded that technology has a place in education, but that educators should be careful when vendors promise to change the lives of teachers and students by automating personalization.

Personalized learning strategies for teachers in 2026: what the evidence supports

Personalized learning strategies for teachers fall into two groups. The first group is made up of practices a teacher can run with paper, conversation and a flexible seating plan: grouping students by current need, checking what they know before each unit, offering choice and teaching students to assess themselves. As Welda Simousek explains above, these do not depend on a great deal of technology. The second group is made up of programs that rely on software, data platforms or a funded tutoring contract. This section looks at what research has found about each, so that a teacher or school leader can decide where to put time and money.

What the best-known study actually showed

Much of the enthusiasm for personalized learning in 2017 rested on a study by the RAND Corporation of schools that had adopted it. Joshua Bleiberg of the University of Pittsburgh described the study for the Brookings Institution in April 2016. It covered 62 schools and compared each student with matched students elsewhere. Students in the personalized learning schools gained 0.27 standard deviations more in math and 0.19 more in reading, which Bleiberg described as substantively large.

Bleiberg also set out what the study could not show. Fifty-seven of the 62 schools, or 91 percent, were charter schools, compared with about 4 percent of schools nationally, and the schools had gained financial support for personalized learning through a competitive grant process. The study was not randomized, because the schools had adopted personalized learning before it began. Bleiberg concluded that the results are promising but cannot support a claim about traditional public schools. Bleiberg also noted that nearly every school already uses some personalized elements, such as the formative data Simousek describes, so the comparison with ordinary teaching is partial.

Newer randomized evidence points to tutoring

A more recent source is an interim report published in June 2025 by MDRC and the University of Chicago Education Lab, the Personalized Learning Initiative. It is a randomized controlled trial of high-dosage tutoring in math and reading, in which students were assigned by chance to tutoring or to business as usual. For the 2023-24 school year, eight partner sites randomized 17,330 students.

The report found a combined effect of 0.06 to 0.09 standard deviations, which the authors estimate as roughly one to two months of additional learning. A lower-cost model, at about $1,200 per student, appeared as effective as a higher-cost model at about $2,000, and virtual tutoring appeared as effective as in-person tutoring. More tutoring minutes went with larger gains, but that link is a correlation, and the minutes actually delivered were well below those in earlier tutoring studies. The report states that the overall effects hide considerable differences from site to site, and the findings are interim. The trial tested tutoring, which is not the same thing as the flexible grouping Simousek describes, so it supports the broader point about personalization and not Simousek’s particular methods.

This fits the point edCircuit writer Jim Reams made in 2018, quoted above: one-on-one tutoring and teaching in small groups show promise, while the case for adding technology needs to be checked against results. A small, steady effect that varies by site is also a reminder that personalization is a set of conditions to create, not a product to install.

Why vendor claims need a second look

The 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report from UNESCO, on technology in education, states that impartial evidence on education technology is in short supply, and that much of the evidence comes from those who sell it. It notes that education technology products change on average every 36 months, which makes evaluation hard, and that around two-thirds of education software licences in the United States were unused. A school that wants a personalized learning platform can ask three questions before buying. Has it been tested by someone who does not sell it? Was the test done in schools like this one? And will teachers have time to use it?

Where to start on Monday

Simousek’s methods are the least expensive part of the picture and the part a teacher controls. The pre-unit check, the exit slip, the stoplight chart and the novice-to-expert line all give a teacher information about who needs what next, and none requires a license. A reasonable first step is to run one of them before a single unit, form groups from the results for a week, and look again at the end of the week, as Simousek advises, because needs change. Students should see their own results, since the point is to help them set their own goals.

Teachers who want more on checking learning along the way can read the edCircuit assessment guide, and those thinking about learners with identified needs will find the special education guide useful.

Further Reading

1. eSchool News – 4 reasons data is crucial for personalized learning
2. EdSurge – Where Does Personalized Learning End and Special Education Begin?
3. NPR – How ‘personalized learning’ can put college in reach for nontraditional students

More on Personalized Learning