There’s a productive struggle happening in personalized learning classrooms across the country for educators and learners. And they wouldn’t have it any other way at Santa Cruz Valley Unified School District #35 in Rio Rico, Arizona.
“We have a little slogan in our school district; it’s not official. It’s ‘above the bar.’ And we keep raising the bar,” said Megan Padilla, the district’s teaching, learning and assessing director. Educators in Santa Cruz have been exploring and implementing strategies to make the shift to personalized, competency-based learning for five years. According to Padilla, they are, like all learning communities engaged in making a sustained shift to a new way of teaching and learning, “a work in progress.”
“The majority of our teachers and those who support them are in this realm of getting students more actively involved in their learning,” Padilla said. “We acknowledge our students have different needs, but it can be overwhelming. How do I help everyone? But if we teach students to advocate for themselves and identify when they have a need, that’s a great start. We’re giving them tools. We’re in partnership with students and teachers in identifying those needs.”
Part of their efforts to give their educators access to more tools and practical strategies was bringing in Dr. Catlin Tucker for a professional learning day. Tucker describes her role as one of modeling as much as possible what she hopes educators will do for their students.
“If we’re asking students to develop stamina, to do things outside their comfort zone, the same has to happen for educators,” said Tucker. “Professional development can often still be sit-and-get, and that’s not what I want to do to teachers, not what I want teachers to do to students. I want to help them productively struggle, have conversations and collaborate.”
Rethinking what professional learning looks like is an essential part of providing educators the same kinds of personalized experiences we want for learners.
“We ask a lot of our teachers to respond to our students’ needs, as they’re ever-changing,” said Padilla. “This work is not just about our teachers and having them do things. As a district and for the people supporting staff districtwide, this is a shift for all of us too, to support teacher and student needs.”
The takeaways
Key takeaways for educators making this shift included:
- Student-centered learning environments aren’t created overnight. Educators are building systems for learning that look different, and not everything will work or work right away. “It’s not realistic to ask everyone to do the exact same strategy,” said Padilla. “It’s really encouraging the teachers to pay attention to what their students need, identify what you can do to help them. And then ask, did that impact their learning? Not everything works the first time.”
- Students and teachers alike need support at the systems level. Whether that’s allowing educators to use their professional learning time to create stations or implement small groups or providing a variety of options for students not just to make choices but to learn how to make choices, it means thinking and doing things differently. “We don’t want to burn teachers out while we’re doing this,” said Padilla. “When we build systems for learning, we’re getting students acclimated or adjusted. You’re systematizing things in the classroom, getting students to do more of that work.”
- How we reflect and act on data matters. Santa Cruz surveys learners, staff and parents to get a sense of what’s working and what isn’t, including after every professional development opportunity. Every educator is a part of a Professional Learning Community and regularly reflects on formative and summative classroom-level data. “Not all data and feedback looks or feels good, but all feedback gives us an opportunity,” said Padilla. “That’s the productive struggle. You have to reflect on what you observe. Without reflecting, you’re not really learning, you’re just doing.”
- Celebrate every win. “Immediately after our training with Dr. Tucker, we put out our monthly newsletter, and we highlighted a teacher who was already starting to implement some of what she’d learned,” said Padilla. “We put her picture in the newsletter and shared what she was doing. That way our teachers see their colleague and they have an example. They have someone to reach out to and something to try.”
Supporting educators in personalized, competency-based learning
For Tucker, it’s essential to provide educators with professional learning experiences that empower them to teach for the future.
“How do we encourage educators to explore instructional models that free them from the front of the room? Tech is everywhere, artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing – our value as educators is in the human side of this work,” said Tucker. “We need to figure out how to design learning experiences that allow us to invest our time and energy there, with individuals in small groups, instead of a one-size fits all model that’s losing kids.”
Personalized, competency-based learning aims to do just that. In a personalized, competency-based learning environment, the teacher models instructions and acts as a facilitator, providing feedback and answering questions when needed. It’s the student that chooses how, why and with whom they want to learn. Students collaborate with each other and give each other feedback, using the instructor as a resource when needed. Through relevant, meaningful opportunities to acquire knowledge, skills and dispositions, each student realizes their fullest potential.
Robin Kanaan, a teaching and learning director with KnowledgeWorks, has supported the shift to personalized, competency-based learning in four Arizona districts, including Santa Cruz, since 2019. She’s seen how Tucker’s facilitation has helped illustrate the need for a new approach to student-led learning.
“Tucker talked about how we as educators give students answers to questions they never asked and solutions to problems they have never encountered, instead of us putting them into situations where they can productively struggle,” said Kanaan. “One of my favorite examples she shared was that shifting to a student-led environment is like moving from network TV to a streaming service. You used to have to look at a TV guide to figure out when your show was on. There were only so many options. With streaming, we can get it anytime we want. We need multiple services to get the shows we want. If you apply that to the classroom, we are saying that we want learners to have multiple ways to access and engage with the content and demonstrate evidence of their learning. That’s Universal Design for Learning.”
This doesn’t mean educators are designing a unique learning experience for each student. Instead, they are creating an environment with the flexibility for students to co-design their own experiences and make meaningful and impactful decisions. The educator is the facilitator, the person who knows their learners, their interests and their level of readiness in the progression of learning. Helping learners know that about themselves too is the goal.
“It’s not one or the other, teacher-led or student-driven,” Kanaan said. “It’s both.”
