Come Fall, Personalizing Learning Is Vital
Plus, Quick Takes On Big Edtech Deals
As schools turn the page on this school year and plan for the fall, personalizing for each child will be critical.
Estimates of students’ unfinished learning vary, but most suggest that for many students, there’s a lot of ground to cover.
Yet these estimates mask the wide variation that teachers will confront when they return to classrooms. Different students will have different gaps and challenges. Some have even accelerated their learning during the pandemic and will disengage if their teacher tries to review material they have already mastered.
In my latest piece for Forbes, I argue that the one-size-fits-all whole-classroom approach that dominates so many of the country’s classrooms and was already failing so many of America’s students will be that much of a worse fit for students come the fall. The assumption that all students should be learning the same lesson at the same time is a fallacy.
Each child needs an individualized learning plan—a concept that is familiar to schools, but that doesn’t need to be weighed down by the bureaucratic and legal wrangling that surrounds IEPs.
You can read my full take here.
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Big deals dominating edtech headlines
The last week of June was chock full of mega deals for education.
The biggest head turner in my view was the news that MIT and Harvard had agreed to sell its nonprofit edX—one of the early providers of MOOCs—for $800 million to 2U, the publicly-traded online program manager company.
Age of Learning, creator of ABCmouse, raised $300 million. Duolingo, the mobile language learning app, filed for an IPO. Instructure, the learning management system provider, also filed to go public—for a second time. Articulate Global, which sell employers software to build customized online training courses, raised a whopping $1.5 billion.
For paying subscribers, I offered my thoughts on these deals here, but you can also check out my take on YouTube Live.
More reasons to keep virtual learning and career-connected learning alive
Finally, I hosted two conversations on YouTube that I recommend.
The first was with Julie Young, managing director of Arizona State University Prep Digital, and John Bailey, a visiting fellow at AEI, who shed light on why thinking that schools will be “back to normal” next year is unlikely to come to pass and why we need to keep virtual learning alive so that we can do it well in the event of a future disaster. The importance of virtual learning as an option is a topic I’ve been harping on quite a bit of course, and this conversation provided more reasons why it’s important. You can watch it here.
The second conversation, which you can view here, was with David Miyashiro and Ed Hidalgo, superintendent and chief innovation and engagement officer, respectively, of Cajon Valley Union School District in California. We talked about their groundbreaking work in career-connected education for students as young as elementary school and how that has translated into efforts to improve literacy and more.
And for those of you who offered ideas and leads for the new book I’m writing, thank you!
There was an outpouring of really good suggestions that I’m working to learn more about as I write. I’ll share more about how the book is going in future newsletters.
I’m also excited to report that I did my first in-person “school” visit this week in a couple years—to a learning pod. The company hosting the pod is called KaiPod Learning, and the focus and exuberance of the nine students in attendance was obvious—which wasn’t what I expected going in given it’s summer. There’s clearly a lot of opportunity for innovation right now in education.
As always, thanks for reading, writing, and listening.