Over the past two years, educators at Windy Hill Middle School in Clermont, Florida have been transforming their teaching, tailoring instruction to students’ individual needs and interests. Students have been using new tools to learn content at their own pace and taking ownership of their learning in the process.
The whole school community has been building a culture of personalized learning.
As principal William Roberts describes it: “Personalized learning is considering the interests of your students, giving them choice in their learning, and meeting them where they’re at—academically and personally.” The approach appealed to the team at Windy Hill as a way they could reach all students and make their learning even more powerful. So, in the fall of 2015, a small group of teachers who wanted to try out personalized learning began piloting the approach in their classrooms.
Teachers in the pilot created units aligned with Florida’s Sunshine State Standards and with multiple pathways for students at different levels, organized around the prerequisite knowledge students may or may not have. Students worked through the unit content at their own pace on their own laptops, conferencing with their teachers and working on projects with their fellow students along the way.
Teachers still provided direct instruction, but they also spent more time circulating classrooms and supporting small groups of students, or working with students one-on-one. And they reviewed their students’ data to better understand where individual students needed more support—or where they were excelling and needed more of a challenge. The results have been encouraging. All 101 seventh-graders that participated in a personalized learning math class at Windy Hill last year scored satisfactory or above on the math portion of the 2016 Florida Standards Assessments.
By comparison, only 55 percent of Windy Hill seventh-graders not in a personalized learning math class scored satisfactory or higher. Mary Ellen Barger, a personalized learning facilitator at Windy Hill, also seen how personalized learning can be especially powerful for struggling students. “In the traditional classroom, little Johnny is bored and doing things to distract the class because he is so afraid of being seen as behind. In personalized learning, Johnny has a goal, knows what he is supposed to learn and that he can do it, and knows how to get extra help,” Barger explains. “He knows that we are going to keep working with him until he understands.”
This year, personalized learning at Windy Hill has expanded even more. The number of teachers using personalized learning in their classrooms has grown from 14 to 47—about half of all instructional staff. And as the team continues to make the culture shift to personalized learning, they also are focusing on personalizing the curriculum in all core subjects as well as electives. Making these changes isn’t easy, but the community is dedicated to personalized learning and excited about the positive impacts. As one eighth-grader put it: “It’s beneficial to everyone.”
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