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Don’t Personalize Learning

In the US, “personalized learning” is what I think of as a head-nodder phrase. Sprinkle the word into virtually any conversation or speech regarding education, and you’ll typically see at least a handful of heads nodding in the room in happy agreement. While some might view this as positive evidence for the merits of personalization, I suspect what’s really happening is that the idea is being treated as an empty vessel into which one may pour any number of competing theories of learning or favored education policies. A term that can mean anything often signifies nothing.

What many people seem to mean by “personalized learning” is that it should involve using technology to give students more freedom to control their education experience. “Blended learning involves leveraging the Internet to afford each student a more personalized learning experience, meaning increased student control over the time, place, path, and/or pace of his or her learning,” declares the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. We must “empower learners to learn any time, any place and at any pace, both in school and beyond,” according to the recently released Learners at the Center of the Networked World report from the Aspen Institute. “Instead of organizing students by age and giving them all the same lesson, [students may] initiate their own learning, may follow different paths, and seek varied resources to help them meet their goals,” says my friend Alex Hernandez of the Charter Schools Growth Fund.

Although there are a number of nested assumptions and hypotheses built into these definitions, I want to focus on two: (1) Students will learn more than they do presently if they have more power over what they learn (“the path argument”); and (2) students will learn more than they do presently if they have more power over when they learn (“the pace argument”).

First, the problem with the path argument is that it runs afoul of our current understanding of cognition. Put simply, knowledge is cumulative. What a child is capable of learning depends upon what she already knows. When a child encounters new information, if she lacks the preexisting knowledge to put the information in context, she will quickly become frustrated. She won’t learn. So to the extent personalization seeks to devolve a greater degree of the responsibility of acquiring new knowledge to students, it relies on the mistaken assumption that many or most students are properly equipped to make sense of new information:

There is a large body of research which shows that not all learners prefer nor profit from controlling the tasks and that forcing such control on them can be counterproductive…The reason for this is that learners do not have or do not know how to utilize appropriate strategies when they are left to themselves to manage their learning environment (i.e., they do not have the capacity to appraise both the demands of the task and their own learning needs in relation to that task in order to select appropriate instruction). In other words, learners often misregulate their learning, exerting control in a misguided or counterproductive fashion and not achieving the desired result.

(Paul A. Kirschner & Jeroen J.G. van Merriënboer (2013) Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education, Educational Psychologist, 48:3, 169-183.)

Of course, as Dan Willingham told me after reviewing a draft of this post, “it’s possible to imagine versions of the path that are cumulative” and tailored to an individual student’s ability or interests, it’s just that students are unlikely to find this path if they themselves “pick what to study next.” I am of the increasingly controversial view that we created the profession we call “teaching” largely to solve for this problem. Students need to be guided down the path of their learning. Teachers should remain central to the activity of imparting knowledge to students.

Second, the problem with the pace argument is that it too contradicts one of the key insights from cognitive science: our minds are not built to think. In fact, our brains are largely oriented to avoid thinking. That’s because thinking is hard. And often not fun, at least at first. As a result, we will naturally gravitate away from activities that we find hard and unpleasant. Willingham warns me that I’m seemingly implying we never think about challenging subjects, but of course that’s not true. In his view, “difficulty is [a] key variable…the response [from people who support personalization using technology] is that it’s easier to make things engaging with tech. That may be right, but there haven’t been very many good examples so far.” 

This is also why I think it’s a mistake to place children in charge of the speed  of their learning, particularly during the early years of their education. If left to decide for themselves, many kids – and particularly those from at-risk backgrounds – will choose a relatively slow velocity of learning (again, because thinking is hard). The slow pace will lead to large knowledge deficits compared to their peers, which will cause them to slow down further, until eventually they “switch off” from school. The only way to prevent this slow downward spiral for these students is to push them harder and faster. But they need to be pushed, which means we should not cede to them control of the pace of their learning.

My personalization skepticism will no doubt prompt a slew of objections. Let me now anticipate and partially defuse three of them.

Wait, you aren’t really suggesting we return to the “factory model” of education, are you?

To the extent that the so-called factory model involves the dry recitation of facts to students in a flat monotone voice and devoid of meaningful student interaction apart from taking attendance, no, I am not. (Though feel free to watch this clip to see an alternative pop-culture example of effective “factory model instruction” taking place.) What I am saying is to the extent the factory-model stereotype represents what’s actually happening in classrooms, the problem is not the seating arrangement or lack of smartphones, it’s the pedagogy. Effective instruction requires understanding the varying cognitive abilities of students and finding ways to impart knowledge in light of that variation. If you want to call that “personalization,” fine, but we might just also call it “good teaching.” And good teaching can be done in classroom with students sitting in desks in rows, holding pencil and paper, or it can also be done in a classroom with students sitting in beanbags holding iPads and Chromebooks. Whatever the learning environment, the teacher should be responsible for the core delivery of instruction.

Are you against technology in schools?

Not at all. In fact, I think there are many ways in which technology can improve education, as many schools and educators are demonstrating worldwide. Here’s one example that strikes me as particularly interesting – using an iPad with the Educreations app, teachers can literally see and hear students struggling to grasp specific concepts, and reflect on what to do next. I also believe that the ubiquitous use of technology will make our schools rich with almost real-time data on student learning that can be quickly analyzed and acted upon in beneficial ways. (Insert standard “provided the proper privacy safeguards are in place” proviso here.)

At the same time, I have little doubt that technology can hinder education too. In both the US and New Zealand, I’ve visited technology-rich classrooms where virtually no learning appeared to be taking place. And even when learning appears to be happening, there’s always a risk that the appearance is deceiving:

The fact that students make use of many electronic devices and are called digital natives, does not make them good users of the media that they have at their disposal. They can Google but lack the information skills to effectively find the information they need, and they also do not have the knowledge to adequately determine the relevance or truth of what they have found (Walraven, Brand-Gruwel, & Boshuizen, 2008). This leads to essays on Baconian science with texts about the 20th-century British artist Francis Bacon and on the problems that Martin Luther King had with Pope Leo X and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

(Kirschner & Merriënboer, cited above.)

Having said that, and just to reiterate, my argument is not against technology. Instead, what I contend is that many personalization enthusiasts support a theory of instruction that is difficult to harmonize with our best present understanding of how the mind works. If “children are more alike than different in how they think and learn,” as Dan Willingham argues, then one of the major pillars underlying the push personalization crumbles. So I believe we should adopt a more skeptical posture regarding some of the grandiose claims about the benefits of personalizing learning, and shift the burden of persuasion to its proponents to explain why they believe it will improve student learning in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary.

There’s an awful lot of Dan Willingham here. How much of your argument is based solely on his conclusions?

When I first read Willingham’s book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, it made me angry. It angered me because many of my preexisting notions about education and instruction were directly challenged or even contradicted – including my beliefs about the value of personalization. And so I engaged in a bit of “motivated reasoning,” and read some of the underlying research he cites, hoping to find it lacking. Yet the more I read, the more I struggled to find gaps in the logic or evidence. At some point, it dawned on me that I was contributing to the very problem that I had so often decried in education policy. Namely, I was committed to an ideological position regardless of the evidence. That’s when I changed my mind about personalization.

Of course, not everyone reacts to Willingham this same way. For example, in their book Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn suggest that personalization will benefit students in part because (they claim) students have different learning styles, and personalization allows for the tailoring of instruction to each particular style. This idea make extraordinary intuitive sense, yet is entirely unsupported in the scientific literature, as Willingham explains at length. Horn seems to have subsequently read Willingham’s book after Disrupting Class was published, so he (Horn) now eschews learning styles as a “bad example” of personalization. But when does something pass from bad example to evidence that your theory is wrong?

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In closing, the stakes here are high. There is a tremendous amount of energy behind “personalized learning” and in support of policies and practices tied to its loose vision for the future of education. Perhaps it will lead to tremendous learning gains as it unleashes learners to pursue their true passions and learn at a time, place and pace of their choosing. But if we’re wrong about this, we may actually compound the challenges faced by the students who are most in need of guidance and support from the professional experts we call teachers. And we won’t see heads nodding anymore.

Disclosure: I’m on leave from an organization that funds Educreations, and Dan Willingham is serving as an academic mentor for my fellowship in New Zealand. He also reviewed and offered comments to a draft of this piece, as indicated above.

  1. juliebwalls reblogged this from kuranga
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  3. cjholsing reblogged this from kuranga and added:
    An alternative viewpoint to the need to disrupt education….
  4. kuranga posted this