The Trump Foundation will hold a series of meetings to deepen the knowledge of personalization among mathematics teachers in middle school
The foundation’s clinical teaching strategy always thrived to find ways to help teachers use a personalized learning plan for each and every student in their class. By diagnosing the student’s knowledge and capabilities and adapting the teaching accordingly, we believed that teachers would be able to better address the difficulties, learning styles and pace of every student. In mathematics and science learning, we thought this approach is vital, because knowledge and skill are intertwined and built brick on brick.
However in practice, this tool has proved to be very difficult to implement in the five-unit classes in high schools. Teachers do use the diagnostic data in order to adapt their teaching, nevertheless they use it for the whole class, and to cluster their students into ability groupings. A learning plan for every student seemed to them as an impossible mission, whereas the developers of assignments in universities believed that teachers should keep their focus on the lesson, the material, and the joint progress of the students in their classroom.
Now, as we enter middle schools, we once again find the potential of a personalized learning plan as a promise that needs to be tested and proved. Middle school students enter 7th grade coming from different elementary schools. Classrooms are typically crowded and diverse, the students’ school schedule is becoming very busy and scattered, and they need to be highly organized and agile. Many of them tend to “get lost”, their talents and challenges are hardly identified, and the gaps between them significantly widen.
The theory of change that we recently presented for our proposed role in middle schools, emphasizes the need for a stronger teacher-student effort focused on learning. It articulates that students need teaching that stirs their interest, pushes them to invest their efforts and provides them with a clear learning plan expressed in concrete steps that are achievable and adapted to their progress. They need teaching that provides close support and gives them individualized, constructive and reinforcing feedback.
Therefore, in order to move forward with this intention, we propose as a first step, to convene a 6 months learning process. The joint study will seek to find answers to the following questions:
In order to address these questions, we propose to convene a group of 20 mathematics, researchers and policy makers, each from a different organization. They will hold three meetings with guest speakers addressing relevant topics, and hold in depth discussions. Two experts will be commissioned to lead the learning process and prepare background material and insights. A fourth meeting will be held for a larger group of 40 participants, where initial findings will be presented and discussed.
Between the meetings, three members of the study group will visit schools in Ontario, Canada, where personalized learning plans are being regularly implemented. The delegation will also participate in the American Education Research Association (AERA) conference, which will be held in Ontario in April 2019. They will meet with researchers who are closely familiar with personalized learning in middle school mathematics and science. Upon their return, the delegation will jointly write a detailed report and present it to the study group and the professional community.
The two experts together with the study group will prepare a report that will summarize the learning process and offer conclusions and insights. It is expected that each of the members in the study group will return to their organization and continue to develop the ideas and translate them into concrete steps and projects.