[From a Symposium on Personalized Learning interview series by New Media Partner edReformer.com]
Symposium speaker Wendy Battino is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition, which grew out of reforms in the Chugach School District in Alaska. We spoke with her about vision, personalized learning components and policy-making strategy and how her implementation at RISC helps her students achieve.
What is the vision for personalized learning as your organization pursues it? One thing we have known for quite a while is that students learn in different ways. We have worked to create a system that meets the needs of every student. The vision is allowing students to engage and have responsibility for their own learning. The way we use personalized learning plans, students get a choice of what kind of topic they want to master. They get to start driving some of their learning and the teacher facilitates that.
What are the challenges being addressed by practitioners in this system? Our biggest mission is tackling the creation of systems so that individualized learning can happen. It’s systematic reform. The challenge is that reform itself is challenging, because of all those moving parts, it means change, and change is all a process for people to go through. To go through a change from a hundreds of years old model, to delivering personalized learning to each student, is not a minor challenge.
Videos of the RISC System.
MORE of the Interview on the personalized learning transformation and scale path, evidence and policy barriers.