How might personalized Learning work in a 3rd Grade Math Classroom?

Seminar Title

How might personalized Learning work in a 3rd Grade Math Classroom?

Personalized Learning

3rd Grade

5th Grade

Mathematics

Mathematics

Have you ever been frustrated with not being able to meet with all levels of learners? Does your teaching revolve around the lower ability students? This has been my frustration so I looked at a way that my students could push themselves at their own level. According to Natalie Abel (2016), personalized learning is “Tailoring learning for each student’s strengths, needs and interests–including enabling student voice and choice in what, how, when and where they learn–to provide flexibility and supports to ensure mastery of the highest standards possible” I focused on 3 main concepts that would allow me to make this successful: Classroom environment, student engagement, and learner profiles. Schoology was used as the framework to run this program. This session could come in handy for someone looking to meet the needs at all learners in upper elementary.

How can I meets the needs of all the students in my classroom, create the want for learning, while having them pushing themselves to the next level, created by student engagement, without the guidance of teachers? During this process, I wanted to see how I could meet the needs of all the students in my class. One reason I began teaching is to push the higher ability students to new levels of thinking. Through my first year in the classroom, I quickly discovered that most of my emphasis was spent on the lower ability students, leaving little to no time working with my higher students. One reason that I wanted to see this change is that instead of everyone showing growth, I was seeing more students filtering towards the average. The lowers students were showing significant gains, average students were staying average, and the higher students were fixed if not falling. I had a vision to be with all of my students most of the day. I saw this working while using Schoology as a platform. Through Schoology, I would be able to have students work at their own place, view instructional videos of me, and move on when they felt they mastered the skill. I will be able to see the quality of work being performed throughout the steps. A few major steps that need to be met before this will be successful is having a successful classroom environment and creating intrinsic motivation in all students. Because the student will be doing a lot of self learning, they must feel comfortable to ask questions prior to the release of responsibility and to talk with me with questions they have. Through my research I found technology and student ownership were the essential stepping stones that were needed to make this process a success. Technology in the 3rd grade ended up being a larger learning curve than anticipated. The first 3-4 weeks consisted of setting up the rules and procedures that would be needed. This wasn’t just on the students, but on my framework too. My quiz questions weren’t allowing them to make “acceptable” mistakes even though they had mastered the skill being assessed. Example is when the answer was 3,200, some students would put in 3200, counting it wrong when it was actually correct. I would need to think of all possible “acceptable” answers in so they wouldn’t get them wrong. This was changed in week 3 when I went to multiple choice, eliminating that frustration the students and teacher were seeing. Ownership of their grades was another successful step that was needed. Classroom environment was set up successfully at the beginning of the year, which led to a lot of students wanting to own their grades, but I had 4 that didn’t care about doing the work. For these 4 students, I did a few mini lessons on the importance of ownership and how we need to proud of our accomplishments. As a result of my interest in successfully meeting and pushing the needs of all academic needs, I feel with more “tweaking” this can happen. During this process, I felt that most kids were being challenged while I wasn’t with them and I was able to meet with all levels more throughout the week. I will continue to tweak this framework and implement this strategy in my classroom. Once math is running at a successful rate, I’ll try and set up my reading core under this framework.