Kim Frencken: Personalized learning versus differentiation

Personalized learning gives a student more power in the content decision making process, while differentiation focuses on the same content, but at different skill levels.

Personalized learning encourages students to ask what they need to learn. Differentiated learning addresses the various learning styles and abilities of a student. 

Personalized learning creates a learning experience for each student while differentiated learning adapts the learning experiences for each student.

Sounds great, doesn't it? But... I'm a skeptic and I don't normally just take someone's word for something. I want to see how it fits into my classroom and how it will affect my kids. So.....

I started investigating and asking some questions. Asking kids what they wanted to learn. Answers hit the wall like spaghetti. Only not much stuck. 

Most of the educators I talked to were so overwhelmed by curriculum demands that creating personal lessons wasn't even possible, even if they had time to spend creating them after doing all of the other paperwork. So...

Back to the investigative drawing board. Yes, it is correct that personalized learning involves creating curriculum for each student's requests, not adapting existing curriculum. It also takes time to implement and appears to be difficult, if not impossible, when you have no control over the curriculum. I never found an answer for my #1 question: How do kids know what they need to learn if they haven't been taught about all of the possibilities they can explore?

It all brings me back to the beginning. I'm no closer to an answer than I was...

Or maybe I am. Personalized learning has a nice ring to it. A student-centered approach to learning. Implementing more project based experiences. But, as I read this my blood pressure rises. 

While it creates a nice exploratory experience for my kids, it creates an increase in my stress and workload. My students may learn about the learning process, but are they learning what they need to know? 

Not one student wanted to know about multiplication. No one asked to learn about the Civil War. No one asked for instruction on creating more interesting sentences. Not even with prompting. Not with creating graphics to guide them in determining what they wanted to learn. Every student request was centered on kid-friendly, fun things.

I'm all about differentiating instruction to meet the needs of each learner and adapting a lesson to meet their interest is also important, but opening the door to this type of educational freedom seems like opening Pandora's box. Don't kids need to know what they need to know before they can tell us what they need to know?

Will I be given support and time to create these experiences for my students? I guess that remains to be seen, and I'll keep searching for answers to improve my student's educational experiences.
(For more of Kim Frencken's writing and information about her educational products, check out her blog, Chocolate For the Teacher.)