Exploring More Individualized Learning

 Here's my annotated article link: http://diigo.com/

In reading William Richardson's " Preparing Students to Learn Without Us", the writer talks about how in many schools, teachers are beginning to teach by letting the students find something they are passionate about, and then letting them sort of create their own assignments and use their own resources. This means a lot of kids are  developing  more independence in their learning, but it's also more work for the teachers, who have to change around rubrics for each student, and that means they have to grade 25 very different assignments' as opposed to one with different interpretations.

As Cathy Stutzman is quoted as saying in the article "'It's scary not to know exactly where your students will go if their curriculums are potentially different, and it requires a lot of adjusting,' Stutzman explains." I think this uncertainty actually ads to the more personalized process of learning. Not knowing where research or an assignment will take you brings a sense of adventure to learning, but sometimes it could be too much. for a teacher to be chasing around two dozen research projects.

I think this whole personalized learning thing could work, but only for certain classes. I have the feeling that because I have trouble learning the Unit Circle in a traditional classroom, having to figure out my own Math learning plan would just make things more difficult. This kind of learning, with all the SIAs (Student Initiated Assignments, as Mr.Grossman likes to say), might only be really applicable to classes like English, History and TV production- the kind of classes we take when we're in CAP. Using this individual learning technique would probably work very well in a class like this, and we can use the blogs to share what we find with other kids, like the students in the article. So maybe my next post will be about a cool Journalism blog I found, or a series of videos teaching someone how to really edit in FinalCut Pro. Maybe.