.svg)
In the ever-changing world of early childhood education, personalized learning has emerged as a way for educators to adopt more inclusive, flexible, and effective ways of teaching. This method is all about understanding that each child learns differently, with their own styles, speeds, and preferences. It's about making classrooms a place where every child feels seen and can grow.
For teachers and childcare providers, adopting personalized learning practices represents not just an educational shift but a deeply impactful way to enrich the educational experience.
In this article, we're diving into what personalized learning means, sharing tips to implement this strategy in the classroom, and exploring its various advantages and disadvantages.
What is personalized learning?
Personalized learning is a tailored system where the instructional approach and pace of learning are specified to the needs of an individual child. Instructional approaches, as well as learning objectives and instructional content, are based on the child’s needs, and learning activities are meaningful, relevant, and driven by their interests.
The goal of personalized learning is to engage children in the learning process to boost self-motivation for success. For example, instructing a child to count to 10 is different from involving them in the process. Personalized learning can help you empower children in decision-making and goal-setting, which can boost active engagement in the classroom.
This approach works particularly well when applied with the universal design for learning (UDL) framework. UDL creates an environment based on inclusivity where teachers focus on meeting the needs of all children to accommodate all abilities, disabilities, learning styles, and more. Incorporating the universal design for learning means providing multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression, making it possible to enhance personalized learning by catering to each child.
Save educators time and enhance program quality with brightwheel's Experience Curriculum. These monthly curriculum kits are mailed to your program and can be paired with easy-to-implement activities featured in the brightwheel app. This gives you tons of flexibility in your lesson planning and embedded assessments make it easy to monitor each child's growth.
What does personalized learning look like?
While the system allows children to work at their own pace, personalized learning—when done correctly—still keeps children on track to meet the educational and developmental standards for their age. Research on personalized learning has identified four attributes of highly effective practices: learner profiles, personal learning paths, competency-based progression, and flexible learning.
Learner profiles
Learner profiles provide a deeper look into the characteristics of a child—their skills, challenges, progress, goals, needs, and interests. They allow you to gain a better understanding of a child and use this information to make decisions that guide their education and development plan.
Learner profiles are updated regularly to help educators, parents, and children keep track of their progress. To create a learner profile for a child, you might ask questions like:
- What are the strengths in how they learn?
- What challenges are present?
- How do they prefer to access information?
- How do they engage with content?
- How do they express what they know and understand?
- What are their talents, interests, and goals?
Personal learning paths
Personal learning paths provide children with a customized journey toward personal development that changes based on their progress, motivations, and goals. Learning paths are concrete, understandable lists of goals and objectives used to guide children toward greater competence and more advanced skills. They allow children to focus on independent learning through a tailored experience.
Competency-based progression
Competency-based progression is a process where a child’s progress is continuously assessed against their goals or learning objectives. This practice ensures that children master a specific set of knowledge and skills based on demonstrated competence instead of instruction time received. For example, in competency-based progression, a child demonstrates their ability to count to 10 versus simply observing and participating in the activity for a set number of hours during instruction time.
Flexible learning
Flexible learning involves creating an environment that allows for using various teaching methods to adapt to how your children learn best. Physical environments have a significant impact on learning; however, flexible learning spaces can be both physical and abstract.
In addition to maintaining appropriate childcare ratios, you want to consider space and learning materials when analyzing your physical learning environment. You might ask: Where and how are the children sitting? What surfaces are the children working on? Does the space allow for moving around?
The abstract considerations might include technology, such as audio and visual aids. Are there auditory distractions? Can you set up the classroom to enhance the audio? Will you use a whiteboard or a blackboard?
When a child’s learning environment is flexible, learning becomes easier and more efficient.
Personalized learning in early education
Examples of personalized learning in an early childhood education setting might look like one-on-one teaching and peer help. One-on-one teaching offers systematic learning in an individualized manner. During this form of personalized learning, educators are expected to understand what the child already knows. Using that information, you can bridge existing knowledge to new concepts and skills by creating customized lesson plans and activities for each child.
Peer help, similar to mentoring, is another way children can receive personalized learning. This creates opportunities for children to help and receive help from a classmate. For example, you might pair a child who excels in math but experiences some challenges in literacy skills with a child who has the opposite skills and challenges.
Have the children act as classroom buddies to help each other throughout the day. In a lesson on counting, you could have the first child act as the group leader and guide the pair through the lesson. Alternatively, in an activity on letter recognition, you’d assign the second child to take the lead. It might help to remind the children that they’re not the boss but a friendly helper sharing what they know with their classmates.
Personalized learning benefits: Pros and cons
Personalized learning isn’t a new concept in education. Teachers have been employing this intentional teaching practice in early childhood, primary, and secondary education for decades. Like many other teaching tools, personalized learning has its pros and cons.
Benefits of personalized learning
Personalized learning gives teachers more time to focus on each child
By adopting personalized learning models, teachers have the opportunity to learn more about their children. They allow for targeted attention through individual or small-group work. One-on-one tutoring enables teachers to provide extra support to children by reviewing and reinforcing past material while working with the children’s current knowledge and skills. Personalized learning also offers the opportunity to introduce project-based instruction, which allows teachers to create lessons based on children’s interests.
Personalized learning increases engagement
Personalized learning is a system that allows for collaboration between educators and children. It’s an emergent curriculum method, or a child-centered teaching technique for creating essential and engaging lessons based on a child’s needs, skills, and interests, that makes learning more relevant for each child. When they can move at their own pace and develop a sense of control over their education, children are likely to become more engaged. When their needs, skills, and interests influence the course of their learning, it is easier for them to enjoy learning versus feeling forced to learn “just because.”
Personalized learning allows for more efficient learning
Personalized learning is tailored and efficient. It moves away from a standardized, one-size-fits-all system of learning. It neither slows down advanced children nor rushes children who are struggling. For example, in a classroom where some children already know their basic shapes, a standardized lesson on shapes would benefit only the children still learning their shapes. For the children who have already mastered them, their time might be better spent learning more advanced shapes, such as diamonds, ovals, and pentagons.
Disadvantages of personalized learning
Personalized learning can increase educational inequality
While standardized education has its flaws, so does personalized learning. When the latter is used exclusively over the former, it can intensify achievement gaps that are typically created by socioeconomic differences. Personalized learning platforms can push well-performing children by consistently providing them with more advanced content. Alternatively, it can leave struggling children with easier lessons that don’t challenge them. Personalized learning requires challenging lessons—for all children—and effective scaffolding to keep them advancing and prevent struggling children from falling behind.
Personalized learning can lead to massive data collection
Personalized learning is a data-driven practice. It uses information on a child’s skills to tailor the learning process; however, some worry about the data collection issues it imposes on young children. Personalized learning programs and apps often collect and share personal information without the user's knowledge. Depending on the device, they may have access to one’s exact location and can even access cameras. This poses a big threat when children access personalized learning on personal devices, because it opens the door to increased monitoring by apps and potential surveillance.
Learning can be flexible
Personalized learning is an adaptable education approach that allows children to learn at a pace based on their unique skills, needs, and interests. Although personalized learning has the potential to increase achievement gaps, this flexible learning practice can increase engagement and make learning more efficient for all children in the classroom.
Brightwheel is the complete solution for early education providers, enabling you to streamline your center’s operations and build a stand-out reputation. Brightwheel connects the most critical aspects of running your center—including sign in and out, parent communications, tuition billing, and licensing and compliance—in one easy-to-use tool, along with providing best-in-class customer support and coaching. Brightwheel is trusted by thousands of early education centers and millions of parents. Learn more at mybrightwheel.com.
