Personalization 3.0 – Using Technology with a Human Connection

From the Marshall Memo #426

In this Education Week article, California foundation executive Susan Sandler worries that these days, “personalization” in schools is mostly about data and customization, competency-based strategies, online learning, and credit recovery. “[T]there is more to high-quality learning than creating the equivalent of a perfect iPod playlist,” she says. Sandler proposes blending the best of what she calls Personalization 2.0 with Personalization 1.0 (each student being personally known at school and having strong relationships with the adults and students around them) into Personalization 3.0 – using technology to enhance the relationships between students and adults in school, not replace them. “We can have the best of both worlds,” she says. “We just need to choose to do so.”

The need for a hybrid approach became clear to Sandler as she interviewed at-risk San Francisco middle-school students who had successfully turned themselves around. “In each case, without exception, the significant upward turn in the students’ school performance could be traced to an adult in the school who had gone out of his or her way to interact with students in a sustained, authentic and personal way,” says Sandler. “This human-to-human interaction – being pulled aside for private conversations or student-specific encouragement – steadily convinced each student that school wasn’t a faceless bureaucracy, but a place where at least one person cared about them and was working to help them. Each student responded by making dramatic positive changes…”

What would Personalization 3.0 look like in a school? Sandler imagines these possibilities:

• Data about students would be used to deepen their in-person relationships – “teachers would start conversations with students several steps ahead, having already gathered basic information about them.”

• Learning would be structured to enable students to pursue individual learning journeys while maintaining a “home base” community of peers and at least one caring adult who knows them well. “Structures inside and outside of school would attend to the relational flow of each student’s day and week,” says Sandler.

• Students would have more opportunities to belong to communities, in person and through social networking tools. 

• Software would be developed to capture information from student-teacher relationships, and teachers would be trained to use it well. 

• Standards and curriculum materials would be focused “so that teachers don’t rush across a wide expanse of shallow content to the exclusion of deeper learning and authentic connection with students,” says Sandler.

If this is done right, schools can use scarce resources more efficiently and effectively, she says: “Educators are our most valuable and expensive resource; when they offload tasks that technology can handle, they can focus on the high-touch work where they make the greatest impact.”

“People vs. ‘Personalization’: Retaining the Human Element in the High-Tech Era of Education” by Susan Sandler in Education Week, Feb. 29, 2012 (Vol. 31, #22, p. 20, 22), http://www.edweek.org.