Navigating the Path to Personalized Education

A Vermont initiative to improve learning in middle schools is working through the challenges of using the latest digital tools and different teaching approaches

By Kevin Bushweller

Ed Week

In a classroom on the third floor of a 110-year-old faded beige-brick building, 20 middle schoolers of varying sizes and attitudes flip open their black HP laptops for an interactive lesson on the Declaration of Independence.

The students at Edmunds Middle School are crafting and revising poems about how they would have felt the day after the declaration was signed, but with a personal twist: Each student has taken on the persona of a patriot, loyalist, or moderate. Teacher Brent Truchon, a lanyard dangling around his neck with the attached keys and school ID badge tucked in the pocket of his red button-down shirt, moves constantly around the room, kneeling next to students and their laptops to give one-on-one attention where needed, before stepping to the front of the class to rally them all to put more imagery into their poems.

Then Truchon moves to a SMART Board, where he uses his finger to scroll and clicks on links to show students how to use a Web 2.0 writing tool to post their poems online for others to read. He explains how the students should read and react to classmates’ poems, and how they, in turn, should react to critiques of their own poems. “You can agree or disagree,” he says, urging them to think before they write.

Students are at varying levels of progress in the lesson near the end of class when several begin having trouble connecting to the network. Truchon instructs them to save their work to their laptop hard drives and says they’ll begin the next day where they left off.

Edmunds Middle School, perched on a hill with a view of the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York and of Lake Champlain, where some Revolutionary War naval battles were fought, is one of the most diverse schools in Vermont. Forty-one percent of its 384 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, and 20 percent speak English as a second language. It is a study in contrasts, ...

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