Episode Topic: Ashley Pursley and Danae Acker speak with Dr. Sarah Catto, a personalized learning coach, about what personalized learning is, how to begin, and what resources are available for teachers interested in beginning their journey with personalized learning.

Hey guys! I'm Ashley Pursley and I'm Danae Acker. You're listening to iTalks; it's the podcast with illuminating conversations that empower the learners we serve!

Introduction

Today, we’re joined by Dr. Sarah Catto, our personalized learning coach from the Office of Personalized Learning in the South Carolina Department of Education. Dr. Catto has over 18 years of experience in public education serving as an early childhood educator, reading recovery teacher, instructional coach, and literacy specialist with degrees in early childhood education, a masters in Educational leadership and administration, and a doctorate in language and literacy. She is also an adjunct professor at USC Upstate and Converse College. When Dr. Catto is not supporting teachers and students, she’d rather be reading! Welcome Dr. Catto!

As we mentioned in your intro, the South Carolina Department of Education has an entire office dedicated to personalized learning. What role do you play as a Personalized Learning Coach?

It's never the same from day to day. My main job is to support schools and districts no matter where they are across the spectrum of implementing personalized learning. What my job really is is to work myself out of a job; if I've done my job well, they're not going to need me anymore. They are going to connect to other districts, other people, even other states to help move it forward. My job is to support them, but to really try to foster that autonomy in schools and district to take on personalized learning themselves and be successful.

We’ve used the phrase “personalized learning” a few times already; in general, what is personalized learning?

If you were to Google "personalized learning," you would get a wide range of answers. Honestly, when I first started, I thought personalized learning was mostly technology; I thought, "If a child is on a laptop or tablet, and they are working through their own playlist or whatever, that's personalized learning." The South Carolina Framework shows that's not necessarily what it is. Even though we are the Office of Personalized Learning, I prefer to think of it as learner-centered. Everything about personalized learning revolves around learner ownership. We're talking about making decisions in education, both at a systems level and at the classroom level that centers around the learner.

How has the state department defined South Carolina's work with personalized learning?

We focus it around the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate; if you look at our one pager of the framework, it has our logo at the top, right corner of the page. At the center of the pinwheel, you find the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate. I constantly see that yellow and blue poster of the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate on walls in classrooms and schools, but very rarely is it actionable. It's just there. If you were to ask someone how that actually is embedded into your classroom, a teacher would typically say, "I don't know." The profile has three parts, world class knowledge, world class skills, and life and career characteristics. Most of the time, we we are talking about education, our focus is on the world class knowledge. It's crucial, but our Personalized Learning Framework also focuses on world class skills and those life and career characteristics.

In order to do that, our framework has four main parts. The first one is student ownership; it's what drives everything else; on the logo, student ownership is threaded throughout everything else that we do. At its most basic understanding, students ownership is when kids have an active voice and choice in what they are doing, and even beyond that, children know what they're doing, why they're doing it, and they know what's going to come next. Transparency of learning is a huge part of our work. The other components serve to support that.

We have flexible learning environments; as wonderful as modern furniture is, that's just part of it. I've been in classrooms with wonderful, new, modern flexible seating, but the teaching is not personalized at all, and I've seen the opposite. A flexible learning space is making sure kids can learn anytime, anywhere, even outside of the school walls.

Another piece of the framework is learning pathways. This is really the rubber hitting the road when you talk about student ownership. Pathways is what takes the kids on that journey. We think about kids entering learning at their readiness level instead of the arbitrary grade levels. The pathway for a child is informed by not only their interests and strengths, but also constant formative assessment that adjusts the path and pace.

Learner profiles is the last component of the South Carolina Framework for Personalized Learning. The learner profiles are part and parcel of the learning pathways. As a learner, how well do I know myself? Can I be an advocate for myself? If I get an 80 on an assessment, do I know what it means? Then, what can I do to move forward? Students who know themselves as learners drives those pathways as well.

When we start thinking about those components, we can connect them to things that are already happening in classrooms. When you said flexible learning environments promote learning anytime, anywhere, we can connect it to the new practice of recording direct instruction and publishing to Google Classroom for students to access it anytime, anywhere. It sounds like personalized learning is the umbrella term, but we're all already using some of the strategies. The idea of putting it into this framework focuses that work to improve our best practices and use of those strategies to make it more intentional and effective for the student-centered learning.

Often, people look at me like, "If you just give me a box of that personalized learning stuff you're talking about, that'd be great." But that's not exactly what we do. Instead it is looking at best practices through the lens of student ownership to make an impact. If a school comes to me and says, "This is what our teachers are doing," my question will always be, "How much students ownership do you see in that? How much feedback do the students give their teacher on what she is doing?" It is not something that is packaged and delivered at your door. It's a mindset shift. It's viewing best practices through the lens of learner-centered practices.

Personalized learning is not about the destination; it's about the journey. It's not about becoming a personalized learning school or teacher. It's about using the tools and strategies to make learning more personalized.

It's not "in addition to". This is what you're doing already, so it's not something else to add onto our plates. It's something we're already doing with the increased focus of a tunnel vision view with the student right in front of us. We look at them and say, "Hey, we're doing all of these things, but what does that mean to you? Do you understand what we're doing?"

Yes! It goes back to that student ownership component because that's what's lacking the most! Can you talk about how you've seen student ownership at the different levels?

That's another added bonus to my role; I get to see it implemented at all the different levels. A question I like to pose to people is, "Who do you think has a more difficult time with personalized learning: a five year old in kindergarten or a high school senior? People mull it over, but often say the five year old. Nope! Nine times out of ten that five year old catches on quickly because, to them, it's just learning. It's so often that we diverge. Here's learning and here's education, and the two are not one in the same. Personalized learning just makes sense to a five year old who is used to learning naturally. The high school senior who has had years upon years of not having that agency would take a lot of practice to undo what's been done. I'm not saying it can't be done. From freshmen to seniors, I've seen amazing accomplishments that as a college professor, I know they will be ready! Even in kindergarten or first grade, I've seen kids who will come up to me and say, "This is what I'm working on, and this is how I know that I'll be finished with it, and the next thing I'm working on is this." The teacher is still there, but she's there as a guide on the side for that child. Watching a five or six year old with agency that empowers them through, I think, "Man, in ten years you are just going to be a phenom; it's going to be amazing!" It's the same for high school freshmen through seniors; when you see them take ownership, yes content/standards benefit, but a lot of the behavior improves. When you think about the disengagement that high schoolers tend to have, ownership of learning lights them back up.

When we're talking about taking a deep dive into personalized learning, we might be wondering, do grade levels go away? In the current structure of our educational system, how does personalized learning look and work?

That's a big question! Grade levels can still exist; it's not completely abolishing everything that we have, but it's thinking differently. All of you have had a student move on to the next grade level before he/she was ready. Or you've taught a kid something that you knew he/she already mastered and didn't need it. Are we providing the opportunities that child needs to truly show the competence to move forward. Those grades can still be there, but how informed are you as a teacher on what that child can truly do and what needs he/she still has? Is that child truly informed on what he/she needs to move on to the next grade level?

When personalized learning is at it's height, we're thinking about it away from the time-based system of learn for 180 days, check, and move on. It's more like, in that 180 days what do I really know about what you've mastered? It's not necessarily how much time you've spent; it's really about what have you mastered within that time and what do you still have left to learn?

If I'm a teacher who sees this as exactly what I'm looking for, especially during the pandemic when we're seeing gaps in learning, can I do this siloed in my classroom or does the whole school or grade level have to be on-board for me to do personalized learning?

First, we hear a lot of people say, since we've been in this pandemic, we're starting to see gaps in learning, but I try to remind people the gaps were always there, and you know they were there; it just shined a spotlight on it, so nobody could really deny it anymore.

As a siloed teacher you can delve into things, but there's a benefit to having at least one person to bounce ideas off of. When we're talking about personalized learning, this is a second order change. First order changes are new curriculum or a new behavior management system. It doesn't delve into your beliefs as an educator, but second order change is a different beast. If you're trying to do this on your own, it can be really overwhelming. You really need at least one other person to go to and say, "Hey, I tried this and it failed monumentally."

If you don't have anyone to connect with in your building, the nice thing about having our office is we can connect people and schools and districts with one another so you aren't trying it all alone. At your loneliest, you've still got me (Dr. Catto) in the Upstate; you can reach out to me, and I'll help you out with things.

It sounds like the State Department has invested a lot into personalized learning. What's the benefit of personalized learning; what's the why behind it, and how did we get here?

It goes back to the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate; when it was created, our office was created to bring it alive. We wanted to make not only the world class knowledge, but also world class skills and life/career characteristics something we could see in classrooms. My WHY for personalized learning is, "why would we continue doing the same things we've always done and we know the results we're getting are not what we want. And the small tweaks we've made aren't doing it. In my experience when I watch a fully implemented, learner-centered classroom, that's what does it. I'm not going to continue to do something that just doesn't work very well. Teachers are doing so much work, but they are not necessarily doing the right work. Not like right or wrong, but the thing that's most effective for them. If you're leaving at the end of the day and you're the one mentally exhausted, that's not right. Your kids should be the ones leaving like, "Whew! THAT was a DAY!" I tell teachers all the time, yes, this is a lot of work, but it's the right work and at the end of it, you're going to feel much more fulfilled in your job as an educator.

When a teacher is a guide on the side, where does the teaching actually take place?

One myth of personalized learning is that in a fully implemented personalized learning environment, there is not direct instruction. That is not true. There is still direct instruction, but that direct instruction is informed. We can all think to a time in the classroom when we really didn't know if all our students needed that mini-lesson, but they were getting it because we were on week 3, day 2 of the pacing guide. That kind of direct instruction is not as personalized. But if I have a pre-assessment that shows me six of those kids most definitely need this, I will pull them in a small group to provide the direct instruction. The guide by the side part of it is there as well. Students are checking in with me, but I'm not the end-all be-all of the assessment data. My kids know it too; they know what kind of a learner they are. Personalized learning does not make teaching obsolete, but it does change it. Teachers are partners with their kids with a shared responsibility for learning and assessment. It does do-away with the sage on the stage to 100% of the kids all of the time. That only happens if all of the kids need it. It's going to make the teacher that much more important and really vary his/her job.

The direct instruction should be learner-centered. Have these learners in some way (an aligned pre-assessment) shown me that they all need this instruction? These direct instruction mini-lessons could even be outside of content. Maybe we need to have a class meeting about being more responsible for our data notebooks. That would be a whole-class mini lesson for everybody.

Direct instruction does not go away, but it's informed based on the needs of each student. It could be all kids, or it could be three or four.

When I'm pulling together a small group of students for direct instruction, what does it look like for the rest of the class?

It depends on those learning pathways. If you've got pathways for your students that are aligned to their needs and interests, students will typically work on those tasks or activities while the teacher is doing small group instruction. We've all been there when we're teaching our heart out with a small group and what the other students end up working on is busy work, so we can focus with our small group. What ends up happening is the students disengage very quickly and that engagement piece is where the ownership is lacking. We always say, "If kids aren't engaged, there's an issue with the ownership." I don't necessarily want them to be busy the whole time; I want them to be engaged. How do I make them engaged? Well, how much ownership do they have over the task? That's where we bring in the pathways.

If I've done my pre-assessment or whatever it is that I'm going to use to inform my instruction, my students are also aware of the standard, the tasks that will show mastery, and the skills they are working towards. When you get that kind of ownership, the engagement in that classroom skyrockets. It's not a perfect world, but it's the tipping piece from busy work to engaged work, and I'll always say ownership is the key.

Sometimes people hear us talking about learning pathways and stop us like, "What are you talking about? You mean I have to create an individual pathway for each of my 28 students?" That is not what we are talking about. It's basically taking differentiation, which we're all familiar with, and just delving a bit more deeply into it for each kid. You may still have kids who are on progress, need more support, or are ready to move on. You may still have these three large groups, but add a little distinction within those three groups of who may need more time, or who may need a video instead of a writing activity.

We've talked a lot about ownership, but how do students get ownership? How do I help facilitate it as their teacher?

I love having control of my classroom, and I know not all teachers are like that, but a lot of us are. The first step is redefining my role as a teacher. I don't want to have control of a classroom; I want to grow that discipline with my students. Instead of me putting discipline upon them, I want them to be self-disciplined. What can I do to help them do that? We always start with culture first. During the first weeks of school, instead of the teacher writing out the rules, our classrooms will typically design and write them together--a code of cooperation. What are we pledging to be as a community of learners? Think of your standard operating procedures. Do I as the teacher have to give you permission to get out of your seat to sharpen a pencil? I could, but it also takes a lot of time and energy. Can we come up with some kind of standard operating procedure that we post of what to do when we need a pencil sharpened? The kids take ownership of the class expected behaviors. Even before we get to the academics part of ownership, we're looking at culture in the classroom first. What opportunities do I have to selfishly lighten my load and put it on the students. Who's really doing all the work? I'm stealing that from a Burkins and Yaris literacy textbook. But that's always a question I have in my head. Who's doing all the work when we enter a classroom? Even these small, minuscule tasks end of leeching a lot of our teacher energy throughout the day.

Okay, so you've convinced us. We're ready buy-into personalized learning. How can we get started?

We have so many different resources! In our current context of the pandemic, our office still has our cohorts. One of those cohorts is the Launch Cohort. It's for schools and districts who are just starting with their journey of personalized learning. We ask it to be a team of several teachers and at least one building or district leader. Everything in that cohort is hosted on Canvas virtually. It is a rolling registration window. If any school or district want to join in, email us and we will get you set up. The Launch Cohort is a great way to start.

We have the Framework Foundations Series. Those modules are mostly a self-paced, self-led discovery of personalized learning. It's made up of five or six modules that take you through each part of the framework. For example, what does learning pathways really look like in the classroom? It really takes you through the what of South Carolina Personalized Learning. You can get recertification credit for it too!

We have a podcast too. It's called Makin' it Personal. We're also on Twitter and Instagram @personalizeSC. We have a website and a community called Personalized SC that connects educators all over the state on the mobilize platform.

Alright, Dr. Catto, here we are at the end of our iTalks: Illuminating Conversations Podcast. We've appreciated our time together, but what final thoughts do you have for our listeners?

It is a mantra that we use in all of our cohorts: Think Big, Start Small, and Act Fast. Personalized learning is such a big idea that can feel overwhelming, but start really small and act on it now. If it fails, we can try again, but at least start. That first step is the most important part of our journey.

You can find Dr. Catto on Twitter @DocCatto or you can email her at sbcatto@ed.sc.gov.