Learner-centered MTSS

Personalized Learning: Meeting the Needs of Students with Disabilities – Roadmap for School & District Leaders.pdf

All Means All

The National Center for Learning Disabilities created the infographic to the left to support school leaders with understanding the steps in ensuring an equitable system for all learners.

According the infographic, "Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a set of principles for curriculum development that give every student the opportunity to learn. UDL addresses:

  • How information is presented (representation)

  • How students demonstrate what they know (expression)

  • How students interact and engage with the material (engagement)"

UDL plus MTSS = equity by design.

Universal Design for Learning and Multi-Tiered Systems of Support

Shift our Focus to the Individual

We can't teach individual students if we accept the myth of "average." There are no "average" brains or "average" students. Listen to Todd Rose's 8-min TED Talk on how we might begin rethinking what we have believed since the industrial age.

Advancing Equity through Personalized Learning—A Research Overview.pdf

Cover Photo credit: Courtesy of Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action.

Click to learn more within this research review.

Introduction to an Exemplar Resource

Within this research review, readers will learn that,

"According to the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD), two critical frameworks must converge in order for all learners—especially SWDs—to fully benefit from personalized learning: universal design for learning (UDL) and multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) (Trainor et al., 2008). UDL is an approach focused on increasing student access to augmented materials and multiple modes of instruction (Rose, 2000; Rose & Meyer, 2000), and fostering the development of curricula to support access, participation, and progress in all facets of learning (Hall, Strangman, & Meyer, 2003). For students with sensory and intellectual disabilities, these practices reduce accessibility barriers inherent in most educational materials, providing alternatives (e.g., text to speech) and multiple modalities (e.g., close captioning) as well as simplified text. UDL principles intend to reflect the ways that students process information (Rose & Meyer, 2002) and thus may be used to develop goals, instructional methods, alternative assessments, and classroom materials. Applications of UDL may improve outcomes for diverse learners by providing improved access to content and enhancing the use of technology to complement personalized learning."

Additionally:

"MTSS provides supports and interventions to students through the system-wide use of evidencebased practices of varying intensity and data-based decision making in response to individual academic and other needs (Utley & Obiakor, 2015). A system-wide MTSS uses a tiered approach to provide a continuum of structures, resources, strategies, and practices to cohesively and 10 Equity and Personalized Learning: A Research Review coherently meet the needs of all learners (Averill & Rinaldi, 2011). One challenge, which many practitioners are unpacking, is how to increase and vary the intensification of personalized learning within school environments that also employ MTSS interventions. Numerous states and districts have implemented an MTSS framework that could be leveraged to inform personalized learning practices for all learners."

CCSSO. 2017. Equity and Personalized Learning: A Research Review is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Defining Personalized Learning

Introduction to an Exemplar Resource

According to KnowledgeWorks: "In order to ensure high quality implementation of personalized learning at scale, states should align all enabling policies and resources behind a definition that includes the core elements of effective, sustainable personalized learning environments. KnowledgeWorks recommends that states define personalized learning as a teaching and learning framework in which:

  • Instruction is aligned to rigorous college- and career-ready standards and the social and emotional skills students need to be successful in college and career;

  • Instruction is customized, allowing each student to design learning experiences aligned to his or her interests;

  • The pace of instruction is varied based on individual student needs, allowing students to accelerate or take additional time based on their level of mastery;

  • Educators use data from formative assessments and student feedback in real-time to differentiate instruction and provide robust supports and interventions so that every student remains on track to graduation; and

  • Students and parents have access to clear, transferable learning objectives and assessment results so they understand what is expected for mastery and advancement."

KnowledgeWorks. 2015. Creative Commons License Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International, KnowledgeWorks. Some rights reserved.

A State Policy Framework for Scaling Personalized Learning.pdf

Click here to learn from the expertise at KnowledgeWorks.