Personalizing the Education Experience

This is one of my reflections from my class, Leading Change: Go Beyond Gamification with Gameful Learning.

There isn’t much personalization happening, at least in my classes. This is something that I want to work on. I do allow students to choose topics of interest to study and there are a lot of opportunities to do this within my Social Studies classes. For example, when completing a project about Progressive Era reform, students are given options of influential individuals to study. This allows some student choice on the matter.

I also allow students to choose the media in which they would like to complete their projects. Sometimes I will require that students create an infographic, but other times I will give them choices: poster, website, blog post, video, etc.

All choices are given by the instructor, which I think is necessary, especially when completing certain research projects. If I don’t give a list of influential individuals for students to choose from, someone might choose someone that doesn’t fit into the time period at all.

I think the learners’ autonomy can be increased by allowing choice more often throughout the year, but it is important for the teacher to provide the choices and avoid making all tasks too open-ended.