Jeff, your last sentence in your comment is quite compelling. The more I think about that, the more it makes sense. Remember the old interview question that went something like “Is teaching an art or a science?” I always answered that question with “It’s both.” There has to be passion. Passion about helping people to help themselves. But there also has to be knowledge. Knowledge about the actual skills…management, content, organization, etc. In my mind, an advertised “personal” learning experience based on a technological “tool” is just that, a tool. The technology doesn’t take into consideration all the variables present in a students mind, only what the student outputs. On a large scale, these tools are valuable for producing data. Data that can be useful, IF interpreted logically. Putting all a student’s learning experience in one technological basket leaves out the human part.

Contrast him with Bill Gates, who changes course without saying he was wrong and without asking people who actually teach why he was wrong.

Teachers said years ago that computerised “personalised learning” was a busted flush.

He still has much to learn though. Instead of trying to work out whether traits come before genes or genes come before traits, a real teacher would find out what students needed and then teach them side by side. If you teach factorising separately on the basis you did expansion last week, so they get that, then you are a mug. Things are never that simple.

Anytime! I’m open to any medium. Just tell me what you prefer.

To me, my best teachers only presented the content knowledge to me and let me decide how much I want to learn. I remember that I only took in things that I was ready to absorb. Some things are very good but I wasn’t able to take in when it was presented to me.

I believe that everyone knows themselves the best and throughout the years people have developed theories about their lives after I almost screwed up two student’s decision making in my first year as a teacher. That was painstaking. I gave the kids some advice. For the first one, I thought that would be the best for him, but what I didn’t realize is that the kid was super intelligent- much intelligent than I, as his teacher. The advice I gave him was superficial and that almost cause him to make the no-so-good choice for his life.

For the second one, the kid hated math so I gave the kid some advice and it turned out to be my advice was not helpful at all.

Honestly, I am very regretful. I agree with the featured comment that kids can personalize their learning by themselves. :))))

Thanks for commenting, Aaron. I’d love to hear more about what Teach to One did that the Summit PLP doesn’t.

No offense taken with the scorn, I think PBL, like other buzz-words that pop up in education can often lose their meaning so I wanted to qualify with authentic just as a way to say that I don’t think the
word should be tossed around lightly. What I mean by authentic is projected BASED learning, not project ORIENTED learning. Basically, how do students learn about a topic by doing a project, not summarize their learning in a project. When done well, I feel like students are able to explore/create novel ideas and live in productive struggle.

“Authentic” project based learning, eh?

Is that the sort when it fails it isn’t “authentic”, and when it succeeds turns out to have a large, but hidden, dose of traditional learning?

My apologies for the scorn, but if a style of education is so hard to get right that it needs “authentic” in front of it, then it will almost certainly fail over time in the real classroom.