Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSurge discusses research that shows developing personalized learning needs to go beyond just the singular teacher-student relationship: a broader network of school support must be present.

• The Alabama-based Piedmont City School District found some success implementing "Team Time," so that other adults in school could build a rapport with all students. How could other districts replicate such an effort?

• Here's how to include your community in a personalized learning vision.


Advocates for personalized learning have bold and plentiful ambitions for students: higher rates of engagement, greater persistence, healthy development and expanded opportunity — not to mention improved academics. All of these ambitions to support healthy, whole child development often fall to a single, key relationship at the heart of any school: the relationship between students and their teachers.

Putting student-teacher connections at the center of personalized learning efforts is clearly a good idea, especially to curb a tendency to focus on technology over teaching. Both champions and skeptics are taking pains to make that point. Saro Mohammed of The Learning Accelerator has written that “Perhaps the best kept secret of research on edtech is the fact that teachers and teaching remain the most important influences on learning.” And veteran educator Peter Greene summed it up well in his recent Forbes article detailing inevitable tensions between personalization and scale: “It's nearly impossible to personalize instruction with just one person involved,” he wrote.

Greene’s sentiment may be a correct, but overly conservative, estimate: it may also be nearly impossible to successfully personalize instruction with just two people involved.

The reality is that teachers shouldn’t go it alone. Beyond clear academic research that overwhelmingly points to teachers as the leading variable driving student learning, other research points to relationships more broadly as core determinants of students’ chances of getting by and getting ahead. Research from an array of youth development and social capital scholars is clear: students will most benefit from a web of adults supporting their healthy development, academic success and access to opportunity.

Read the full article about surrounding students with a web of connections by Julia Freeland Fisher at EdSurge.