How might we envision new classroom procedures that attend to the latest research findings? Without getting bogged down in the research, let’s sketch out what classrooms might look like.
Adapting to—and Implementing With—Student Learning
Teachers are quite successful when they adapt to—and implement with—student personalized learning because that is the pathway to any student’s success in gaining mastery of any curriculum. Personalized learning means that the way in which students learn is recognized and adapted to by the instructional leader. Personalized learning includes the ideas of understanding the curriculum and the learner’s actions in response to the curriculum. Personalized learning also means that there is an independent pathway of learning for each student through a curriculum. Adapting to and implementing with student learning means that teachers have to modify instruction to adapt to common and uncommon student learning challenges, provide individualized support, and assess student learning in a way that provides timely feedback that increases the success of student learning.
New Forms of Adaptive Assessment
New forms of adaptive testing and assessment need to be constructed. These include new forms of summative and formative assessments and online digital assessments that can produce real time diagnostic information to teachers to help guide their adaptation plans for student learning. These new forms need to be balanced in the implementation so that testing and assessment does not overwhelm classroom time and focus but rather sits in the background as support for students’ and teachers’ needs for real time assessment data. Finally, new forms of assessment procedures need to display coherence with new classroom procedures so that teachers and students connect their individual learning paths with their instructional leadership through personalized learning success.
The Central Work in New Classroom Procedures
The central work in new classroom procedures is student acquisition of the learning task, the personalized learning pathways, the errors encountered and resolved along the way, and the demonstration of learning through task repetition, verbal and writing reviews, and new product creation. Teachers have to be given the time to organize the central work in new classroom procedures by reduction of classes taught, reduction in administration, and increase in cross-classroom planning with other teachers.
