Introducing the Personalized Learning Readiness Continuum

It's here! The first prototype (and 32nd draft) of the Personalized Learning Readiness Continuum!
Over the past two years our team has been iterating and refining the systems at both the campus and district level that enable personalized learning in the classroom. And, we've learned a lot. As more educators and school teams are raising their hand(s) to join the work, the need to identify our proof point schools as well as schools that were ready, willing, and able to dive into personalized learning grew even larger. Alongside students, teachers, school leaders, and our friends at 2Revolutions we turned to the design thinking process as our guide to solve this problem. 

What follows is our attempt to capture the process we went through as well as what's ahead for how we're planning to test out the tool in the 2018-2019 school year. ​

Empathize
In December, we surprised our school leaders with an opportunity to conduct empathy interviews with students back on their respective campuses (thank you Google Hangouts!) during a design studio. Teams interviewed up to three different groups of students across all grade levels and then used these experiences to create empathy maps.

To access the empathy interview guide, click on the screenshot above.

Define 
Building from empathy interviews and findings, we wrote our actionable problem statement (point of view): the PL central team needs a way to identify where schools are at in their journey to personalization to strengthen our definition of personalized learning and our ability to ensure more students in Dallas ISD are getting what they need in a manner that works best for him/her.

Next we then wrote many "how might we" questions to help us prepare for the next step in design thinking and landed on this one to help ideate. How might we create a tool/ continuum to identify proofpoint schools as well as schools that are ready, willing, and able to dive into PL?

Ideate 
Using the, "How might we create a tool/ continuum to identify proofpoint schools as well as schools that are ready, willing, and able to dive into PL" statement we then shared draft domains and summary statements with groups of teachers and leaders to brainstorm actions and systems that would be in place if the summary statement were true for their campus. This step in the process lasted four months and included face-to-face and virtual brainstorming. A huge shout out to Post its and Google Doc comments for helping us facilitate this process. 

Prototype
Using the hundreds of ideas shared from the multiple brainstorm sessions, we then began to draft out actions across a continuum. During this phase, we continued to include our school leaders and teachers in helping to draft indicators as well as check for alignment against existing district-wide systems and lessons learned from our first four years of PL. 

In April, after 28 drafts, we shared the first iteration or prototype of the PL Readiness Continuum at our spring design studio for feedback from school leaders. We captured feedback through small group sessions as well as asked school teams to self-assess on all indicators. Feedback captured during this process was applied and by mid-May we finally had a prototype ready to be tested. 

Test
In May, we spent three days at a new (existing campus) personalized learning campus for the 2018-2019 school year with our partners at SchoolWorks testing out the tool through a School Quality Review process. During this visit, we conducted observations, interviews, document reviews, and their application for our district's Public School Choice selection process to help us determine where they fell currently on the readiness continuum. With this data, the campus team was able to prioritize a domain and build an action plan for their first six-months as a PL school. 

What we've learned so far:

• School leaders view the tool as a helpful roadmap for refining and building systems to support personalization. 
• Not PL Ready (level 0) is deflating for new schools, but critical in identifying the foundational systems and actions that need to be in place before PL begins.
• Messaging and ensuring that the tool serve as non-evaluative is crucial in building trust with new and existing PL school teams. While we're still in the early stages of implementation, it's important to still use this time for innovating vs. implementation and hard accountability.

Looking Ahead

• We're planning to use the 2018-2019 as a "test" year for the tool so that we can continue to gather feedback and refine the tool to meet the needs of our schools. During the spring of 2019, we'll revisit the design thinking process with our PL family to help refine the tool. 
• In the fall of 2018, we'll be releasing a draft of look- fors and curated resources aligned to each domain to help leaders build and refine systems to support PL. ​

download the pl readiness contiuum

Kristen Watkins
Director of Personalized Learning 
​
Kristen leads all district efforts to move towards scale, sustainability, and fidelity of implementation of PL districtwide.