Individualize learning in schools for success

Attempts to empower student learning, using results of standardized testing, will prove futile to providing individualized learning for all students. Parents feel honored when their children achieve “best in their class” but each student learns at a different pace. Everyone must help create the expectation that all students will learn how to discover and fully develop their individual talents.

“Schools Cannot Do It Alone,” a book by Jamie Vollmer, tells of his lessons learned as he struggled with his personal understanding of many challenges facing public education. He was surprised to learn that public education was originally designed to achieve a narrow range of specific objectives that now conflict with the need to provide individualized learning for all students.

Vollmer defines “nostesia” as a combination of nostalgia and amnesia to describe our memories of public education. Our individual memories can become “community memories,” which delay consensus of how to transform education for individualized learning. The book explains how learning outcomes can be improved through community understanding, trust and permission to make transformational changes and through community support to continually improve learning opportunities for all students. Read an excerpt of the book at www.jamievollmer.com/book.html.

Phillip Owen

Monticello