Arlington Central School District Commits to Personalizing Learning for All Students

The Arlington Central School District, located in LaGrangeville, NY, is a member of the American Association of School Administrator's Learning 2025 Network along with approximately 125 other school districts from across the country.  Learning 2025 is a student-centered, equity-focused, future-driven collaborative.  Its central premise is that leaders, teachers and students must play an active role in redesigning systems, reengineering instruction, and co-authoring the learning journey.

Last year the District began working with Eric Sheninger to deepen its understanding of how to leverage technology to personalize learning for all students.  Sheninger's concept of personalized learning emphasizes the importance of student voice and choice and path, pace, and place in the learning process.  

Throughout the school year, administrators and teachers worked together to identify how the Learning 2025 Core Redesign Components could support Arlington's efforts to prepare students for success in life.  Our team studied the relationship between the work in Arlington and the Learning 2025 Framework.  For example, the equity work in the district clearly aligned with the concept of No Learning Marginalized, and the priority to strengthen Multi-Tiered Systems of Support for students clearly aligned with the whole child focus on Social, Emotional, & Cognitive Growth.  However, as we continued to refine our goals and professional learning priorities, it became apparent to us that the essential concept driving each element of the model and all of the instructional priorities in Arlington is the need to personalize learning for all students.

At its August retreat, principals and central office administrators built off their work with Sheninger and studied a variety of additional resources on personalized learning, including Ed Elements' The Core Four of Personalized Learning (Targeted Instruction, Collaboration & Creativity, Flexible Path & Place, and Reflection & Goal Setting), to develop a common understanding of personalized learning in Arlington that can be cultivated and consistently communicated over time.  

Arlington High School's nickname is the Admirals.  The team agreed that personalized learning is the "anchor" for all of our work.  It determined that it would attach the the organizational definition and corresponding principles it develops to the visual of an anchor to create a powerful symbol.  The visual and concepts are still very much in development, but my assistant superintendent, Dr. Daisy Rodriguez, and her instructional team are off to a great start synthesizing the ideas of the administrative team.  The Arlington Version 1.0 definition of personalized learning is as follows:  "Personalized Learning is the educational approach that aligns schools, classrooms, and instruction to the individual needs of students to empower them to be self-directed, lifelong learners, that willingly contribute to their communities."

It took a lot of hard work by a lot of people to get to the point that we are at, and there is a great deal of work ahead.  No doubt we will learn together and our approach to personalized learning will evolve.  With that being said, I am very proud of my team.  Arlington is in a great place to launch the 2022-23 school year.