Former English teacher innovates, earns new position

New personalized learning collaborator Andrew Easton’s fascination with personalized learning began before he even knew what the term meant. Before he came to Westside, he taught at Gardner-Edgerton high school in Gardner, Kansas.

While he was teaching the historical nonfiction unit in English 12, he found that the students were generally disengaged. He devised a plan and came up with a way the student could work on their own schedule and complete the unit how they saw fit. At first it was a slow process according to Easton, as Gardner-Edgerton didn’t have computers for every student. Over the years, the process became more clear and easier to understand. When Easton first moved to Westside he taught in a more traditional way, disregarding the personalized learning methods he had practiced in Kansas. Easton went to a conference  to learn about personalized learning and realized that he had been practicing just that back in Kansas.

“[My] new title is personalized learning collaborator,” Easton said, “That’s different from a coach’s position, [like the] instructional coaches here at the high school, because we’re dealing specifically with personalized learning.”

This past summer the three new personalized learn collaborators, Easton, Katie Sindt, and Kristen Hogan, have come up with a plan to help teachers incorporate personalized learning into their teaching methods.

So far Easton, Sindt, and Hogan have come up with five steps to get this style into classrooms all across the district.

“We [now know] knowing your learner is important,” Easton said. “[We use] data driven instruction or data informed decisions that you’re making, tech integration, flexibility which is everything from your mindset your approach to how you understand things to grouping. So how do you pair up groups, to space, there an opportunity for students to use the space, in a way that doesn’t kind of lock you into an assigned seat the whole time, and then ‘Voice and Choice’ so students to have that voice that drives the process of refining what that looks like in your classroom.”

Easton’s, Sindt’s, and Hogan’s goal for the next two years is to educate teachers about personalized learning and for them to try and incorporate it into their classes. Easton recommends to start small, by just trying to do it with one lesson, and eventually working your way up from there.