How Do They Do It? Describing Nontraditional Designs for Creating and Carrying Out Personalized Plans for Learning in Three High Schools

Elizabeth Brott Beese, Purdue University

Abstract

There is a long history of calls to “personalize” education – (by which will be meant, in this study, to adaptively generate goals and plans for individual students, based on various kinds of information about those students). Calls for such personalization have perhaps increased with the rise of personalizing information technologies. However, planning and managing a schools’ worth of personalized learning plans is a demanding, novel task. As many scholars have pointed out, it is a task which requires changes to the very design of the school organization itself. Despite recognition of the need for innovative designs to support personalized education, there is little concrete design guidance for would-be designers of personalized educational programs. Indeed, the literature lacks detailed, descriptive examples of extant functioning designs in personalizing schools—much less any guidance about which types of designs work better than others. This qualitative multiple-case study investigates three high schools, each having several nontraditional processes and systems for creating and carrying out personalized plans for learning. With a conceptual framework informed by Sharp and McDermott’s concept of an organizational process, and Alter’s taxonomy of entities in organizational “work systems,” this study attempts to discover and describe patterns in nontraditional organizational designs in three American public high schools. These descriptions aim, ultimately, at establishing a basis for future productive comparison among such designs for personalizing education.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Watson, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Educational leadership|Educational administration|Educational technology

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