At the risk of speaking in opposition to a newly emerging, and predictably popular, educational trend, I can tell you that Island Pacific School will not be re-engineering itself to deliver personalized learning to its students anytime soon.
What Island Pacific School will do is continue to take account of different learning styles in its teaching and will continue to create powerful opportunities - like the school's Masterworks program - for students to pursue, in depth, topics of individual interest. We will not tailor-make individual curriculum for each and every student based on apparent interests and desires.
We believe there are certain things that students need to know, certain things they need to be able to do, and certain attitudes they need to acquire if they are going to gain a genuine education. We believe that it is an abdication of our responsibility as educators to pretend otherwise.
If personalized learning means an individual curriculum for each and every student, - with no shared exploration of, for example, the great conversations of human inquiry - then students and families will need to look elsewhere for this version of the purpose of schools. Education, for us, is about so much more than simply responding to personal interests; it is about inspiring students to discover whole oceans of knowledge and understanding about which they are necessarily unaware.
