How to Make Classroom Learning Personal and Meaningful for Every Student

"Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid."

I believe Albert Einstein said this, but it's been debated. This quote has also been criticized for a few reasons, one being that by calling everyone a genius, especially children, that they may believe they don't have to work hard in life. I don't really see it that way. 

​What it means to me is that when it comes to learning, not all children are the same and shouldn't be treated as such.

What does it mean to make learning personal?

Every student walks into your classroom each day with a unique set of challenges, energy levels, reading and writing abilities, personal traumas, learning styles, etc.

Ignoring these unique differences, in my opinion, is dangerous, putting learners at risk of checking out due to apathy, boredom, confusion, frustration, and loss of a love for learning. 

Making learning personal means facilitating learning experiences that are designed around the unique interests, backgrounds, skill levels, goals, strengths, weaknesses, personalities, and so on of EACH INDIVIDUAL student.

The teacher/facilitator builds a relationship with every learner and enhances learning by creating an environment that reflects and celebrates the uniqueness of every child.  Yes, this includes high school students. 

So how do you make learning personal for 30 middle or high schoolers? The same way you would make learning personal for 1 student; by building relationships with your students and learning experiences to match.

I recommend moving toward a student-directed, teacher-facilitated model with experiential learning activities. Here's how:

How to Make Learning Personal in a High School Classroom

​1) Build Meaningful Relationships With Your Students: 
​

• Personal Learning Plans: Get to know your students with personal learning plans (PLP). Students document their interests, personality types, goals, dreams, aspirations, and more. A personal learning plan is always evolving as students themselves evolve, so revisit personal learning plans with your students often. 
  • Save time by grabbing a ready-made, editable, Google Slides personal learning plan template. Assign a copy to each student to manage and share with you throughout the year. 

• Surveys: One way to get to know students is by having them develop a personality profile with informal surveys such as interest surveys (​free interest survey), multiple intelligences, Myers Briggs, learning styles, the color wheel, career surveys (for older students), etc. All of these are included in my PLP resource. Here's the thing with these surveys. NO, these surveys are not meant to put students in a box or define them to such a degree that they MUST revolve their learning plans around survey results. They are, however, helpful intrapersonal awareness tools. 
• Build a Strong Classroom Culture: Create a strong community within your classroom, one of kindness and trust, not just between students, but between you and your students. 
• Talk to Your Students: Try your hand at some good old fashion conversation. Dialogue with learners doesn't have to be, and shouldn't be, limited to PLP meetings, going over interest surveys, doing assessments together, etc. Have real, organic, casual chats with students to learn more about their individual needs and interests. 
• Help Learners Build Interpersonal Awareness: Making learning personal can't all be on you. It can be challenging to make learning personal when you have students that "have no interests" or simply don't know who they are or what they want.  Help them get to know themselves and develop a healthy self-concept. Try these resources to help guide the experiences.
  •  Personal Identity PBL Bundle
  •  Get-to-Know-You PBL Bundle.​

2) Organize Learning Experiences That Are Personal In Nature:

Once you really know your students, you can make learning personal by organizing and facilitating learning activities that give students voice and choice; student-directed learning in other words.

Student-led project-based-learning is a wonderful tool for making learning personal because students design their own experiences.

I love project-based learning, and would start with that if you are trying to personalize your high school curriculum. But it is not the only way. You can make any learning experience personalized as long as students are given some autonomy and that the experience is designed with the child in mind.

Try some of these learning activities. You do not need the resources. The resources are intended to help guide beginners and save those that are not beginners time, which is hot commodity! 

• Check out my guided PBL resources that follow specific themes.
• PLP + PBL Tool Kit Bundle for a full personalized PBL experience.​
• Student-Directed Learning Tool Kits Bundle

3. Personalize Assessments and Evaluations

Yep, you read that correctly. Testing is not personalized. That is not to say you should never give a test to check for understanding, but if you're going to personalize learning experiences, you should personalize assessments and evaluations as well. It just makes sense. 

• Comprehensive Assessment Portfolio - My students build and manage their own assessment portfolios, meaning, they add all of their learning outcomes from every learning experience into one document over the course of a session. They might add their rubric scores, written reflections, photographic evidence of their final products, etc. Click here to grab a free copy for your students.  It's a great way to showcase learning.
• ​​​Student-Generated Rubrics - Have students create their own rubrics, or at a minimum, leave some extra rows for students to add their own evaluation criteria. 

Transitioning from a didactic approach to a more student-led approach won't be an easy. Change is hard.  But by cutting down on lecture and lesson planning, you free up time to build relationships with students, create learning plans, and facilitate learning activities that best suit the interests, needs, and goals of each child. 

Make learning personal!

Thanks for stopping by. If you ever decide to make learning personal in your classroom through student-directed learning, I'd love to hear from you. How did it go? What have been some challenges? What has gone well? Let me know in the comments!

Online Courses:

Resources:

Blog Posts:

​Did you know there is an experiential learning Facebook group? Check that out - Experiential Learning Community for K12 Teachers - and join in the discussion about experiential learning ideas such as real world learning in the classroom.
​
Let's get social!

Follow Experiential Learning Depot on Pinterest, Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram for more on experiential education.​