Tech's Favorite School Faces Its Biggest Test: the Real World

On lengths of yarn stretched between chairs, sixth-grade math students were placing small yellow squares of paper, making number lines--including everything from fractions to negative decimals--in a classroom at Walsh Middle School. Their teacher, Michele O'Connor, had assigned the number lines in previous years, but this year was different. She, personally, hadn't spent much time leading students through practice problems or introducing the basic math concepts they would use in the project. That had largely been relegated to online math lessons, part of separate periods of learning time when students were free to work through computer-based lessons in any subject they chose, at their own pace. The change at Walsh, located in Framingham, Massachusetts, is part of a nationwide pilot program, one that could indicate just how deeply and how quickly the personalized-learning trend will penetrate the average classroom. Indeed, despite the buzz around personalized learning, there's no simple recipe for success, and the common ingredients -- such as adaptive-learning technology and student control over learning -- can backfire if poorly implemented. A looming question is whether personalized learning that works in, say, a tight-knit, mission-driven charter school can be reliably translated into traditional district schools with many more students, less flexible schedules, keener standardized-test worries and cultures steeped in established ways of teaching and learning.