Navigating the Path to Personalized Education

Edmunds Middle School teacher Jim Monahan uses an interactive whiteboard to help a student solve a math problem while other students work at their own pace on other assignments.

—Rajan Chawla for Education Week

A Vermont initiative to improve learning in middle schools is working through the challenges of using the latest digital tools and different teaching approaches

By Kevin Bushweller

In a classroom on the third floor of a 110-year-old faded beige-brick building, 20 middle schoolers of varying sizes and attitudes flip open their black HP laptops for an interactive lesson on the Declaration of Independence.

The students at Edmunds Middle School are crafting and revising poems about how they would have felt the day after the declaration was signed, but with a personal twist: Each student has taken on the persona of a patriot, loyalist, or moderate. Teacher Brent Truchon, a lanyard dangling around his neck with the attached keys and school ID badge tucked in the pocket of his red button-down shirt, moves constantly around the room, kneeling next to students and their laptops to give one-on-one attention where needed, before stepping to the front of the class to rally them all to put more imagery into their poems.

Then Truchon moves to a SMART Board, where he uses his finger to scroll and clicks on links to show students how to use a Web 2.0 writing tool to post their poems online for others to read. He explains how the students should read and react to classmates’ poems, and how they, in turn, should react to critiques of their own poems. “You can agree or disagree,” he says, urging them to...