The Muscogee County School District has officially launched the first phase of its district-wide Personalized Learning initiative. As part of this first phase, all middle and high school students will receive Google Chromebooks to support classroom instruction. The District will provide more than 15,000 devices as part of the one-to-one (1:1) student-learning device rollout by mid-October. The device rollout marks the beginning of a multi-year plan to transform instructional practices, district-wide, in order to meet the learning needs of the modern student.

Personalized Learning is a widely-practiced approach that focuses on providing individual support and ensuring mastery based on each student’s strengths, needs, and interests. The District has been utilizing differentiated instructional approaches to address individual learning needs for students. Differentiated Instruction is an approach included within the Personalized Learning curriculum.  

According to a 2013 survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), employers seek specific skills such as the ability to work in teams, plan, organize, and prioritize work, communicate verbally, obtain and process information, make decisions, and analyze data. In order to meet the demands of the continually transforming workforce, the District will use Personalized Learning to build student agency through digital literacy and citizenship. The overall goal is for each student to understand how to develop into independent thinkers and doers with ownership of his/her learning process. This enables student voices and choices in what, how, when, and where they learn.  

Although the 1:1 student-learning device component is new, the concept of Personalized Learning is not new for the District. During the 2018-2019 school year, three elementary schools (Dorothy Height, Martin Luther King Jr., and Brewer) received funding from the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement (GOSA) to begin implementing Personalized Learning in grades two and three.  After seeing many benefits for teachers and students, those schools have expanded to grades four and five this school year. GOSA has also expanded support for Personalized Learning to J.D. Davis Elementary and Rothschild Leadership Academy.

Each school will embrace its own design to incorporate Personalized Learning while adopting District policies and best practices. All students will be required to submit documentation authorizing use, as permitted by the District, and complete an online course focused on proper device use and digital citizenship. Devices will be provided at specific times during the school day for middle school students. As high school students complete the required course, they will be allowed to use the devices under a take-home policy administered by their assigned schools.