Westside Personalized: A Personalized Learning Podcast

In this episode, Crystal shares how she has leveraged flexible seating to further enhance the positive classroom climate and rapport she has with her learners. Additionally, the conversation also delves into the innovative practices Crystal has used to support her students' ability to set measurable academic goals, pursue those goals,... Read More

Personalized physics! Ben Powers has transformed his classroom, his lessons, and his class culture in his physics courses at Westside High School to adopt a personalized approach that empowers learners with opportunities to design their own labs, to experiment with different materials, and to both metacognitively and creatively engage in the... Read More

Mikayla's first foray into gamification came in the form of her short story unit Ready Reader One, where she built a series of "worlds" that were each created around the premise of one of the five short stories her learners had the opportunity to read and explore. In this episode,... Read More

In this episode, Sarah and I discuss the Rockbrook third grade's vision for personalizing their learners' experience in addressing their approach to teaching spelling. Additionally, Sarah also breaks down flexible seating in her classroom, sharing the expectations she has set for her learners and how learners use the space intentionally... Read More

Sarah Schoenrock is a high energy educator who loves to challenge herself creatively, which has led to her trying a variety of new things this year in her classroom. In this episode, Sarah reflects on her forays into implementing personalized practices and also game elements into her instructional repertoire this... Read More

In this episode, Lance shares how he personalized an assignment that asked learners to explore the lives and efforts of seven social reformers from the progressive era. That personalized assignment afforded learners choice in selecting which reformer's life to delve deeper into, and then students created a modern social media... Read More

In this episode, Molly and I discuss a personalized learning unit that she and educator Melissa Inmon designed for their AP Composition course at Westside High School. The personalized practices in this learning experience were rich as students had academic choices to make in the content they engaged, in the... Read More

Join Alli Pontious and I in this episode as we discuss the interactive choice chart we built using Google Slides that helped to provide a personalized learning experience for our district's primary learners. This choice board offers learners the opportunity to complete five assignments (driven by indicators) in the order... Read More

In this episode, Tricia and I reflect on our experiences as personalized learning collaborators/coaches in our respective districts. Our respective districts, Westside and Edina, are sister-schools that are both invested in scaling up personalized learning district-wide, and our ongoing support of one another's efforts and our continued communication have been a... Read More

In this episode, Lacey Peters shares the personalized model she has built for the three swimming courses she leads. Lacey uses iPads to film her students as they are perfecting their swimming techniques, and through the use of the Hudl program, Lacey and her swimmers collaborate on stroke analysis and... Read More

Kevin shares first his personalized classroom model as he has built it out in his secondary math class, and in the back half of the episode, Kevin delves into the design process, implementation, and also provides his reflections on his first experience with gamifying a personalized learning unit. Listeners, key... Read More

In this episode, Paul and I discuss the practice of differentiating instructional delivery methods and the process by which Paul facilitated those various options in order to meet learners through the medium from which they learn best. Paul shares how he was first exposed to this idea as a part of our... Read More

Four years ago, Lance was a part of our district's first personalized learning cohort, and so in this episode, Lance shares from his wealth of experiences with incorporating personalized learning strategies into his classroom. Specifically, Lance breaks down how his first steps to implementing greater voice and choice options for... Read More

What is a PLP and how can it support learning and personalized practices in the classroom? This podcast is a fun deep dive detailing Mikayla's doctoral work on the topic of PLP development and implementation, and as she shares her expertise on this topic, we also discuss our PLP Team's... Read More

For our district elementary teachers, math time is often the launching point for developing personalized practices in the classroom. In this podcast, Hillside 4th-grade teacher Erica Riffner broadens our scope as she shares her experiences with personalized learning in math, reading, writing, and in a variety of other aspects of... Read More

In this episode, I sit down with WMS English teacher John Horton and discuss the process by which the 8th-grade English team develops their semester-long, student-driven inquiry project. The team supports learners as each individual student begins by developing an authentic question that they then research and discuss until it evolves into... Read More

Richard Christie, 6th-grade educator at Prairie Lane Elementary, attended our PL training day and took away his own creative vision for implementing flexible learning spaces into his classroom. In this episode, Mr. Christie shares his flexible space model and more importantly notes the academic benefits that came along with this... Read More

For this episode, I interviewed the editors of multiple WHS journalism publications with two goals in mind. The first goal was to share the story of how one student took on the sole responsibility of creating an entirely new website for our high school journalism program. The second goal was... Read More

If you’re interested in games in education, if you’re interested in personalization, if you’re interested in the social studies discipline, — I mean — if you appreciate innovative approaches to education on any level at all, you’re going to love this episode! Join educator Jon Preister and I as we... Read More

This episode walks listeners through the entire process, from design to implementation to after unit reflection, of the development of this immigration unit with educator Mel Rice. Her vision of personalizing the learning experience by affording her students a variety of choices to allow them to explore the unit content... Read More