Q&A with Rebecca Wolfe, personalized learning’s biggest advocate

By Nick Chiles
July 30, 2015

What would schools look like if they were designed around the needs of students?

That’s the question that drives the work of Rebecca Wolfe, director of the Massachusetts-based Students at the Center project, part of the nonprofit Jobs For the Future.

Called “personalized learning,” the idea sounds simple: Let the students dictate the direction and pace of instruction. Its adherents claim that not only will student outcomes improve, but point to research that shows it works particularly well for students of color. However, convincing the many entrenched interests that run school bureaucracies to give in to such a radical change can be a challenge.

Q: One of the tenets of Students at the Center is that each student must be provided with the scaffolding and differentiated support needed to keep progressing at a pace that allows the student to reach college, career, and civic outcomes, even when unequal resources are required to achieve a more equitable result. Do you think the U.S. believes in the last part of that statement, or is there still great resistance to it?

A: I tend to be an eternal optimist when it comes to my work in education and I think that there are more people and systems and policy makers ready to concede that statement and agree with that statement than there ever have been before. Now that’s not to say it’s widespread and not to say that if you took a poll or asked somebody running for president right now that it’s a popular view, but I think there is more movement in that direction and more evidence that that’s what’s needed than ever before.

This blog is available in full on The Hechinger Report, where it was originally published.
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