Last year, Mill Creek Middle School and two sixth-grade classes at Creekside started a new learning program. While in Dexter Community Schools, changing learning programs occurs so often that it isn’t a surprise anymore, this new program was certainly vastly different from the other learning programs that Dexter had used before.
This new program is called the Personalized Learning Program and it is online based. Students have a certain number of “power focus areas” they need to complete by the end of the school year and these are completely online based. There is a blue line that marks where a student should be to complete the program by the end of the school year, and that is the only thing keeping them on track.
The second part of the PLP is a section called projects, where the teacher teaches for a little bit and the students have traditional tests in these concepts. They also have “concept checks” where they answer a couple questions online and turn these into teachers for a formative grade to see how well they are learning the topics. For the power focus areas, the students have an unlimited number of times they can retake a test to pass. In these power focus areas, there is a list of resources the students can use to learn that particular section.
For the current ninth graders at DHS, this change was unexpected, yet intriguing.
“I was like, ‘Oh that’s interesting, I wonder how this is gonna go,’ and I liked it, for like two weeks, and then I was like ‘actually, this sucks a lot,’” DHS freshman Shyanne Mannor said. “Some kids it can be super beneficial to them, and for other kids it can’t, like me. It just didn’t work, and that’s why I’m retaking algebra this year, because I didn’t pass at all.”
As it turns out, Shyanne wasn’t the only freshman who disliked the new learning program after getting to know it.“At first I thought it was cool, but then we started it and I didn’t really like it,” freshman Amber Hilberer said.
Mannor had all four of her core classes online, while Hilberer only had it in math, and both of them still disliked the program. More freshman with varied amounts of classes in the PLP said that they didn’t really enjoy it. While most freshmen don’t generally enjoy school, this reaction wasn’t totally unexpected. When asked if they really learned anything, a vast majority said they couldn’t really remember what they learned last year.
“It was useful for retaking geometry, but I wouldn’t have been able to go on to algebra II with what the PLP gave me,” freshman Maura Moller said. Most students only learned what they needed to for the test, and then forgot it after they didn’t need it anymore.
“Our main goal, they basically told us, was to get through all of these, and that’s what we did,” freshman Kesley Walter said. “We got through all of them, sometimes not even really thinking about what buttons we were pressing. We were just like, ‘I gotta get this right,’ so we got it right and then we just moved on from there. There was a lot of holes, I know, for me for math.”
The PLP can work for some people, and yet for others who have trouble focusing, it led to even more problems. “It gave many people an excuse to goof off in class instead of getting work done,” freshman Jennifer Bow said.
Many people wonder if this dislike and ineffectiveness of the PLP was just in the freshman class, since they only had one year of the PLP and it was the first year of the program. Sixth graders and eighth graders had varying opinions.
“I don’t like it because they say you can work at your own pace but really they’re still pressuring everyone to be ahead of the blue line and they don’t really give help to people who are below the blue line or behind it,” eighth grader Emily Lyons said. “I feel like they give it all to you in too big amounts kind of, like larger amounts than they should and you just can’t remember it next year.”
With these interviews, many felt sixth graders would dislike the PLP just as much, but instead of a negative response, they gave an overly positive one.
“I like the PLP because we get to pace ourselves and I don’t like to rush myself when I do things,” sixth grader Katy Steinbrecker said. “I think I have have a better understanding of the way you have to search for things through textbooks and online and find really good sources.”
This group of students had, after all, chosen to take the PLP themselves, and weren’t forced to, so they must be those who are better at learning at their own pace and in their own way “You get to learn more in a shorter time,” sixth grader Audrey Gauthier said. “It teaches you how to take notes. Her main concern about the program is the fact that while she is good at learning on her own and quickly, other students in her grade will have trouble next year switching to classes online.
“I know some people who like working in a class because it’s at a slow and steady pace and they learn the same thing for a week and then you learn something else, which is okay,” Gauthier said. “But next year, they might have a hard time adjusting to how PLP works, cause it can be very confusing.”
She also feels that sometimes it is hard to remember what she learned previously, because they are all rushing to stay ahead of the blue line - “The blue line of death,” she called it.
To truly understand how the sixth graders feel the way they do about the program, one needs to look at their schedule and see how it works. In both Gauthier and Steinbrecker’s classroom, the students do either math or science one day and the other the next. Sometimes they split the class period in two to do both science and math.
In the morning, the students have 45 minutes of PLT, or Personalized Learning Time, where they are allowed to work on anything they want to on the platform in the morning. After the students do either math or science, they move next door to Jane. Webby’s class to work on either English or social studies.
Gauthier and Steinbrecker have Denise Dutcher, a math and science teacher, first
“In this role, I’m kind of more of a coach and saying ‘let’s look at our reference guides that we have and I’m kind of guiding them towards the resources that they need to be successful with the project,”’ Dutcher said. “I’m always giving some sort of directive, and it could be, for example, ‘let's talk about your project right now and what are your goals that we’re going to be accomplishing today.’”
So why is there such a difference in opinion about the PLP throughout the different ages of students?
The main difference is the choice of the matter.
In middle school, the PLP is compulsory. In sixth grade, it’s a choice the students themselves get to make based off of their understanding of the program and their understanding of their learning style. The only choice regarding the PLP that students can make in the middle school is whether to have the PLP for math and science or for all of their classes. Students who don’t work well online, based on preliminary assessments, don’t have a choice on whether or not to take the PLP, and those who don’t move as fast when they have to do the work themselves can’t choose to have a traditional class where there is more structure than the PLP.
The common belief is if schools want to try a Personalized Learning Program, they should be able to be personalized for everyone, and therefore everyone should be able to learn in their preferred style instead of forcing all students to learn one way or another.
“I think it needed a bit more work done, maybe, on it, because it doesn’t work for some people, but it did work for others who finished it a lot earlier in the year, but some people didn’t do so well in the PLP.” freshman Maura Moller said.