As teachers, we must seek to move beyond traditional, prescriptive classrooms and instead, utilize tools and techniques that meet students where they are at right now—tools and techniques that make learning accessible, meaningful, and fun.

This article also appeared on Gettingsmart.com

Not too long ago, my four boys went outside, disappeared for a couple of hours, and then returned home in a heated debate over some mysterious eggs that they had discovered at the edge of a pond located a short distance from our house.  Despite the fact that our home lies nearly 1,000 miles inland, the youngest boy insisted that that the eggs were from a crocodile.  His hope was to get a hold of a few hatchlings, raise them to full maturity, and train them to keep intruders out of our yard.    While his older brothers both scoffed at the ‘croc theory,’ they could not come to an agreement about what type of eggs they had  actually found.  One of them insisted that they had been left by a turtle, but the oldest brother argued vehemently that turtles usually buried their eggs…so it was more likely that a snake or a bird was the culprit.

For days they sought to uncover everything they could about various animals in the area.  They photographed the eggs, showed them to everyone they knew, debated, and—in their own words—are now looking for an ‘egg-spert’ to settle it once and for all.  The ‘egg incident,’ as my wife and I now refer to it, reminded us both of the impassioned, deep learning that often transpires when young people are permitted to explore their own interests on their own terms.  But this event has also caused me to reflect on the need to do something similar in the classroom—to transform traditional learning practices into more customized learning experiences where students are encouraged to employ choice and self-regulation in their own studies.

By definition, customized learning seeks to gear classroom content, instruction, and other aspects of learning towards individual students, their unique interests, and past learning experiences (Hattie, 2009).  As of late, a multitude of research findings have underscored the importance of learning activities that encourage student control over the learning process (Ewen, & Topping, 2012; McLoughlin & Lee, 2010).  While student characteristics such as learning styles have long been recognized as factors that may affect learning (Coffield, Moseley, Hall, & Ecclestone, 2004; Felder & Silverman, 1988; Keefe, 1979), the use of other individual differences between students to guide instruction is largely still viewed as an “innovation” in education (Raman & Nedungadi, 2012).  According to Horizon Report (2011), the real potential of a personalized approach to learning lies in teachers’ exploration of ways to customize curriculum, instruction, and even assessment in ways that differ from person to person, and student to student.

It is no small coincidence that some of the most popular tools amongst young people outside of school, such as video games, are successful largely due to their ability to extend control and choice to learners through customization of play (Chandler, 2013). In the world of X-boxes and Play Stations, customization means that players are able to adjust the game to accommodate their own interests, style, and objectives. Gee (2007) observed that classrooms adopting this principle would allow students to discover their favored learning styles and to try new ones without fear. In the act of customizing their own learning, students would learn a good deal about their own thinking, reflection, and ways of solving problems.

I recently came across a free teaching tool called