Yesterday, I wrote about the idea of individualized teacher education and the problems with its coming up against standards of assessment that lead to certification. This morning, by coincidence, I read through a book on how administrators and school leaders can harness technology for the engagement and achievement of their learners. The thought occurred to me that in our programs of Teacher Education and in standards being applied to programs of teacher education, we are increasingly singing the song of differentiation. We know all too well that the secret to learning is targeting learning to the needs and abilities of the students. So, logically, as I thought about what I was reading, I realized that no two adults come to us from the same place to becoe teachers. The literature reinforces that teacher professional growth is very different for each educator and that the journey from novice to expert varies from one learner to the next. That being said, the book I am referring to talked about using technology to individualize classroom learning and we need now, I am arguing, to think of that same classroom learning as applying to teacher education classrooms as well. Implied in all of this is maximizing the use of technology to enable different students to take different tracks as they take their journey to being certified. This might include online learning, social networking messaging, video teleconferencing, YouTube postings, discussion threads and so forth. Once we abandon the idea of a fixed classroom of large groups of students analyzing the same information, anything is possible. So classroom individualized learning then extends to professional classrooms as well. Now that I think of it, how is this different from visiting some student teachers in classrooms multiple times and others only once in a session. The key to all of this is that all stakeholders have to be on the same page and agree in advance to the goals and the descriptors of the journey. Now there is the rub.
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