Personalization is often used in the ed-tech community to describe a student moving through a prescribed set of activities at his own pace. The only choice a student gets is what box to check on the screen and how quickly to move through the exercises. For many educators that’s not the true meaning of “personalized learning.”

Diana Laufenberg, director of Inquiry Schools and a former teacher at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia: personalization only comes when students have authentic choice over how to tackle a problem.

“We often say we want creativity and innovation – personalization – but every mechanism we use to measure it is through control and compliance,” Laufenberg said. “Those things never come together as long as that is the overriding moment.”