In February’s newsletter I championed a more holistic approach to the field of prevention that addresses the sources of risk behavior. In this second installment I advocate personalization over standardization of educational approaches.

Last week I spoke with the director of a youth organization I’ve been working with for several years. Her group is transitioning from a standardized education model to a more personalized one. The director described the initial training for the original program implementation. “We were basically trained to deliver a script,” she told me. Her observation succinctly captured a core tenet of the standardized approach. Hatched in the industrial revolution to promote a “consistent product” (I grieve to think that we would deign to refer to humans and their ideas as “product”), this relic prevails today. We have come to value standards and fidelity to such an extreme that we have marginalized the very elements that can promote behavior change. Standardized educational methods, while they may be earnest in their desire for bringing about positive change, consume precious resources and limit educational effectiveness and efficiency. To recoup these losses and to bring greater benefit to the youth we serve, I believe we must transition from standardized education to a more personalized model. Personalized education does not mean that we deliver a different program to every student. It means we retool our methods to provide every student with the requisite freedom, trust, and safety to make the education his or her own.

Consider the following: You deliver a “Stop Smoking” message to a group of teens and survey them afterward. You’re encouraged by the test results. In each of the key areas students demonstrate positive responses. Nearly all of the students, for example, agree smoking is not in their best interest. You then sit down with the class and pose one final question, “Can you tell me what this message of not smoking means to you?” Thirty students equals 30 unique meanings—and it is at the level of meaning that we must operate if we are to make a positive difference. It’s all too feasible that we could find consistency among student recall that would make the industrialist proud. The questions on the survey only help you measure how well you do in standardized terms. But accurate recall does not make for better decisions, for the simple reason that a student’s ability to recall data has little to do with whether the data has any meaning—and therefore any power. Behavior change is preceded by a process wherein meaningless content becomes meaningful. Personalized education encourages students to partake in this process.

One simple step you can take toward helping students make your message their own is to pose these questions that pertain to meaning during your presentation:

What do you think about this message? How do you relate to this message? How might this message affect your life? If this message seems irrelevant, please, by all means tell me in detail how this seems irrelevant.

Note the freedom and multiple points of entry these questions offer students.

Please don’t misunderstand me: Prevention education should have standards for content. Standards help provide consistency and program fidelity, components that are essential at a number of levels, not the least of which are assessment and evaluation. So while content is something we should define in clear terms, the process of learning–in order to be meaning-filled and potent–should encourage exploration and student process. The message has to progress from being ours to being owned by the students; from being pertinent from our perspective, to becoming a transformative element in how students see themselves and the world. Only when students personalize our message can we have any confidence that our work is effective. To ensure the most promising outcomes possible we must retool our training and implementation.

I was presenting on this topic a couple weeks ago in Florida when one participant noted what I believe is the primary reason we shy away from personalizing education, no matter how much good we think this will bring to students: “It feels really vulnerable,” she said. She got it. More than our fear of getting in trouble for not fulfilling standards, there is a deeper fear, multifaceted, that sabotages our efforts. I suspect, based on my own experience, it’s one of the most powerful fears–fear of the unknown. We wonder, “If I give students freedom, what might they say or do?” This is one reason we’re drawn to standardized education. In it we discover safety and control. It provides a Trojan horse within which we can house our fears. We do well to recognize this, enter classrooms anyway, and open the horse. An honest assessment of our fears is a bold first step that will help us be more effective.

Each of us hopes that our work in prevention education will help youth surmount substantial obstacles. We address this goal in prevention education best not by telling students about something, but instead helping them come to know our message in a personal way. Only then can the power and richness of this message help create the positive change we all seek.

Tags: educational reform, personalized education, prevention education

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