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After a brief pencil-and-paper warm-up, her second-period class divides into two groups of about a dozen students each. One group of students turns to a problem from a textbook, with clusters of students working together at desks, while members of the other group migrate to the laptop cart in the classroom's corner, take a device back to their desk, log in to their Cognitive Tutor software accounts, and tackle problems tailored to each student's learning progress. After 35 minutes or so, the groups switch tasks."It does free [teachers] up to be more of a troubleshooter than anything," said Ms. Brierley, an 18-year teaching veteran who has spent the last third of her career working with Cognitive Tutor. "It gives [students] an opportunity to be independent and work through things and sometimes work things out in their head without us telling them what they should be doing."But Cognitive Tutor has some notable nuances for a station-rotation model. Among them, both the print text and the software come from the same provider. So while some students may reach concepts in print first, and others first encounter them online, the terminology and theory behind teaching concepts remains constant.Both branches of the curriculum also stress the manipulation of numbers and variables. The text features perforated tearaway pages so students scribble in or alongside charts and equations rather than on separate scrap paper. (This also means a district implementing the curriculum has the added expense of purchasing new textbooks every year.) The software requires students to set their own bounds for graphs and tables and type key information from paragraph-length word problems into charts before answering a series of questions all based on the same scenario.

I want to share some of my current day woes about this foray into personalization.

when students had the chance to work at their own pace, this actually translated to students working slower than I had hoped for.

I was rudely awakened to the fact that “at your own pace” might mean that students’ timelines and my own timeline are not necessarily in sync. I had designed the experience around students perhaps working more quickly (and thus the advanced and optional stages), but why would a student challenge themselves towards the “advanced and optional” stages if they had the chance to work slower and do less?

One danger is that grade-focused teaching corrodes the very meaning of learning. The purpose of learning becomes merely the achievement of grades. Not the mastery of the material. Not finding innovative and imaginative solutions to tough problems. Not joining with fellow students to run with an idea and see how much each can learn from the others. It becomes instead what former Harvard dean Harry Lewis calls "an empty game of score maximization." It makes the work seem pointless.

A student out to maximize her grade point average is tempted to choose the easiest courses, those with the least challenge and work, or those with the "easy-grader" professors.

The students in the bottom half of the class--students whose learning we want to encourage--know that the odds of high grades and high rankings are stacked against them. If we corrupt students' souls by convincing them that the main motive for learning are high grades and honors, we end up de-motivating, and de-moralizing, those students who have little chance for the top rankings.