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The Every Student Succeeds Act supports personalized learning (PL) to close achievement gaps of diverse K-12 learners in the United States. Implementing PL into a classroom entails a paradigm change of the educational system. However, it is demanding to transform traditional practice into a personalized one under the pressure of the annual standardized testing while it is unclear which PL approaches are more likely to result in better academic outcomes than others. Using national survey data of ELA teachers in identified learner-centered schools, this study compared high and low-performing learner-centered schools (determined by their standardized test results) in terms of their use of five PL features (personalized learning plan, competency-based student progress, criterion-referenced assessment, project- or problem-based learning, and multi-year mentoring) and their use of technology for the four functions of planning, learning, assessment, and recordkeeping. Generally, teachers in high-performing schools implemented PL more thoroughly and utilized technology for more functions than those in low-performing schools. Teachers in high-performing schools more frequently considered career goals when creating personal learning plans, shared the project outcomes with the community, and assessed non-academic outcomes. They stayed longer with the same students and developed close relationships with more students. Also, they more frequently used technology for sharing resources and reported having a more powerful technology system than those in low-performing schools. This study informs educators, administrators, and researchers of which PL approaches and technology uses are more likely to result in better academic outcomes measured by standardized assessments.

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As a way to support teachers’ professional development activities and build communities of practice for teachers, education researchers and practitioners have put considerable effort into building an online learning community for K–12 teachers to create a venue to facilitate teachers’ joint knowledge construction. However, a substantial number of such online communities have failed due to lack of participation of members. Therefore, it is critical to understand how to design a sustainable community that fulfills members’ needs and elicits active participation of members. In this literature review, we adopted a sociological framework to investigate how to create a sustainable online community. This framework suggests that the sustainability of a community comes from individual members’ three types of commitments: instrumental, affective, and moral commitments. Such commitments are results of members’ cognitive, cathectic, and evaluative processes and lead to membership retainment, cohesive relationships, and socially regulated participation. Using this framework, we conducted a systematic literature review on online teacher community articles published from 1990 to 2018. Our findings provide insights on factors associated with teacher members’ instrumental, affective, and moral commitment to an online community. Based on these findings, we further provide design suggestions to build a sustainable community for teachers.

This article examines practical implications of the work by Bennett et al. (Educational Technology Research and Development 65( 1):125-145, 2017) entitled, "The process of designing for learning: Understanding university teachers' design work". It addressed the knowledge gap of design practices of university faculty by conducting an extensive qualitative study with 30 interviewees. Three design practices reported that are incremental and iterative. Understanding these common design practices is critical to effectively and efficiently support faculty with transferring their instruction online when many institutions face the challenge of supporting a large number of inexperienced faculty with transferring instructions online. Based on the findings, three stages of support can be devised for before, during, and after sessions. Given the non-systematic cyclic design process of the teachers, need-based, just-in-time support and resources may be helpful. Although the reported process is not specifically for online learning design, the findings may contribute to establishing best practices for supporting faculty's online learning design.

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