This ASCD Study Guide is designed to enhance your understanding and application of the information contained in Personalizing the High School Experience for Each Student, an ASCD book written by Joseph DiMartino and John H. Clarke and published in April 2008. The activities in this study guide have been designed to help school improvement teams explore ways to engage all students in learning. Although any individual could complete the activities, their real value will be to spark dialogue among high school faculty and staff who are working to improve student performance. Methods such as these have been used by groups of teacher leaders, participants in school-based graduate courses, and task teams working in tandem to focus, organize, plan, lead or assess a whole school personalization initiative. Including students in team exploration can vastly expand a team's access to useful results. Unlike most Action Research formats, these suggestions are not designed to produce information that would be valid and reliable beyond the school community itself. Like the problem-based or project-based learning described in Chapter 4, the activities can send different team members off in different directions to gather information that they then present to their whole team. In conversation about information from multiple sources, members of a school community can arrive at consensus about how problems happen in their school, and how different kinds of solution can personalize learning for each student. General guides for personalizing the high school experience can be found at http://knowledgeloom.org/resources.jsp?location=6&tool=-1&bpinterid=1095&spotlightid=1095. You can download team guides on Personalization, Advising and PLP development, with many other resources, from that site.

Chapter 1: A Failure to Adapt

1. What is your problem situation? How do you as a school district or faculty describe it? What data have you used to define your problem?
2. How does your community at large perceive student achievement? Is their problem situation the same as the school community?
3. What 'stories' do your students tell about the prominent events in their high school experience?

Chapter 2: Advising

1. What is missing at your school that an advisory could address?
2. What steps could be taken to implement an advisory program at your school?
   1. Organizationally – Who will be advisors? How much advising time is needed to meet your purpose? Where will they meet? How will advisees be grouped?
   2. Content – Will the content be the same across all advisory groups? Will advisors have the option to vary content as they see fit? If the purpose is academic, will there be content around portfolios of student work available?
   3. Assessment – Will students earn credit? How will you know how to improve the advisory program? How can you help advisors to continuously improve?
   4. Leadership – How will you get all stakeholders to embrace the value of the advisory program? What professional development will be offered to insure smooth implementation?
3. What best practices do you already have in place that we can build on?

Chapter 3: Personal Learning Plans

1. What's missing at your school that personal learning plans could address?
2. Do you know your students' history, hopes, dreams, fears, and goals?
3. How can you learn these things about your students?
4. How can you use these things to improve student performance?

Chapter 4: Personalized Teaching

1. Does your school ask students to complete academic assignments that integrate content acquisition and skills development with "real challenges" in the larger world?
2. Are all students required to "go public" with their work, on parent's night (with student presentations), at arts fairs or science fairs, on Websites, on local TV stations, or school board meetings?
3. Are teachers provided with the opportunity to present their work design to the whole school community in the same variety of ways as they would if they traveled to a professional conference in their subject area?
4. Teachers who are designing and field testing project-based learning can benefit from faculty meetings at which they present their assignments for critique, guided by common questions:
   1. How does this project reflect adult challenges?
   2. Will the project engage all students?
   3. How well does it integrate disciplinary content and skills?
   4. How compelling is the challenge for each student?

Chapter 5: Community-Based Learning

1. What is missing at your school that community-based learning can address?
2. Who are the community members you could tap into to support community-based learning?
3. How can you introduce place-based education, service learning, or work-based learning in your school?
4. Can you identify specific adaptations to potential 'problems' presented that meet the needs of your school?

Chapter 6: Personalized Assessment

1. Who are the 'Mauricios' in your school? How do you identify them? Who is responsible for them?
2. How do you assess your students? Is there a common practice used? How effective is your current practice?
3. Do any kinds of personalized assessments already occur in your school? How can you build on things you are already doing?
4. How can you involve parents in personalized assessments?

Chapter 7: Personalizing School Systems

1. What steps can you take over the next three years to develop new programs that personalize learning? Who will you include in your planning? What will their role be? Who will hold you accountable?
2. How will you implement systemic changes to increase personalization?

Personalizing the High School Experience for Each Student was written by Joseph DiMartino and John H. Clarke. This 100-page, 7" x 9" book (Stock # 107054; ISBN-13: 978-1-4166-0647-5) is available from ASCD for $21.95 (ASCD member) or $27.95 (nonmember). Copyright © 2008 by ASCD. To order a copy, call ASCD at 1-800-933-2723 (in Virginia 1-703-578-9600) and press 2 for the Service Center. Or buy the book from ASCD's Online Store.