Jillian hopes to be a famous writer. Joseph wants to be a basketball star. Don wonders how to jumpstart a journalism career.
High school is a time for dreaming big and hatching great plans for the "real world" after graduation. But to make those dreams and plans a reality, students must also view high school as a unique opportunity to acquire the skills and the knowledge—including self-knowledge—that can lay the groundwork for later learning and promising careers.
That's where personal learning plans come into play. Developed by each student in concert with parents, teachers, advisors, and mentors, personal learning plans encourage students to consider their course of studies in light of three key questions: Who am I? How am I doing? Where am I going?
Ideally, as high school students answer those questions—on both academic and personal levels—they develop clear goals and expectations that guide their class choices, internship or work opportunities, and career directions, says Beth Lyons, dean of curriculum at Mount Desert Island High School in Bar Harbor, Maine. Further, execution of their learning plan gives students opportunities to gain feedback on the quality of their work from the various adults who support them, and this helps them improve their school performance, even as their dreams change, she adds.
"It's totally appropriate for someone in 9th grade to say, ‘I want to play for the NBA.’ That's a totally appropriate dream," says Lyons. "The dream will evolve through four years. So as a junior—especially if he is still five-feet-ten-inches and has not made the varsity team—he may be thinking about other things."
Learner-Centered Reform
Some schools in Maine are using personal learning plans, one of the core practices outlined in the state's school reform effort, Promising Futures: A Call to Improve Learning for Maine's Secondary Students. Like many innovations in mainstream education, personal learning plans have their origins in special education, where individualized education plans played a large part in pioneering the team approach to tailoring learning goals for each student based on her specific needs. For example, Lyons adapted the McGill Action Planning System (MAPS), originally developed for persons with disabilities, so that 9th graders can take an account of their history, dreams, strengths, and talents, as well as their needs, challenges, and goals.
Students, parents, and a faculty advisor discuss the completed MAPS inventory at an annual conference in September, and this conference, Lyons notes, is considered the centerpiece of the personal learning process.
Students themselves direct the half-hour conference in which they discuss their dreams and aspirations, their strengths, and their weaknesses. Lyons recalls one boy who wanted to be a lawyer. He needed special education services for language and processing—skills he had previously dismissed before realizing, through the process of completing and discussing the MAPS inventory, they would contribute to his ultimate career goal.
The conferences also reinforce for students and parents that classwork samples can either support known strengths or act as gentle reminders that the student needs to improve skills in other areas.
With each successive conference, students accumulate work called "common assessments" in their portfolio. Common assessments address key goals for learning and skill acquisition in each subject area at each grade level. For example, common assessments in English include 9th graders critiquing a newspaper editorial to evaluate its persuasive power, 10th graders analyzing literature in a thesis paper, and 11th graders carrying out an extensive research project.
Students typically finish the common assessments by the end of junior year, aligning them to a mandated standard for graduation. However, they can redo assignments during summer school or their senior year to try to gain passing scores.
Celebrating Learning
As a culmination of their individualized learning, seniors at Poland Regional High School in Poland, Maine, complete a "senior celebration." Each student must undertake a major research project, subject to faculty approval, on an essential question in a field that interests the student. In a public presentation to school, family, and community members, seniors outline their research and findings and hold a discussion. A faculty and peer panel scores the presentation.
The main criterion for the senior celebration project is that students choose a question about which they are passionate. One student, for example, might research the serious question of how UN peacekeeping operations have changed since the Cold War, whereas another might investigate the more whimsical question of how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop. One student, in fact, did seek to answer this latter question, employing a class of 5th graders to lick the celebrated lollipops and designing a machine to do the same. The project, which the student's chemistry teacher hailed as "a model of employing the scientific method," nonetheless failed to provide the answer to the enduring candy query. Ultimately, as his roundtable advisor Bill Lundgren recalls, the student concluded that the old TV commercial was right—regarding the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, "the world may never know."
Finessing Your Plan
Because personal learning plans are such a new strategy, schools are constantly tinkering with and improving them, say school officials. At Poland the words "personal learning plan" have been unofficially banned from student discussions after the various paper forms connected to the plan became a "dreaded thing" to be filled out, says Dean of Faculty Angela Atkinson-Duina.
"We felt that students—and also many teachers—had a hard time jumping beyond [PLPs as a list of goals] to really engage in the reflective work that a personal learning plan requires," says Atkinson-Duina.
Instead, Poland sought to marry personal learning to its advisory program. Groups of students are assigned to an advisor in "roundtables" that meet daily for 30 minutes. Ideally, students meet with the same advisor and classmates through all four years of high school. Considered a teacher's "fifth class" that "requires as much preparation as any other," according to school officials, the teacher as advisor must help students use activities to focus on the guiding questions (Who am I? Where am I going? How am I doing?). Students also complete career interest inventories, arrange job shadowing opportunities, and celebrate individual accomplishments as a group.
"We feel that the activities we do in the advisory address the purposes of the PLP . . . namely, personalizing education and working with students to plan an education that fits their needs and life goals," Atkinson-Duina emphasizes.
Building Relationships
A crucial piece of the personal learning plan is the development of solid relationships with a number of adults during a student's high school career, say advocates of this learner-centered reform. "I'm not as concerned about the documentation of the plan, as I am about whether students and advisors have an authentic conversation," says Lyons.
At Mount Desert, teachers act as advisors to groups of students throughout the students' high school careers. Although advisors have monthly checkups with students—which Lyons considers the bare minimum, made unavoidable because of time constraints—she also encourages teachers to gauge a student's development and needs through more informal and impromptu conversations in the hall or the school cafeteria.
Advisors also act as advocates, encouraging students' ambitions even if parents deflate a career dream by saying, "Oh, you'll never do that!" Lyons adds. Advisors use their knowledge of the students' personalities, strengths, and learning styles to help steer them to teachers with whom they'll work well.
Nonetheless, "advisors are not guidance counselors, psychologists, or therapists—they are teachers who can work really well with kids," says Lyons. Therefore, advisors are required to refer problems requiring professional help to an appropriate guidance counselor.
English teacher Becky Leamon says that she felt useful being an advisor who could help out students and their parents without "being a teacher." One payoff came at last year's graduation of the first class of students who had experienced the PLP and advisory process through all four years of high school. A teacher for 16 years at Mount Desert, Leamon remembers that in prior years she and other teachers were typically "wedged in the back" of the auditorium, uninvolved in the proceedings.
This year, however, students insisted that their teachers be on stage as they received their diplomas.
"It was pretty amazing to be there as the students came in. The kids didn't want to just shake hands; they wanted to hug everybody," says Leamon. "We were up there because we worked together for four years—that was terrific."
