Maintaining an ongoing communication between students and the advisors, teachers, parents, and mentors who give them feedback is critical to the success of personal learning plans. Experts say technology may offer one option for overcoming the limits of monthly sessions, which can involve an advisor holding conferences with as many as a dozen students in 40 minutes.
David Gibson, vice president for research and development for the National Institute for Community Innovations in Montpelier, Vt., works on a team that is piloting the Web-based "Personal Learning Plan" in K–12 schools as well as in preservice teacher education programs and local education agencies.
Using Web technology, the Personal Learning Plan site can link ongoing student work to standards—which are also housed online—making assessment of standards-based evidence easier. Students can submit work to offer evidence of mastery of certain subject area standards and skills and solicit feedback, via an e-mail alert, from a variety of advisors. Key academic advisors, parents, peers, and internship mentors can post their comments directly through the Web.
"Originally, personal learning plans were a paper-based face-to-face process, but you could never hold enough advisor meetings to make the project work," says Gibson, who has conducted extensive research on personal learning plans. "The load began to be unbearable," he adds, recalling the paper trail needed to document meetings with students, parents, teachers, and mentors for off-campus or independent work experiences, not to mention signoffs for semester assessments and interim meetings.
When working on assignments using the online Personal Learning Plan, the student controls the planning and action as well as access to the work, so they have a kind of private "studio space," notes Gibson. A student can invite advisors to critique works in progress in what is essentially a virtual "advising room," and then when finished, share them publicly with anyone, he adds.
Students can limit the e-mail notifications to relevant advisors for a particular project or create various tiers of external and internal advisors. "If a student wants to invite her grandmother or other relatives to give feedback, that's fine," says Gibson, emphasizing that technology makes possible the easy widening of a student's circle of advisors.