PERSONAL LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Personal Learning Objectives

Personal Learning Objectives

Introduction

I met Joe Claprood at a conference on competency-based assessment in New Hampshire. I sat next to Joe at a session, waiting to hear Steve Jubb, the executive director of the Bay Area Coalition of Equitable Schools, describe how experiential learning was developing in some high schools in the San Francisco area (Evetts, 2003). At that time, Joe was a junior at the Metropolitan Career and Technical High School in Providence, Rhode Island, called the Met. The Met is an innovative high school that has taken experiential learning to an extreme rarely matched by any other high school in the country. Students at the Met get all their learning through internships and projects that are guided by personal learning plans (PLPs). The results for Met students have been documented elsewhere, and they are positive. Typically, all seniors at the Met are accepted at a college.

Personal Learning Objectives: An Example

Joe explained to me that he had started his freshman year at the Met and had liked it well enough, but many of his friends were at his neigh-borhood high school. So, after a successful freshman year, he chose to transfer back to the neighborhood high school. It didn't take Joe long to realize that moving from class to class every 45 minutes and having virtually no say in his education wasn't for him. So, he returned to the Met to finish his high school experience. After Steve Jubb completed his presentation, Joe took over a fairly large portion of the session, describing his personal experiences to the 50 or so people in the room (Evetts, 2003).

I was so impressed by Joe's ability to explain the kind of personalized learning he had designed at the Met that I would later ask the school's administrators how Joe was doing. At another conference, I listened while Eliot Washor, one of the founders of the Met, explained how the senior year at the Met was different from earlier years. Eliot explained that the senior experience continued to be guided by each student's PLP, but the senior project was much more rigorous and demanding than the four projects a year students had completed in their first three years. To describe the special challenges of the senior year, Eliot used a compelling illustration—Joe Claprood's senior project.

Joe had mentioned in advisory that his dad had fought in the Vietnam War but would never discuss his wartime experiences. As a result, Joe incorporated into his PLP an interest in learning more about Vietnam. He also decided to do his senior project on the Vietnam War, but in a dramatically powerful way. He did substantial research on the war and created a credible report—and set the goal of going to Vietnam with his father. His PLP goals included criteria to measure this project against real-world standards.

Joe conducted various fund-raising activities. And he and his father actually did make that trip, where the two of them discussed his wartime experience—at the point of ...