Project Summary

"Student-centered learning" describes a style of teaching and learning where the environment, curriculum, and instruction focus primarily on helping students achieve success. Understanding how to build and sustain student-centered learning environments at the high school level is crucial to the long-term goal of improving high schools. The purpose of the Personalized Learning Project was to capture and disseminate procedural knowledge about how schools can become student-centered, and to articulate the process required to create and sustain personalized learning as the guiding norm of high schools.

Through working with teachers at schools in Maine and Vermont that support a student-oriented high school reform framework, we captured and detailed the necessary practices and actions that teachers, principals, district and state personnel, and others can take to support student-centered learning.

The Personalized Learning Project proceeded in three complementary ways: (1) reporting and disseminating lessons from the Maine Department of Education’s implementation of student-centered learning as part of its state-initiated Promising Futures initiative; (2) the development of a series of workshops on personalizing learning at the high school level; and (3) the formal joining of these two strands in support of Vermont’s efforts to promote student-centered learning as part of the Vermont Department of Education’s High Schools on the Move strategy.

Publications related to this project:

• Changing Systems to Personalize Learning: A Workshop Series
• Personalized Learning: Preparing High School Students to Create Their Future