Mid-Year Reflection || 15 January 2018

 Students decided that they wanted to raise money during the holiday season to present a gift card to our custodian for all that she does for us.  The idea to tape me to the wall was very student-generated.  The teacher had very little input.

1. How am I doing with scheduling a visit to one of my colleagues’ Learning Labs, and 

what are my next steps?

I haven’t been doing very well with scheduling a visit to one of my colleagues’ Learning Labs; 

to personify my calendar, it has exceeded proficient on the Worthy Adversary Learning Scale. 

Although things have been tough, I’m hopeful that the new year will bring with more opportunities 

to achieve workflow.  Each of our cohort schools offers an important piece of the personalization 

puzzle. I wish I could visit ALL of the schools.  Narrowing my scope, I’d like to visit Lamoille, 

Cabot and Essex in the coming weeks.

After the break, we’ll begin OT 2.0 in the Upper House.  Students and their TA teachers 

will revisit the PLP process.  Students will reaffirm, revise or reset their personal and academic

goals during the first week or so after the break.  For years, we’ve required students to set their 

goals as SMART Goals. Teachers have agreed to allow students to use the WOOP Goal template.      

2. What have I done so far to engage my students in our inquiry question, and how are they 

responding?

Bill and Susan recently helped the adult members of the PAML Crew shape and evolve our inquiry

question to become “How can we shape Opportunity Time (2:00-2:45 daily) to introduce the 

power of personalization to young adolescents?”  Students in the upper house have been 

working on setting and achieving academic and personal goals.  Students have been asked to set

academic goals that align with LSSU proficiencies. Many students have picked proficiencies that 

they’d enjoy meeting. Others have selected proficiencies that they struggle to meet within the 

confines of their traditional classes.  Typically students wrestle with proficiencies in more 

traditional settings, their classes, with their core academic teachers.  Some have begun to use 

Opportunity Time to go head-on with proficiencies with more personalized structures that align 

better with their learning styles.  Students have also set personal goals and they have aligned 

those with Scholarly Habits--other schools may call them Habits of Mind or Habits of Work.  

There are students who work very hard and are engaged, but there are some students who aren’t 

being effectively reached.   

3. Even if they are preliminary at best, what are some of my findings so far?

My findings lead me to ask more questions.  My belief long ago was that if you simply give 

students opportunities to pursue the things that they care about, they will automatically engage in 

them.  They’d bond to their PLPs and never want to let them go.  Instead, we still have some 

students who struggle to meaningfully engage with the process and to remain persistent, 

especially when their work becomes more rigorous.  We need to see and explore models that 

have worked in schools with similar student populations. Do these similar schools typically offer 

this type of learning at the end of the day, or do they offer it at a point in the day when students 

are more fresh, perhaps during the morning?  How do these schools successfully integrate 

community members into their schools’ learning communities to allow for more authentic student 

experiences?  The only formal way for students to demonstrate proficiency is in their Core and 

Expo classes.  Are there schools in Vermont that have systems in place for students to 

demonstrate proficiency at any time and any place? I want to gain a solid understanding of their 

frameworks from pitching the concept to community members all the way to exhibitions of 

learning and assessment.        

For this project, some Upper House students have begun working with Lower House students 

to help them get a handle on what their current and future teachers need to provide to them in order for 

them to feel like they’re empowered, self-directed and motivated learners.

 

4. As we pivot from conceiving of, designing, and creating our Learning Labs to 

orchestrating, documenting, and telling the story of our Learning Labs, what are my 

most pressing questions / wonders?

Things are beginning to come together, and there is light at the end of the tunnel.