If you are like most people in Vermont, just mentioning the “PLP” can be a conversation stopper. The personal learning plan (PLP) has been consistently difficult to implement. It is always “something else” kids have to do and “something else” teachers have to do. It seems like a great idea but very few students are using it to drive their learning and their high school path.  After completing several iterations of a personal learning plan design process with learners, we discovered that there were some small shifts that made a big difference. 

Goal Setting

One obstacle we discovered in our work with learners was that goal setting is extremely abstract and requires a level of meta-cognition and maybe even developmental readiness that many learners either don’t have or don’t have a readiness for. I’m not at all suggesting that this is not a learnable skill but just having a goals section in the personal learning plan or asking kids to set goals with no context leads to shallow goals that do not provide a reason to go back and reflect. If we want kids to interact with their goals, the goals need to be designed to be revisited. We redesigned our goals by first asking learners to consider what they want their lives to look like in the future using very concrete questions. We asked them to visualize life in 10 and 5 years so that when they are creating goals, they are creating them with the context of their larger future. Having this picture in their view, changed the way they thought about their plans and also allowed them to distinguish between high-level goals (based on values and long-term plans) and more low level (to-do list) goals and distinguish between goals and action steps. Angela Duckworth discussed the idea of having this overarching picture by which all your actions are built-in her book Grit . She describes this hierarchy in this video as well.

Learning Goals & Graduation Requirements

Power strategy number two was about making it possible to interact with the learning goals or in the case of high school, proficiency-based graduation requirements. As we watched learners interact with the personal learning plan we designed, we were looking for ways to give learners genuine reasons to use it. What they told us and showed us was that they wanted to keep track of the requirements. They wanted to know how they were progressing. So, we came up with a way for them to move buttons that represented their requirements into a completed section. Not only can they visually see which requirements are completed and which still need to be achieved but each button goes to a page with the indicator requirements and a place to house evidence. Check out our vlog to see a screencast of this.

The idea of the personal learning plan is more complex than just these two areas, of course, and we have bigger plans for engaging teachers and advisors in implementing these small tweaks so they don’t stand alone, but they are two simple shifts that can have a high impact on the ability for learners and teachers to use the PLP in a genuine way. In addition, most schools have something that serves as a PLP but they struggle to make it meaningful. Sometimes all that is needed is a few tweaks rather than an entire redesign.