• Engaged learning
• Challenging standards
• Multiple pathways
• Personalized learning
• Flexible structures
• Real-life experiences
• Instructional leadership
• Alignment
• Shared purpose
• PreK-16 continuity
• Family participation
• Community partnerships. 

As you read, you will recognize the importance of accepting change as part of our work and understand the nature of the process in which you would be engaged.  Key points to achieve the school transformation through personal interactions and relationships include these:

• No single individual can guide the process of growth from a single vantage point; participants guide themselves as their awareness grows.
• Changing a school culture ignites fear and passion, which need to be channeled into experimentation and collaboration.
• Early changes and ideas may provide surprisingly obsolescent as personalization spreads throughout a school community.
• Although ideas and techniques can be imported from elsewhere, transformation rests on local initiatives that involve students, teachers, school administrators, and policy developers.
• All participants have to act as leaders who carry news of success and failure from one realm to the next and help connect their innovations to the larger transformation.
• Disorganization and confusion are inevitable in any changing system, signaling the need for even more communication and collaboration. 

Guidance is also given on the process for personalizing courses.  Key steps  provided include the following:

• Choose a competency area on which to focus.
• Choose a kind of task in that area.
• Develop a generic (not task-specific) school-wide rubric, using standards as a resource to describe the rubric dimensions and points on the rubric.
• Identify the kids of student work deemed most important.
• Collect/Develop models of the tasks and annotate those models using the standards-based school-wide rubric.
• Design and implement targeted practice using those models and school-wide rubric.
• Design and implement emotional triggers that engage  students in this type of task.
• Give students  rapid feedback on their targeted practice, using the school-wide rubric or elements of it.
• Collect evidence on how the kids are doing.  Use this evidence to refine targeted practice, emotional triers, and feedback.
• Collect and share annotated models and classroom examples of targeted practice and emotional triggers that worked.
• Refine the school-wide rubric.
• Refine the models; align the models horizontally (across subjects within a grade) and vertically, answering the question, "Is the level of challenge increasing appropriately through the grades?) (Lou's Comment:  Or appropriately based on developmental level of the student?)
• Design an system for knowing where - in which courses - the models and targeted practice are being used.
• Design a system for reporting student progress in this type of task. 

Questions for which Clarke advocates we all need to seek answers include these:

• State and national policies have leaned heavily against personalized or customized learning.  How do we open the policy environment to personalized learning?
• Testing companies, text publishers, local employers, and school boards have a vested interest in keeping things as they are.  Who and how do we take responsibility for political change to make room for personalized learning?
• Many high schools have a hierarchical structure; most personalized processes depend on leadership distributed across boundaries.  How can we begin to reconfigure school leadership so students and teachers can make the adaptations they need to make?
• Teachers choose their profession based on affiliations to a particular subject area.  Their training includes class planning, curriculum design, testing, and classroom management.  Many see advising as counseling and feel unprepared to manage individual relationship.  Not all are confirmed risk takers.  How can we help teachers prepare for new roles in personalized learning?
• Many students have learned that passivity and anonymity ensure safety.  What  will it take to persuade more students to take control of their own learning in a more public arena?
• Current management systems - schedules, buses, grading, faculty assignments, hiring, budgeting, and record keeping - are based on the assumption that all students will proceed through similar experiences in a coordinated fashion.  What will it take to adjust those systems so  they support wider variability?
• How can we define accountability in a personalized high school?

This book will be available at a reduced fee (and no shipping charges) at the Competency-Based Education Conference:  Define!  Design!  Deliver!  Please join us!