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I'm Nettie Legters.

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I'm a Research Scientist with the Johns Hopkins University Center

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For Social Organization of Schools.

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I am also a Co-Director of the Center's Everyone Graduates Initiative

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and its Talent Development High Schools Program.

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We have over a million young people who are dropping out of school every year

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and even more who are graduating from high school woefully unprepared for success in college

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and post-secondary training or in career and civic life.

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Personalizing the learning environment has become one of the main strategies

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that folks are adopting to transform large, bureaucratically-organized, anonymous,

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impersonal secondary schools into more personalized learning environments that engage students,

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meet their needs, and help them achieve and advance to graduation.

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There're many ways to personalize the learning environment,

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and schools have been experimenting with all of these to good result.

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There's small learning communities, there's advisories, there's interdisciplinary teams,

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there's flexible scheduling, extracurricular activities.

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Schools are even reaching down into their feeder schools to get data on the students,

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so they can actually get to know them before they get to the school doors,

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setting up a Summer Bridge Program so that there is a community building

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and an academic skills building opportunity even before students get to school.

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So, there are lots of different ways that, you know,

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specific concrete strategies that schools are using to personalize learning environment.

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One of the most prominent approaches to personalizing learning environment has been to kind

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of take large schools and break them down into smaller units.

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So, this occurs through the creation of new small schools or, in many cases,

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the creation of small learning communities.

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So some examples of small learning communities include ninth grade academies.

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There's a large push out there to really support kids who are undergoing a transition either

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into sixth grade or into ninth grade, and so ninth grade academies are a good example

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of a small learning community in a high school,

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and career academies-and career academies are small-learning communities

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that have a career focus.

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The other approach that schools have taken

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to create even smaller instructional units are interdisciplinary teams,

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so breaking a small learning community down into interdisciplinary teams.

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An interdisciplinary team typically consists of a math, an English,

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a science, and a social studies teacher.

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Those teachers have what's called a common-planning time every single day, preferably,

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and they share all the same students.

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The teams are really the front line when it comes to troubleshooting

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around what we call the ABC's of dropout prevention, and that's attendance,

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behavior, and course performance.

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And so, the teams are equipped with data and with their immediate experience of every student,

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and so when they meet, they can look back and see over the last, you know, week or two,

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who hasn't been coming to school, who has been enacting out,

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who has been falling behind in their homework, and really get on that before the problem gets

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so serious that the kid has fallen off track.

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We've found that schools are much more likely to be successful in this conversion process

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if they undergo a very inclusive and transparent planning process

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so that all the adults are involved in looking at the data,

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understanding why they are doing this in the first place,

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really and seeing how many students are dropping out and how many students aren't succeeding,

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and then participating in all the steps of developing what kinds

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of small-learning communities they are going to have, what are the themes going to be.

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We've found that small learning communities that are really designed around student interest

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and faculty strengths and the availability of supporting partners, external partners,

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those small learning communities are really going to be strong.