Educators frequently report feeling constrained by the competing and often conflicting demands of their curriculum, students, assessment requirements, supervisors, and parents. They fear, with all the mandates and pressures, they are unable to be the kind of personalized learning leader they want to be. The goal of this guide is to encourage educators to jump in the box, rather than going outside of the box, to be creative. Drawing on current research on teaching and learning and second-language acquisition, as well as personal experience as a practitioner and mentor of new and veteran teachers, the author will address key areas and questions most important to K-12 classroom teachers of diverse language and literacy backgrounds. The body of this guide is divided into two sections. The first focuses on personalized content instruction for Emergent Bilinguals (EBs), including setting achievable learning objectives, strategies for communicating content, and approaches to assessment. The second section offers guidance to content area teachers on building the language skills of the EBs in their classes -- targeting the academic language specific to the content and activities of their lessons.