Most existing semi-supervised clustering algorithms are not designed for handling high-dimensional data. On the other hand, semi-supervised dimensionality reduction methods may not necessarily improve the clustering performance, due to the fact that the inherent relationship between subspace selection and clustering is ignored. In order to mitigate the above problems, we present a semi-supervised clustering algorithm using adaptive distance metric learning (SCADM) which performs semi-supervised clustering and distance metric learning simultaneously. SCADM applies the clustering results to learn a distance metric and then projects the data onto a low-dimensional space where the separability of the data is maximized. Experimental results on real-world data sets show that the proposed method can effectively deal with high-dimensional data and provides an appealing clustering performance.