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At iNacol Conference? Join Us for Two Sessions!

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on October 22, 2018

Bryan Hassel, Public Impact’s co-president, will be presenting in two sessions at this year’s iNACOL symposium in Nashville. Join him today for “Making Blended Better” at 2:15 in room 206, where he, Cabarrus County teacher and former Opportunity Culture Fellow Scott Nolt (at right), and former principal Michelle Cline discuss what they’ve learned and where they’re going with the use of blended instruction. They’ll cover how innovative staffing, course design, and student engagement can make the most of blended and personalized learning–bringing the best to far more students.

Can’t get to iNACOL? Check out a video of Mr. Nolt and read his column “Blending the Best: Better Learning for More Kids.”

On Wednesday, Bryan Hassel and Thomas Arnett, senior research fellow at the Christensen Institute, will lead a design workshop, “Leveraging Innovative Staffing Models to Maximize the Power of Personalized Learning,” from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. in room 106B. They’ll be discussing our recent joint project studying how a number of district, charter, and private schools are using non-traditional staffing and blended learning to achieve noteworthy results for their students.

The Risks and Rewards of Using Bended Learning to Reach More Students

written by Elizabeth Annette Bartlett on August 9, 2018

This column first appeared on EducationNC on August 9, 2018.

If, as a teacher who sees success with one class of students, I could reach twice as many students per class, why shouldn’t I try? That’s the question I asked myself in trying to solve a dilemma my middle school science students faced. In the end, it wasn’t quite that simple — but the lessons we learned will continue to benefit students.

In the 2015–16 school year, Cabarrus County Schools introduced earth and environmental science to advanced middle school students, bringing it down from ninth grade to eighth grade. As a teacher at Harris Road Middle School, I quickly saw that this meant students would have to learn two years of science in one year. Although the curricula were meant to overlap, in reality, they overlapped very little.

As the year progressed, I discovered that students simply did not have time to do hands-on labs while also incorporating the global problem-based learning that we are required to provide — something meant to increase students’ knowledge of the world. I found it unacceptable to teach science without hands-on labs.

Having seen a math teacher use blended learning to reach more students, I was intrigued by the prospect that this could solve the lab time shortage problem.

In math, students were with the teacher on day one, with an assistant monitoring their online learning on day two, back with the teacher on day three, and so on. This allowed the teacher to cover two full sections in one class period.

So I approached my principal with an idea: Use the blended-learning teacher-reach model so that I could teach a group of seventh-grade advanced science in the same class period as my eighth-grade earth and environmental students. Then, I could bring some of the eighth-grade content into seventh grade, lightening the load for the next year. For example, I could add the weather content to the already-scheduled nine weeks on weather in seventh grade, and bring the eighth-grade molecular biology unit in, as the seventh-grade curriculum already incorporated a cells unit, human body unit, and genetics unit.

By adding the time with an assistant, students could now learn some material online, with materials I created, freeing my time with them for more labs.

My principal thought long and hard about it, but in the end, he gave his go-ahead for the following school year. With my additional classes — two each of advanced seventh-grade science and earth and environmental science — I had a total of 250 students.

I spent the summer creating the content for both courses, using planning time paid for by my district. Focusing on pace and standards, I put all the material into Canvas, an online learning management system that would give students access to the content any time, anywhere.

In the beginning, I kept wondering “what have I done to myself?” as I would go home exhausted at night, still needing to prepare for the next day. Since I developed the digital content, I really didn’t expect a lot of prep through the school year. However, a teacher must adjust for each year’s students, and my district did not incorporate extra planning time for blended-learning teachers that year.

I soon discovered my seventh-graders were not ready for independent digital content. Lacking the maturity at first to be successful, they needed to be direct-taught and to slowly incorporate the independent, online learning. For the first half of the year, students found it hard to make the switch between my teaching and their work with the assistant — if we said the same thing in different ways, students believed we were telling them two totally different things. They needed the maturity and many critical thinking activities to grasp this and be able, by the end of the year, to work well using the blended-learning model.

The payoff came the next year, when those students moved up to the eighth-grade earth and environmental science class. They retained much of what they learned in seventh grade, and they had the maturity to start working on day one in the blended model. That showed in student learning growth scores — students in seventh grade met growth expectations, while in eighth grade, they exceeded expected growth for both the eighth-grade information and the earth and environmental instruction. I believe the difference was their maturity level, and the ability of the older students to be ready to work more at their own pace.

I especially saw that maturity change during lab time — in seventh grade, students felt labs were play time instead of a learning opportunity. Throughout the year, I was able to witness changes in their attitudes during labs and in their self-motivation to complete work online.

Unfortunately, after a lot of discussion and debate, the school administration decided to end the blended model for the advanced seventh-graders, instead having all students take the same regular science class. I agreed with the decision; seventh grade for most students is all about change, and another advanced class was adding a lot of stress to most students’ already-packed schedule.

But we’ll take the lessons we learned further into eighth grade, where I will be extending my reach to six blended earth and environmental classes — exposing many students to the increasingly needed experience of online learning. And I will continue to extend my reach by acting as a mentor to our new seventh-grade science teacher, using the insights gained in my years with both grades.

Elizabeth Annette Bartlett is a blended-learning science teacher at Harris Road Middle School in Concord, N.C., where she was the school’s teacher of the year in 2017. She was named the outstanding earth science teacher for North Carolina in 2017, and went on to be named the eight-state Southeastern region winner.

Meeting the Personalization Challenge with New Roles + Blended Learning

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on May 24, 2018

Amid all the buzz about personalizing learning, what can we learn from schools getting great results? In Public Impact’s new report with the Clayton Christensen Institute, Innovative Staffing to Personalize Learning, we analyzed eight schools and school networks that are not only personalizing learning, but also getting strong learning results with disadvantaged students.

What’s different about these schools compared with the norm? New staffing models combined with blended learning. In these schools, blended learning does not replace teachers. Instead, blended learning augments the ability of multiple adults to understand and meet the needs of individual students in a collaborative workplace.

Research about Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture initiative has already shown positive student learning gains in district schools where multi-classroom leaders lead small, collaborative teaching teams, many of which use digital tools to keep track of student progress. But what about these other efforts?

[Read more…]

Personalizing Learning with Innovative Staffing + Blended Learning: 4 New School Profiles

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on April 10, 2018

As part of a deep look at how schools rethink how they are organized to address each student’s needs, Public Impact and the Clayton Christensen Institute today released the second set of profiles of schools and teachers using innovative staffing with blended learning. These profiles, many with accompanying videos, set the stage for an upcoming white paper analyzing the patterns of the schools’ and teachers’ experiences.

We focused on schools or school networks serving disadvantaged populations that achieved better-than-typical student learning and provided students with more personalized experiences while using new staffing models and blended learning.

[Read more…]

How 2 Pioneering Blended-Learning Teachers Extended Their Reach

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on January 24, 2017

What makes blended learning different in an Opportunity Culture? As two pioneering high school teachers in North Carolina show in new vignettes, blended learning gives them a tool to reach 40 to 100 percent more students per class period with great teaching.

Students alternated days between classroom instruction with their blended-learning teacher and working from home or in a supervised computer lab. The teachers reached more students on the “off” days, but with class sizes staying the same or even smaller.

The two we profile—American history teacher Scott Nolt and precalculus teacher Caitlyn Gironda—both exceeded growth targets while reaching more students, despite having less face-to-face time with students. They earned thousands of dollars in extra pay for their roles, funded through regular budgets.

In the vignettes and an accompanying video, Nolt and Gironda share why they took on the challenge of pioneering this use of blended learning to reach more students, how it worked, and what they learned about how their students learn—and how they adjusted their teaching as they strived to continue to reach all students with excellence.

[Read more…]

Opportunity Culture Voices: For Truly Personalized Learning, I Had to Try, Try Again

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on November 27, 2016

 
lori-treiber-2

After 26 years of teaching, I was the model of a traditional teacher.

Class began with review, then new material and cooperative or independent work, then closure. But two years ago, intrigued by my district’s request that I pioneer an Opportunity Culture biology blended-learning class, extending my reach to more students (and for more pay), I took the challenge: Could I learn some new tricks?

Yes. Just not the way I expected.

–Cabarrus County, N.C., Biology Blended-Learning Teacher Lori Treiber in For Truly Personalized Learning, I Had to Try, Try Again

For Lori Treiber, “truly personalized learning” was the goal as she set out to design the structure of her blended class:

For the first semester in fall 2015, I extended my reach by seeing one group of students every other day, teaching a second group on the first group’s “off” days—nearly doubling my student load for this period to 46. I planned to cover two days of material during each face-to-face day—through labs and activities with minimal lecturing—while students worked online in the classroom on off days.

To “flip” the classroom, I recorded my usual lectures that summer, using PowerPoints and animations. I embedded questions in the videos to help students stay on track, and gathered remediation and enrichment resources.

I divided my students three ways: half met with me for half the period, while half worked online next door, then switched; half met with me for the whole period, switching the next day; or all 46 met together in a large room.  I could design each day to best fit students’ needs and each topic’s objectives.

I also gave students personal choice and some freedoms. I broke the assignments into 80 percent “basic work” and 20 percent “uPicks,” letting students select from an assignment list. Students got all assignments at the beginning of the topic and could set their pace. Basic work was due daily, uPicks any time before the test. Freedom, right?

Well, yes and no, as Treiber found out. She hit some bumps that first semester, and made some useful adjustments. But she still wasn’t satisfied. Read her inspirational story of how her class–and her teaching–evolved over the past several semesters in the latest column in the Opportunity Culture series on Real clear Education.

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