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Module 3 Summary - Creating a Culture of Innovation

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ERIC - Blended Learning: The Convergence of Online and Face-to-Face Education. Promising Practices in Online Learning, North American Council for Online Learning, 2008-Apr

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Most educators, parents, and policymakers think of "online learning" as a subset of distance learning (where the students and teacher are geographically separate), in which content delivery and communication are achieved primarily through the use of computers connected by the Internet.

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Creating a Culture of Innovation: MSD Warren

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MSD Warren, Indiana is an urban district serving 13,000 students. Their step-by-step iterative approach to innovation help each teacher find the best approach for their students. Watch Warren's story of how they continue to evolve and improve.

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Video of Models of Blended Learning and Limiations

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Video of Models of Blended Learning and Limiations

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Click here-- blended learning and the future of education: Monique Markoff at TEDxIthacaCollege

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Article: Embarking on Year Two: Moving Beyond Blended Learning

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Article: Embarking on Year Two: Moving Beyond Blended Learning

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"Embarking on Year Two: Moving Beyond Blended Learning" by Diane Tavenner first appeared on Blend My Learning.

"My biggest struggle in last year's blended pilot was that while my students had such varying skill levels and learning gaps, I still had to teach to one pace. I kept thinking, 'If I could only break down the walls...'"
-Summit San Jose Math Teacher, Zack Miller

This summer, we did.

After successfully piloting our first blended program in math last year, we challenged ourselves to dive deeper into the potential of blended learning with the goal of creating a school model that could optimize every aspect of our students' learning experience.

This past June, we took a step back to explore lessons learned from our math pilot program, and as Zack suggests above, remove any barriers that stood in the way of our students accelerating their learning.

Where We Started

When we founded our flagship school ten years ago, we established a foundational no excuses culture built on high support and high expectations for our students. These checks and balances, and intensive teacher-led support systems, have ensured no student falls through the cracks and immediately receives the intervention they need to stay on track to high school graduation and four-year college acceptance. This has yielded strong results with 96 percent of Summit graduates accepted into at least one four-year college or university.

And yet, for a percentage of our students, one of the biggest hurdles to college completion was the need for academic remediation. Despite participating in a rigorous, college-prep curriculum and taking at least six AP classes at Summit before graduation, some students still had fundamental learning gaps - or as we say, the Swiss cheese - going all the way back to elementary and middle school.

Additionally, the unintended consequence of our teacher-directed, high-support model was that many students lacked the structure and behaviors they needed to drive their own learning, and ultimately, their college success.

It begged us to ask the question:

"How does a no excuses, high-support model both intensively shepherd students through a rigorous, college-prep curriculum and give students the skills they need to be successful once they are on their own in college?"

Our 2011 Blended Learning Math Pilot

Our first step in this process was to integrate blended learning into our academic model. Our belief was that technology offered us the ability to create a more personalized learning environment for every individual student, delivering exactly what they need, when they need it and how they need it. We envisioned a model that freed our teachers to do what they do best: teach conceptually and intercede when students struggled or required further challenge. Technology could provide students with targeted practice and offer teachers and students immediate learning data.

We started small, with 200 ninth grade students in our two new San Jose schools. The pilot program was a blended learning math curriculum that integrated Algebra I and Geometry. There were three blended math teachers with 35 students in their classrooms.

During a daily two-hour math block, students rotated between classroom instruction, small group learning, peer-to-peer tutoring and individual practice using Khan Academy. Students were encouraged to work together as they moved through their online exercises.

The pilot was a success. By the end of the year, our students had achieved significant growth, filling academic gaps with a higher degree of success than we had experienced in our previous ten years of non-blended and personalized efforts. ( We used both the California Standards Test (CSTs) and the Northwest Evaluation Association's (NWEA) MAP math test.)

What We Learned

Despite its success in accelerating student learning, there were four key challenges that needed to be addressed before embarking on a second year of blended learning. These included:

A single scope and sequence curriculum (pacing guide) that did not allow students to move at their own pace - faster or slower - as they needed.

A continued emphasis on teacher-directed learning, with our students unable to drive their own learning and develop the invaluable skills needed to be successful in college.

Our students being regulated to age-based cohorts and grade levels, prohibiting truly personalized pathways for each student.

The physical constraints of classroom walls, architectural structure and school design that impeded collaboration across the blended classrooms.

Ultimately, we needed to move beyond solely blending high-quality face-to-face learning experiences and online instruction to instead rethink the entire school experience - from how learning spaces are designed, to the use of time, to the role of the student and educator. Most importantly, we wanted to create a truly self-paced and self-directed learning environment.

Throughout this process, we found ourselves regularly asking questions like:

"What would an optimal learning environment look and feel like for our students?

How do our students learn best and how can we optimize those experiences to ensure their success?

Optimized became the foundation of our efforts to truly personalize learning for every individual student.

Year Two: Optimized Learning

This year, we are piloting the building blocks for an Optimized Learning Environment, where the focus is on each student and what he or she needs to be successful in college and career.

We are starting small, once again, with 400 ninth and 10 th grade students in an Optimized Learning Math pilot in our two San Jose schools.

We have re-imagined the physical classroom and school environment by removing walls to create a 7000-square-foot open architecture learning facility that accommodates 200 students in individual workstations, as well as, four learning spaces dedicated to small group learning, 1:1 coaching, and larger workshops and seminars.

We have reconfigured teacher roles to move towards a team of educators who work together to provide high-quality face-to-face learning experiences and tiered support and intervention for students.

In our pilot this year, we have five math instructors and two learning coaches who work as a team to support 200 students at one time. Whereas historically teaching responsibilities were divided by content area, they are now delineated by the aspect of teaching. Our math team serves as coaches and mentors, curriculum curators, developers and intervention specialists.

We have removed the restrictions of traditional grade levels to give students the true freedom to move at their own pace. In math this year, students are not in ninth or 10 th grade and are not taking a defined math course such as Algebra or Geometry. Instead, they are progressing through a competency-based curriculum dependent on their own path and pace. Students must demonstrate competency on all of the standards and skills of three learning phases, High School Ready, College Ready and Early College.

Based on pre-assessment data (we use the NWEA MAP test), each student is provided a personalized Math Guide that details for them what they already know (highlighted in green), what they should be focused on today (highlighted in yellow), and lastly, what they do not know and are not quite ready yet to tackle (highlighted in red).

We have empowered students to take charge of their own learning by shifting away from our initial teacher-directed blended rotation to students' self-directing their own learning. Students use their personalized Math Guides to set daily and weekly goals.

Our students begin math each day at their individual workstation. They first log into their email to read a daily message from the math team, including a schedule of learning opportunities offered that day, along with available projects and seminars. Depending on their learning goal, our students can choose whether to remain at their workstation for individual, or with their peers, learning and practice using a host of online resources available to them as 'Playlists,' or participate in a seminar and other small-group projects taking place in the four learning spaces off of the main room. For those students who struggle with this autonomy, our math team provides mentorship and coaching to ensure students are on the right path.

What is Next?

To ensure we are able to quickly learn, iterate and implement what we are learning every day in our Optimized math pilot, we have formed a project team that meets weekly and is led by a project manager. This cross functional team includes a member from our Academics, Information, Technology, Communications and School-site Leadership teams, as well as our math teachers. We are collecting student data weekly through focus groups and surveys, as well as tracking the effectiveness of the tools, resources and technologies we are building and using in our Optimized pilot.

We are looking forward to sharing all of this with you, including what we are learning, what is working and what is not working, and much more.

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Embarking on Year Two: Moving Beyond Blended Learning - Getting Smart by Guest Author - blended learning, edleaders, math teacher resources, Online Learning

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After successfully piloting our first blended program in math last year, we challenged ourselves to dive deeper into the potential of blended learning with the goal of creating a school model that could optimize every aspect of our students' learning experience.

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Video on the role of teachers in blended learning

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Video on the role of teachers in blended learning

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National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)

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The Role of Teachers in a Blended Learning Environment

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Experts and educators discuss the changing role of teachers.

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Article on important features for successful blended learning 

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Article on important features for successful blended learning 

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http://www.eschoolnews.com/2017/04/20/successful-blended-learning/

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Real talk: This is what successful blended learning actually looks like

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In theory, blended learning sounds straightforward: You replace a portion of the traditional face-to-face instruction with web-based online instruction. In practice, though, launching and sustainin...

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Creating a Culture of Digital Collaborative in Online Learning - Springer

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Meaningfully and critically engaging online learners through collaborative teams resolving authentic problems is one key in designing effective learning experience in higher education. Moving toward a new paradigm of distributive education requires a rethinking of the strategies used for engagement and community formation, particularly focusing on how to create a culture of collaboration in learning experiences.

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What blended looks like in the classroom

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What blended looks like in the classroom

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What Blended Learning Looks Like in the Classroom

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Summary of Video and Article for Module 2

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Summary of Video and Article for Module 2

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Blended Learning: Making it work in your classroom Video

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Blended Learning: Making it work in your classroom Video

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Blended Learning: Making it Work in Your Classroom

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The video provide a summary of the steps in chapter 9 of our book about how to create a culture. 

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The video provide a summary of the steps in chapter 9 of our book about how to create a culture. 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zITSFTm7dY

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Create the culture for blended-learning success

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Heather Staker of Ready to Blend discusses how to create the right culture as part of a successful blended-learning implementation

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Interesting article about best teaching practices for online learning.

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This article describes a flipped classroom, characteristics of a good teacher in a flipped classroom, and important components for a successful flipped classroom. 

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This article describes a flipped classroom, characteristics of a good teacher in a flipped classroom, and important components for a successful flipped classroom. 

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Inside a Flipped-Mastery Classroom

Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams

A flipped-mastery classroom takes the principles of mastery learning and marries them with modern technology to make a sustainable, reproducible, and manageable environment for learning. If you were to walk into one of our classrooms, you would see much asynchronous activity. Basically, all students are working on different activities at different times. Our students are busy and engaged in their learning. You would see some students conducting experiments or other inquiry activities, some watching videos on their personal devices, some working in groups mastering objectives, some interacting with the whiteboard to engage with online simulations, some studying in small groups, and some taking assessments on either a school computer or their own personal device. You would also see some working one-on-one or in a small group with the teacher.

If you watched us throughout the class, you would observe several things: At the beginning of class we organize our students. We check to see who might need to conduct a lab, who needs to take an exam, and who needs remediation on a particular objective. You would observe us moving around the room interacting with students. We talk to every kid, in every class, every day.

You might ask how we can do so much with so many kids at the same time. Frankly, this is our struggle. We are constantly moving around the room giving attention to those who need it and making sure that all students are learning what they need when they need it. Teaching in the flipped-mastery model is tiring, and our minds have to constantly switch between one topic and the next, and from one activity to another.

In order to function as an effective teacher in the flipped-mastery environment, we believe a few characteristics are necessary.

The teacher should be a content master. A teacher who is not proficient in his content area cannot operate in a flipped-mastery class. The ability to mentally move from one topic to another is necessary, and a comprehensive understanding of the interconnectedness of the content is essential.

The teacher must be able to admit when he or she does not know the answer to student questions and must be willing to research an answer with the student. Pride will only slow the teacher down and prove to be a detriment to student learning. The teacher should take these opportunities to demonstrate what it means to be a learner: the teacher is the lead learner in a classroom. Teachers should show students what adults do when they do not know an answer, teach them how to collaborate, and guide them through the vast ocean of information in which we swim in our interconnected world.

The teacher must be able to flow through a class period in a nonlinear fashion. All the students are at different places in their mastery and understanding of the learning objectives, and it is the role of the teacher to meet each student where she or he is.

The mastery model hinges entirely on the teacher meeting the student at the point of need, not the student meeting the teacher at the prescribed place in the curriculum.

The teacher must be able to relinquish control of the learning process to the students. Control freaks need not apply.

In addition to these teacher characteristics, there are five main components of a flipped-mastery classroom that must be in place before you start.

Establish clear learning objectives. Objectives are the desired outcomes of learning for each student. Use your state standards, national frameworks, and your best professional judgment to determine what you want your students to know and be able to do.

Determine which of these objectives are best achieved through inquiry, and which are best learned through direct instruction. Create a video for those objectives that will benefit from direct instruction. You need to have either produced your own videos, or found videos that will teach the content you want in the way you want it taught. Remember, as time goes on, more and more teachers are implementing some sort of a flipped model. Many of these teachers are making their videos available on the Internet, so you may or may not need to produce your own videos. If producing the videos seems too daunting, find someone else's.

Ensure student access to videos. When you have either made or chosen other videos, you now need to make sure your students have access to them. There are a variety of ways this can be done, such as posting videos online, keeping files on school servers, and burning files to DVD. There is no easy answer to the access question, and based on our work with many schools, it seems the answer is different for each location. You will need to work with your IT department and see what will work best in your situation.

Incorporate engaging learning activities to be done in class. We make up a packet for each unit that contains the follow-along notes for the video, all experiments students will be doing, and all of the suggested worksheets.

Create multiple versions of each summative assessment for students to demonstrate their mastery of each learning objective in a particular unit of study. This is most efficiently and effectively done through the use of a test bank on a computer generated testing system. We currently use the quiz module in Moodle to create and administer our exams.

At the beginning of each unit packet, we have an organizational guide that has a list of objectives, corresponding videos, reading from the textbook, learning activities, and lab activities. Our organizational guides are road maps that guide students through the unit of study and provide them with the appropriate framework and supporting activities to meet each learning objective.

Source: Adapted from Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. Copyright 2012 ISTE and ASCD.

ASCD Express, Vol. 8, No. 23. Copyright 2013 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.

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ASCD Express 8.23 - Inside a Flipped-Mastery Classroom

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Inside a Flipped-Mastery Classroom Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams A flipped-mastery classroom takes the principles of mastery learning and marries them with modern technology to make a sustainable, reproducible, and manageable environment for learning. If you were to walk into one of our classrooms, you would see much asynchronous activity.

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Anant Agarwal: Why massive open online courses (still) matter

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2013 was a year of hype for MOOCs (massive open online courses). Great big numbers and great big hopes were followed by some disappointing first results.

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Interesting article.