The goal of Blended Learning is to attain mastery through an amalgam of proven traditional teaching practices in association with digital devices being used to add value. Such a combination allows for a culture in the classroom and the school that has students and teachers with mastery based expectations, that has the learning personalised, that empowers the students and gives them ownership and interactive learning.
This requires a paradigm shift in both the teacher and the student role. For the teacher this shift is from a lecturer-fixer; to a facilitator-interviewer, coach and mentor. The basis of this is a move from providing the students with the right answers to empowering the students to own the learning process and get the right answer for themselves. For the students, the basis of the shift is from less individual effort and competition to more interactive/shared collaborative effort, all the time striving for individual excellence. This is not to say that individual effort is not important and provided for. Those who do the work grow the dendrites and grow the learning.
Personalising the Learning
An example of the importance of individual effort comes through the personalisation of the learning that is opened up when the lesson, or segments of it, is delivered in video clips of no more than six to ten minutes using one on one video. This video use is a centre piece of Blended Learning whether the video is teacher or commercially developed. From this, many value added opportunities for learning become available.
The first of these is that the student can now pace and adjust the lesson to their personal, differentiated, learning needs. The pause button becomes a vital component for this, as does the ability to slide back to a previous point in the video lesson if the meaning was not clear. A teacher cannot be slid back to clarify, nor paused to get something right in the students heads before moving on.
There are many reasons for individual differences requiring both pauses and back tracking if mastery is to be achieved. For instance basic activities like note taking will be done at various speeds determined from a number of idiosyncratic attributes ranging from the speed of hand writing or typing skills, to the rate of comprehension often based on the degree of prior knowledge, the mood of the moment, and more.
Marzano’s research shows that the best practice for note making, an essential skill, is not to make notes on the run as the lesson proceeds but to do so by providing pauses within the lesson. However, if this is controlled by the teacher, at best it is a blunt form of differentiation/personalisation. With the students making the decisions there is not only accurate differentiation but also empowerment and ownership.
So a simple operation like pacing, aids mastery by giving time to get the understanding and any appropriate notes completed adds high expectations by allowing time to get it right, empowers the learner by giving them control of their learning and altogether gives ownership.
This is also helps create a classroom and school culture where the students feel valued as individuals and the added empowerment that that gives.
Gather the Data
The in the moment data that the teacher can have available in the Blended Learning classroom allows immediate
individual, group, or class remediation that personalises. As well, because it allows the teacher to act before a student feels a failure, gets frustrated and gives up, it maintains high expectations while, provided the teacher acts accordingly, empowering and maintaining student ownership.
Many of the commercial systems already on the market provide for this data. The teacher dashboard that Google provides, the student progress window that the Khan Academy has and so on give a constant window on what the student is doing, where they are at, and by back tracking to the history, where they have come from. Thus the teacher has a constant stream of quantitative and qualitative data as it happens. By knowing where any student is at and whether the student is struggling or sailing smoothly ahead teacher intervention is finely targeted.
Where the teachers or schools lesson plans are teacher made there are a number of devices that can be used such as Clicker or Survey Monkey using teacher made multi question surveys.
As a general guide, to gather the in the moment data, these question should be asked immediately after major knowledge points (tending to rote learning)and any associated subset of key points (tending to conceptual learning), plus at points where misconceptions may occur. Any questions just seeking right answers or for ranking are a no, no (see my article in Teachers Matter Issue 20).
This data must be gathered frequently enough to give the teacher sufficient warning of any gaps or even potentially developing gaps before mastery is lost. Graham Nuthall’s New Zealand research shows how often misconceptions are learned rather than what the teacher had thought they had taught. If this is not picked up early there is interference – not just with mastery in the present, but also mastery in the future.
Sound systems can provide the teacher with what individual group members are saying thus allowing control over misconceptions and off task behaviour.
Act on the Data
Where mastery is absent immediate remedial action is required otherwise the in the moment data is criminally wasted! Good lessons are a staircase with each new part resting on the foundation of the old so there is not much sense in moving on when part of the class have already stumbled or missed a step. Personalisation is required. Thus, as and when required collaboration groups (either large or small depending on the numbers) are formed and reformed from day to day, hour to hour, or even minute to minute. Flexibility rules.
If there is a small number all that is required is for them to be temporarily formed into an interactive group with the teacher facilitating the learning past the blockage. However, if a large proportion has not got it another remedy such as peer tutoring groups may be the answer.
Those who have gained initial mastery can form small interactive groups to undertake activities that move the new knowledge segment(s) higher up the memory chain: out of short term and into working or even long term memory.
While there are many such interactive activities, one that works well is to require students to prepare and to perform a two or three minute role play about some aspect of the newly learned material. This not only invokes what the neurobiologists tell us is an important attribute to learning – movement – but also, to plan and perform a role play, higher level thinking skills are also required: analysing the lesson, evaluating a key point or key points and then creating the role play. Thus dendrites are strengthened and deeper learning is achieved.
With such immediate remediation no student leaves the lesson in deficit with accompanying low expectations. Just as importantly having embedded in the classroom and the school this culture of getting it right before moving on, provides an overall sense of the importance of persevering, and precision and accuracy, excellence and therefore, high expectation.
Nor do those who had not got it and who originally missed out on the consolidation of the learning through the role plays, need to miss out on the role play learning. These students can be integrated, if necessary one by one, into the existing role play groups as the teacher finds (by such as Clicker or the traditional oral questions) that they now have mastery.
This flexibility of groups, with change amongst the group members as and when needed, is a characteristic of the personalisation of Blended Learning practice. Groups are not permanent. There are no Rabbits and Frogs, there are no “Accelerate” and “Remedial” groups, named or unnamed. Expectancy is not dampened by being in the wrong group. Labels are not a learning assist!
Student Reflection
Qualitative data is also important. Some Blended Learning models have what they call Mentoring Fridays. A suitable activity here is to use this time, or part of it for the students to write reflective journals. This can be simply answering questions like what they found easy or hard but always with the preposition because inserted. Thus they are forced to think: to analyse and evaluate and to create a path forward.
While the teacher must be careful not to mark these comments in any way they are invaluable for creating a student teacher dialogue, a mentoring relationship, to extend the student thinking further about their own best practices. This is a powerful way of supplementing the personalisation, the ownership, empowerment and high expectation through such a student teacher interaction.
Metacognition by dialogue like this is a powerful learning partnership at a personalised level, because through this teacher student interactive relationship student ownership, empowerment and above all expectation of mastery are developed and maintained. An unpublished 1999 research by Massey College of Education enthusiastically recommended this approach.
It is also an avenue for the teacher to learn too.
To conclude, these websites bring further and deeper meaning.
https://www.khanacademy.org/ partner-content/ssf-cci/
http://www.hilliardschools.org/ blendedlearning/