Blended Learning - The role of the leader

"This job would be great if it weren't for the parents." 

I've heard principals say that more than once, and there is some truth in it even though 95% of my experiences with parents as an administrator have been positive. When leading blended learning, your interactions with parents are going to be the key to success. 

Now at this point you might think of everything else you have to do to get blended learning going in your building: convincing teachers it's best for students; shifting classrooms from teacher centered to student centered. All of that is important, but how you handle parents will make or break it. 

Whenever you have a new innovation in the classroom people are always watching to see what happens. And typically, as long as it doesn't affect little Johnny's grades, parents are pretty quiet about it. With blended learning, it's going to require little Johnny to start doing some things he hasn't had to do before. And while I would expect little Johnny to enjoy his school experience more now that he has more say in his learning, not everyone is going to react the same to it. Some might even look at it is being extracurricular and thus something they don't have to do. 

Here's a scenario: Ms. Johnson has fully embraced blended learning in her U.S. History class. Ms. Johnson has started assigning discussions for homework to continue the rich discussions they're having in class. Little Johnny doesn't feel like it's fair that he has to do discussions after school so he just doesn't do them. He gets a 0 for the assignment. Little Johnny's mom calls to complain. How do you react? 

It's easy to say that you tell her that online work is now an expectation of Little Johnny and he has to do the work, and he gets a 0 because the class has moved on from the discussion and it's of little benefit for him to do it now. Or do you bend and tell Ms. Johnson not to require the discussions and just make them optional instead? 

The more you bend here the more likely your teachers are going to get turned off to blended learning. You must hold the line. It's not easy, but nothing worth doing ever is. 

Blended Learning - Mindset 2

If you started your teaching career in the late 90's or early 00's, then you probably encountered this book by Harry Wong. While some of the wisdom of the book is universal and still holds true, Wong was ahead of his time when he talks about instructional design. To paraphrase, he talks about seeing teachers walk out of the building looking like they're nearly dead from working so hard all day. Wong suggests that this is backwards. Students should be walking out looking dead from doing all of the work. Teachers should spend their time designing learning experiences for students that put the onus of work on them.

Similarly, Phil Schlechty in Working on the Work and in Engaging Students talks about the importance of instructional design over teacher performance. This is the essence of blended learning in that teachers need to account for class time and out of class time to design engaging learning experiences for students.

What does good instructional design look like?

For me, the best instructional design is the Understanding by Design framework created by Wiggins and McTighe. It's powerful for a number of reasons, but mostly it keeps the goal in front of the teacher. It forces teachers to confront the enduring understandings in their course, and it addresses transfer of learning from both previous knowledge and other disciplines. Additionally, it lends itself to a student-centered approach to learning. While UbD was written with the traditional classroom in mind, it is useful as a design framework for any learning experience.

iNacol has recently released a Blended Learning Teacher Competency Framework. This can be used to evaluate individual teachers, to sort of take the temperature of an entire faculty, or as a reflective tool. This is a good starting place for any school that is switching to a blended model.

Blended Learning - Mindset 1

This summer I'm going to train two different groups (so far!) of principals on blended learning. I guess I'm qualified to do this since I've been leading an online high school for the past four years, and the biggest piece to blended learning that high schools don't have is the online part of it.

To prepare for this training, I have been reading a lot of internet articles, blogs, and blended by Michael Horn. I highly recommend it, and I might review it if I ever get time.

One of the biggest hurdles for principals to overcome when introducing blended learning in their schools is changing the mindset from a teacher-centered to a student-centered classroom. Some people call this teacher-lead versus student-centered instruction. Others call it learner-centered instruction instead of student-centered. It doesn't matter what the nomenclature is, it's still the same thing: it's the notion that the teacher doesn't hold all the knowledge in the classroom, and in its ideal form, the teacher is the lead learner.  This is the essence of Dr. Eric Glover's Leading, Teaching, Learning triad.

So what's the difference between teacher-lead instruction and student-centered instruction? The University of Connecticut has a great comparison of the paradigms here.

So how do principals get teachers to move towards student-centered learning? I'll reflect on that in part 2 of this series.