Education Jamba Juice

Mixing Ingredients for Optimized Education

A presentation by Calvin Hoff Personalizing Instruction to Accelerate Student Learning

Tom Nixon, Instructor

Reflections on Blended Learning and Personalization as presented in…

Blended Learning is more than just adding

online learning to the mix…

Blended learning combines both face-to-face learning experiences and online learning content and tools for personalizing instruction. That mix then creates optimum conditions for a fundamental shift in the instructional model. The emerging instructional design moves beyond educator roles in traditional, one-size-fits-all classrooms and transforms learning experiences to result in personalized learning opportunities that make the most of teaching and learning. This transformation is enabled by both teachers and students utilizing technology to accomplish the shift toward personalization by design.

Simply adding online computer games or videos to a student’s day or homework time doesn’t count as blended learning. Neither does rolling a laptop cart into a school. Nor does it mean that students are isolated at their keyboards with no social interaction.” – Education Elements, 2012

The instructional design includes:

FLEXIBLE PACING DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION IMMEDIATE INTERVENTION ANYWHERE, ANYTIME LEARNING

It’s not that educational models haven’t taken advantage of all of the above in centuries past, it’s just that now technology has the potential to truly democratize education.

A Blended Learning Environment Offers: Transformed instructional design models that provide for optimizing personalized learning. Students have an individual student profile of their history and performance over time. Immediate supports and services available to students having difficulty demonstrating proficiency or with gaps in knowledge and skills. Multiple pathways to success.

BLENDED LEARNING IS JUST A TOOL TOWARDS PERSONALIZED EDUCATION

It’s all about the student!

Published Online: February 19, 2010 COMMENTARY Why Did the Gates Small-High-Schools Program Fail? Well, Actually It Didn’t By David Marshak David Marshak is a lecturer in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University, in Bellingham, Wash., and is a professor emeritus at Seattle University.

During the last decade, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s small-high-schools program funded the growth of the Big Picture high schools, founded by Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor (34 Big Picture high schools in 17 states). These small, personalized high school programs graduate 92 percent of their students on time.

IMPRESSIVE! RIGHT?

Critical to success are four common values and structures: • Each small high school is a separate school, not a program or an academy within a larger school. Thus, each school has its own leadership and budget. • Each small high school has a clearly defined mission and values, to which its leaders and teachers are deeply committed. • Each small high school in its own way focuses on personalizing education for its students. This value has two manifestations: a commitment to deeper, more significant relationships between students and teachers in which teachers accept greater responsibility for advising students as well as instructing them; and a curriculum that, to some meaningful extent, relates to students’ immediate lives, interests, concerns, and ambitions. • Each small high school hires teachers who are committed to the values of personalized education and who want to engage students within these more profound personal relationships.

Elliot Washor has explained how small, personalized high schools work. The following conditions are necessary, he writes, if we want “all youth to experience productive learning”: • Relationships: Do my teachers care about my interests and me? Can I work with and learn from adults who share my interests? • Relevance: Do I find what the school is teaching to be relevant to my career interests? • Choice: Will I be able to choose what, when, and how I will learn? • Challenge: Do I feel sufficiently challenged in doing this learning and work? • Practice: Will I have an opportunity to engage in deep and sustained practice of those skills I wish to learn? • Play: Will I have opportunities to explore and to make mistakes without being chastised for failing? • Authenticity: Will the learning and work I do be regarded as significant outside of schools? • Application: Will I have opportunities to apply what I am learning in real-world contexts? • Time: Will there be sufficient time for me to learn at my own pace? • Timing: Can I pursue my learning out of the standard sequence?

Success stories are inspiring! BUT WHAT ABOUT THE WRECKS?

How does personalized learning deal with the lazy and/or unmotivated student?

If we learn from our mistakes, why is it all we hear about are the glowing success stories?

ONE SIZE FITS ALL?

Not every subject adapts equally well

to blended learning.

How does rapid capture of student performance data work for acting?

The proposed models are data driven… But not everything can or should be reduced to quantifiable results.

Personalized learning in theatre is no problem.

Every acting assignment is about personal choices.

Every Script Response allows students their choice of any script.

Students choose a play to see for writing a Play Review.

Students often self-select project groupings or choose to fly solo.

The challenge I face is finding a way to meaningfully incorporate online learning into my theatre curriculum.

Students find reference material to add content to a play review.

Or to find a summary for the script they never got around to reading.

And there is the occasional eager beaver who explores a topic just for the thrill of learning to feed their passion about an area of theatre.

But isn’t that just what we used to do in the library? Seems to me, there’s nothing that is truly the online education that is an important part of Blended Learning.

It seems to me that theatre is not well suited for online learning.

Sure, the internet can be useful for research, just as books are, and providing video references, as books are not, but I have yet to find anything available to make theatre a likely candidate for personalized learning via blended learning.

Everybody likes a well mixed drink.

It’s a bit science and art, psychology and timing to get education right (to say nothing of politics!) It’s worth the effort, long as it may take, to personalize education as best we can. The right mix of ingredients is a healthy and desired alternative to the same old same old of education as we know it.

It will really help, however, if we are not all forced to swallow the same drink!