11.26.16

Washed-out faces smiled up at me from the past: crew cuts on the boys, bobbed or curled hair on the girls, bib overalls and flower-print dresses and plain white t-shits, my father a skinny ten-year-old grinning obediently among them.
I sat at my parents' kitchen table. I held a red vinyl folder. It was a photo album assembled for an elementary class reunion. The front cover read "Lott, TX, 1956-57" written in swooping black marker.
A page was dedicated to every student. Below each flashbulb-blanched snapshot, composed in studiously slanted cursive, was a photocopied account of the pupil's life, a writing assignment somehow salvaged by a self-appointed historian or else saved decades into retirement by their teacher. It was Thanksgiving break. I had no lessons to plan, no essays to grade. And so I examined all twenty-six pages like an archeologist with a magnifying glass blowing away chalk dust.
They were rural Central Texas children.
They liked baseball and rock collecting and their mama's chocolate cake and Rin-Tin-Tin on the family television set.
They were the offspring of farmers, carpenters, railroad workers, men who earned a wage with their hands. Their mothers were almost uniformly housewives, proud, scrupulous, matronly.
The children themselves all hoped to grow up to be their parents. To earn a living and to have a life like the one they knew and understood. A simple life, and a good life.
But life in our new century has changed, digitized, on-demand, and in high resolution.
Turning to the last brad-bound page, I was met with a wide shot. A small classroom. Tall windows. Sunlight streamed on wooden floorboards presided over by a young hickory stick of a teacher whose job it was to teach the fundamentals. Rows of boys and girls sat up straight in their desks, looking forward to recess, perhaps, but equally optimistic about the future. It was a future that could be theirs if they only learned to read and write and cipher and, more importantly to their parents, if they were good and listened to their teacher.
Pondering this last gray photograph, I realized something: a paradigm shift, as we like to say in the buzzy jargon of education.
These students were taught to be upright citizens of their community; we now must prepare students to be adaptable citizens of the world.
This is difficult.
This is dynamic.
This is the goal of blended learning.
There is less certainty in today's world. Few children aspire to become their parents. Fewer parents have jobs that their children will be able to inherit. Much has happened since that black-and-white moment was captured on film, much yielded to the inexorable forces of progress. Yet like that prim schoolmarm of the 1950s, our objective as educators is still to prepare young people for the life that awaits them.
That was the goal in Lott, TX, circa 1956.
And that must remain the goal of blended learning in Birdville ISD, circa 2016.

10.31.16

Cycles.
Seasons, systems, celestial rotations.
From large to small and back again, our universe wheels along orbital ellipses that are predictable.
This predictability is not off-putting; it is instead infinitely powerful.
Predictability arises from patterns, and patterns are sustainable. Chaos is not tolerated. When an aberration occurs, the pattern either alters to incorporate it elegantly or moves to reject it utterly.
As in the cosmos, so in the classroom:
Warm-up, min-lesson, work time, debrief--this forms the standard instructional pattern: I do, we do, you do.
So where does this pattern, this lesson cycle, fit in the blended learning model?
It would seem at first glance that, despite its station rotations, there is no lesson cycle when students are working independently at their own pace on differentiated or personalized activities. Or perhaps the patterns still exists, but the august "I" in that equation no longer refers to the classroom teacher. That venerated personal pronoun now indicates an online module or a guiding peer.
This is a struggle for many teachers.
Blended is dynamic. Blended is progressive. But does blended exclude a key elements of the lesson cycle?
Does blended presume that students--not just teenagers, but human learners in general--are equipped to grappled with rigorous, higher-order concepts without explicit and direct instruction, the inaugural stage in the lesson cycle?
I don't believe it does.
I believe that our new instructional model is not just dynamic, but it is also flexible. Blended learning operates within certain prescribed parameters--data-driven instruction, student agency, flexible grouping, station rotations--yet it is agile enough to adapt, to change, to accommodate in order to thrive.
I believe that student performance will shape the trajectory of learning.
If direct instruction in required, then blended will allow for it. If students can learn collaboratively or autonomously, then blended will embrace that too.
Systems are sustainable.
Blended has systems, but those patterns are still evolving, still altering, adapting, accommodating, and subtly, sometimes infinitesimally changing.  
Just like our universe.



     

10.17.16

Today my creative writing classes worked on composing Six Word Memoires as part of our creative nonfiction unit. This had me thinking about drafting six word reflections for our English I blended learning initiative. Here are the results:

Leverage student
agency
by differentiating
instruction.

That's a nice one. But does differentiation truly engender student agency? Maybe this would be more accurate:

Differentiate instruction
by leveraging
student agency.

Given our fast-paced, digitally-driven, consumer-oriented society, here is another one, a more pointed and poignant commentary on technology and digital natives :

Invention is
the mother
of necessity.

I rather like the inversion in that one--indicative, perhaps, of the upended power structure and lesson flipping in our blended classrooms. Students are teachers. Teachers are students. "We have to let go of the idea that in order for students to learn, we have to teach them," to quote a blended expert. Sometimes I agree. Or at least I'm working on it.

Does all reflection have to be done online? Certainly digitally documenting our shared blended journey is valuable and has its place. But I wonder what quiet, solitary thinkers like Emily Dickinson would say... I reflect on blended learning all the time--looking out windows, running in my neighborhood, sitting behind my desk at lunch. So here's a last one, just for me:

I still
have some
untweeted
thoughts...

Success: Students have adapted to station rotation routines.
Challenge: How do you personalize learning for each student each day within the current system?
Goal: To take more risks within the blended model.











   


      

09.26.16

This week students were organized according to their performance on a short formative assessment for station rotations. Data-determined groups annotated selected sections of the Odyssey, engaged in an online discussion examining archetypes and the Hero's Journey, and analyzed figurative language in a poem written by a 20th century author based on characters and events in the Odyssey.
Success: Student engagement was heightened by a short creative writing assignment or literary narrative in which students exercised agency by choosing from a range of prompts or plot points.
Challenge: Selecting portions of the Odyssey to study while excluding other sections proved difficult.
Goal: To foster greater student agency during station rotations. 

09.02.16

Blended Learning, week two:
Station rotations went smoothly overall. The students proved hardy and adaptable. They remain a source of familiarity and comfort among the uncertainty and risk inherent in adopting our innovative new model.
Not all students completed all stations, however. Most rotated successfully through two substantive pre-AP stations this week. And that's okay with me. I am learning to accept that not all activities will be completed by all students. I'm also learning to adopt a more holistic approach to grading.
The English I PLC has coalesced into a cohesive, supportive, and creative unit.
Success: Today my students asked to work on their Canvas flipped lesson after completing the STAR reading screener.
Challenge: I need a strategy for station design that allows for depth while meeting the required rotation schedule.
Goal: To embrace flexibility.
    

07.16.16

     Blended learning, what does it mean?
     Like many teachers, my first impression was that "blended" meant nothing more than what the term itself implies: the integration of technology into the traditional classroom setting. I envisioned desks in rows filled with students bent over laptops, listening to lectures or watching videos while I assumed a supervisory role and walked around the room, nodding here, redirecting there, effective but somewhat sad in my detachment from my beloved content. Not an entirely bad scenario given the digital orientation of our students, but a deflating one for an English teacher who has invested almost two decades developing his own structures and strategies that have proven somewhat successful.
     Fortunately, over the past several months, my understanding of blended learning has evolved. Horn and Staker's book Blended placed this seemingly abrupt shift in a historical context--a heady read, assuredly, but an integral one for understanding the mercantile forces driving what they term "disruptive innovation." (I even liked the chapter on ships.) Where this first book was informative, however, Tucker's Blended Learning was applicable. Horn and Staker showed me that blended learning is a necessary stage in a natural continuum; Tucker, herself a former English teacher, showed me how the blended model can be implemented in my classroom. Instead of traditional rows of desks, I now see students creating, communicating, and collaborating at lively work stations. Instead of monitoring computer screens, I see myself designing flipped lessons, tutoring small groups, and very much engaged in differentiated acts of learning.
    Differentiated acts of learning?
    I rather like that phrase. A bit overwrought maybe, but then an English teacher is still an English teacher. I've learned that about blended learning, too...