4. 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.
5. 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
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. BLENDED LEARNING IS JUST A TOOL TOWARDS
PERSONALIZED EDUCATION
It’s all about the student!
9. 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?
10. 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.
11. 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?
13. 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?
14. ONE SIZE
FITS ALL?
Not every subject
adapts equally well
to blended
learning.
How does rapid
capture of student
performance data work
for acting?
15. The proposed models
are data driven…
But not everything can or should be reduced to quantifiable results.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. 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.
21. It will really
help, however,
if we are not
all forced to
swallow the
same drink!
