3. meet us
DeLaina Tonks Sarah Weston Jenny Dawman Jill Baldwin Laura Hansen
Open High School Open High School Open High School Open High School Open High School
Director Curriculum/Tech Director Language Arts Mathematics CTE
6. “At the heart of the movement toward Open
Educational Resources is the simple and
powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a
public good and that technology in
general, and the Worldwide Web in
particular, provide an extraordinary
opportunity for everyone to share, use, and
re-use knowledge.” -The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
36. Average Score
Rubric
(3 Points Possible)
Degree of Alignment N/A
Quality of Explanation of the Subject Matter 2 (1 user)
Utility of Materials Designed to Support Teaching 1 (1 user)
Quality of Assessments 1 (1 user)
Quality of Technological Interactivity 3 (1 user)
Quality of Instructional and Practice Exercises 1 (1 user)
Opportunities for Deeper Learning 0 (1 user)
Data Driven instruction and design is another ‘best practice’ of Open High School.
One of the most powerful things you can do, as a teacher, is to use the LMS to help you target where your curriculum is working and where it is not. One of the first places teachers are first to examine are assignment and test results. As teachers, we often associate grades with concept mastery, and when teaching outside of an LMS, in a traditional classroom, that is usually the only thing we have to look at.But grades don’t always tell the whole story. Let’s say I had a high number of students getting A’s on an assignment. Does that mean my lesson was successful? Did the students master the objectives? Maybe. Or maybe my assessments were too easy. Maybe it only measured prior knowledge? Maybe Maybe. That’s where learning management systems are powerful; we can examine other areas of our lessons to answer the question , “Was my lesson successful?”Our teachers is to utilize the LMS to show actual student use of the course resources. Which activities are being accessed the most? Which are being skipped? If a particular resource is being skipped, it is a red flag to the teacher than they need to examine this lesson. Is the interactive boring? Or are students burnt out after the videos and lose interest?. How can the teacher re-structure the lesson to keep students engaged? Viewing student usage of lesson resources is powerful information for a teacher to have.Our teachers can then take it even farther. They can track individual and group use of course activities and assignments. If a particular resource looks like it is being undervalued, they can then go and see which students are accessing it. Who is it appealing to? High level students? Low level students? That kind of information is powerful when it comes to improving a lesson.Most online teachers look to student activity logs to gauge how a student spends their time, but this is also very valuable information when it comes to improving curriculum. After identifying high, middle, and low level students, you can then go examine their class activity logs and get a detailed view of how the student navigates your class. How does an A student approach your materials? They had 10 views on a resource, but how long are they spending on it? When our teachers combine these tools available in the LMS, including assessment scores, individual question analysis, tracking of resource use, and patterns in student behavior, they have real, rich data on which to base targeting changes in their curriculum.
I have shown you how our teachersuse data to target their curriculum. That’s the more long-term goal, to improve the course. The more immediate concern for teachers, however, is HOW ARE MY STUDENTS DOING? Are they on track? Are they getting it? Online teachers don’t necessarily SEE the students everyday. We don’t have the visual clues on a students’ participation level that is really easy to pick up on in the brick and mortar classroom. So online teachers need a quick and effective way to ‘take the temperature’ of their students.Our teachers regularly track students exact minutes working in their class. That’s powerful information. This can help teachers target students who are struggling. It is important to know if one of the factors in their low performance is time related. We use our LMS and a 3rd party SIS tool to help our teachers take that classroom data and put it all together in a nice package. Grades, assignments completed, and last activity in the course. Again, the immediate goal is to target students and then RESPOND. Quickly. Teachers naturally track students, in their heads. But teachers’ degree of success in doing that varies dramatically. In the traditional classroom, I made decisions based on gut reactions. My gut is pretty good. But my ‘gut’ let’s thing slip through the cracks. Now? I made decisions based on data, coupled with my gut-teacher-instincts. And that’s what we train our teachers to do too. It is a much more effective combo.
The down side? Actually training the teachers to use the tools/reports used for data gathering, dissemination, and analysis– and then, most importantly, to take action. We have a phrase we use at Open High-- NO analysis-paralysis. Data can be overwhelming– we do not want our teachers sitting at their computers, eyes spinning, frozen because they don’t know what to do with the vast amounts of data generated in online learning. The key to using data effectively is training, training, and re-training your teachers.
The last ‘best practice’ I want to share with you is our teaching model– which is designed to empower our teachers and promote educational entrepreneurship.
At Open High School, we don’t hire facilitators or learning coaches– we hire full time teachers. Licensed. Highly qualified. We rarely hire part-time teachers. We almost exclusively avoid teachers who are already employed full-time, looking for a second job. We are not looking for 2nd tier teacher population that can’t cut it elsewhere. We test, interview, and audition prospective teachers to find the super stars. We are blunt and honest with the amount of work and effort required to teach at Open High School. We pay them well. But we do not keep teachers whose performance does not measure up. This type of educational-atmosphere requires teacher buy-in. There is a high level of accountability, ownership, and transparency in teaching at our school. You can’t hide– your work, performance, and quality is on display, which though frightening to some, is thrilling and even a bit addictive to the type of teacher that we pursue. I talked about how we use OER first because I wanted to give you a clear understanding of why teaching at Open High requires such hands-on,pro-active, and ambitious teachers. Our teachers are required to be instructional designers, data analysts, and skilled presenters– it is built into their job. Which means it is not for everyone.
We do a lot of sifting in our hiring process, but because of this, if you walked into any of our faculty meetings, you would likely be immediately drawn into a discussion between teachers about their newest group project, with a 3rd jumping in to share how that could be applied to a cross-curricular activity in their course. Most of our meeting time is spent in informal professional development, with teachers sharing the best practices they have employed in their classrooms—and the other teachers immediately taking those ideas and implementing them that next week. If you sat behind any of our teachers, while they worked on their computer, you would see on-going chats not just with students, but with other teachers, discussing common students, projects, tech challenges, and offering support. Our teaching model encourages and actually requires our teachers to collaborate, connect, and cooperate. When this happens, it is pure teaching-magic. I have had many of our teachers tell me that they have never had so much peer support and collaboration in a teaching job--- and are shocked to find that these close connections are built in a (mostly) online setting. This comment used to surprise me, but not anymore.
We have found that these three best practices: OER + Data + Teaching Model– have helped us create a culture of collaborative innovation– that has in turn, set the stage for continued refinement of Open High School. Which is exactly what we are going for.
