Effective integration of online learning activities together with in-person teaching approaches is an essential part of the core knowledge and skills of blended teaching. By the end of this chapter you should be able to meet the following objectives:
Online integration is at the very heart of blended teaching. This is where you, as a teacher, can consider what specific online practices can help you address the problems of practice you encounter when teaching the different content areas. This chapter will help you explore ideas and possibilities.
Although blended teaching can seem overwhelming, experienced blended teachers say that the best way to go about this process of starting to blend is to think big but start small. Small beginnings allow you to wet your toes in the process, focus on specific pedagogies and activities, see the benefits and drawbacks, and make improvements on a small scale without becoming overwhelmed by the process. Go ahead, test the water—you will be swimming in no time!
“Often teachers don’t have time to do what they do best because they are too busy lecturing and assessing students. Like many of you, I remember as a middle school teacher, giving a lecture to students and then having to repeat that lecture five times throughout the day, using the same examples, stories, and jokes. By the end of the day I was exhausted from the repeated performances and may have only had a handful of meaningful conversations with students. I realized that I wasn’t spending my time doing what I felt I did best, which was providing individual help and encouragement to students. By offloading the presentation of content to technology, I could have spent my time more productively working with students one-on-one and in small groups.
Some worry that machines will replace teachers. I worry that teachers are spending too much time acting like machines.”
- Jered Borup
How ready are you to integrate both online and face-to-face teaching in your classroom? You can use the link above to find out.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, there are many different blended teaching models. These models are structures and patterns that help teachers to organize online and in-person learning activities for a blended classroom. How a course is structured depends on many factors including the physical learning environment, the school’s access to technology, the age and ability of the students, and the length of class time. While there are innumerable ways to structure a blended course, we will focus on four models in this book: flipped, station rotation, lab rotation, and flex.
Traditionally students receive direct instruction at school and then apply what they learned at home on homework. However, students commonly get stuck on homework and don’t have the resources or support to complete their work, creating a frustrating situation for you, your students, and their parents. The flipped classroom reverses that order so that before students come to class, they receive the direct instruction via online videos. Then, when they come to class, students can complete the “homework” and receive one-on-one or small group instruction. This enables them to have the necessary support when they get stuck.
What to Look For: Observe how moving to a flipped classroom has changed the teaching and learning of this classroom!
A drawback to the Flipped Model is that it requires students to have access to technology and the internet at home. As a result, some teachers have adapted the flipped model by having students watch the videos in the classroom, as seen in the following video. Similarly, some teachers may find that the station or lab rotation models are a better approach--the next models we will be discussing.
Reflection question: How could you adapt the flipped learning model for your classroom?
The station rotation model is perhaps the most commonly used model--especially at the elementary level. This will be especially familiar to you if you’ve ever done rotating stations in your classroom such as the Daily 5. Rotating stations are great for teachers because it affords them the opportunity to work with students one-on-one or in small groups. The station rotation blended model is different because in at least one of the stations, students are learning using technology. When it’s done well, the learning program that students are using in their individual time center will provide the teacher with important assessment data that they can then use to differentiate their instruction when the student comes to their center. Often only one station requires the students to use technology so this model is particularly helpful when each student doesn’t have access to a device at the same time.
This model is also highly adaptable and may look different for you compared to the teacher next door teaching the same learning objectives. It can be set up in a way where students have choice in their path of their learning and the stations they access, or you can set up a schedule for when students are working on certain tasks at a specific time.
What to Look For: Notice how the teacher’s station organization and structures direct student learning and behavior.
Your expectations may also differ based on the subject being taught. For instance, in math you may give students flexibility for what practice stations they access while in Language Arts you may be more purposeful with your grouping to ensure you meet with certain students all at the same time for small group reading and writing.
The stations can be organized differently based on the technology being used. For instance, Angela Johnson’s kindergarteners use iPads that students can easily take from center to center. To help organize and guide their center time, Angela uses QR codes (see the video below).
Reflection question: How could you use technology such as QR codes to help organize your students’ learning in a station rotation model?
The lab or whole-group rotation model is similar to the station rotation model except that students rotate as a whole group on a set schedule or at your discretion. This commonly involves students leaving the classroom to go to a computer lab or you, as the teacher, bringing a mobile lab into the classroom. Your role in this model is also different from the station rotation model. Rather than spending the majority of your time working with students at a small group station, you spend your time working more freely with students throughout the room.
This is perhaps the simplest blended model, one that we have seen for decades. However, an important criteria in this model is that there are meaningful connections between the off-line and online activities.
What to Look For: Look to see how the lab or whole group rotation may be easier to manage than the station rotation.
In the flex model the majority of learning occurs online. Because of this, students have a high level of flexibility to work at their own pace based on their individual needs. You can then use assessment data from the online activities to target where your student needs support through one-on-one or small group sessions. This model takes a high level of planning and preparation. It may occur in conjunction with a content-specific adaptive learning program. Among these are ALEKS10 (Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces), which is a learning system that helps teach high school math including algebra, geometry, trigonometry, etc., or SRA FLEX Literacy,11 which is a comprehensive reading and language arts intervention system for struggling readers. Using these adaptive systems, students can move through class content at their own pace, conferencing with you to work through difficult concepts or to receive additional one-on-one or small group instruction.
Some tools such as Imagine Learning12 also have live online tutors that students can conference with when stuck. In some cases, students can also access supports in languages other than the dominant language at the student’s brick-and-mortar school. When implementing this model, you should also carefully consider how to provide the student enough pacing flexibility while also fostering meaningful student-student interactions and teacher support. Watch Video 2.6 to get a better sense of the flex model in action.
What to Look For: How does this teacher decide what to have the students do online and what to have them do in-person?
There is no right or wrong model to use in blended teaching. Therefore, you should select ideas from the various models then combine them in a way that will meet your specific teaching needs. For example, if you are wanting to devote more class time to a specific in-class activity, then you may want to utilize the flipped model. But, if you are wanting more small-group or one-on-one time with students, then you may use elements of the station rotation or lab rotation models. Conversely, if you want students to learn at their own pace online, then you will want to pull from the flex model. You do not need to become loyal to or an ardent devotee of a specific model. Your blended classroom should both use and combine various models to best meet your needs and the needs of your students.
When selecting a model it is important to consider the following technological requirements for each model.
As with all blended models, the flipped classroom model has certain technical requirements that should be considered before implementing the model. The flipped classroom has proved popular because in many ways it is the easiest to implement if the following technological requirements are met:
The station rotation model has the lowest technological requirements:
The flex model has the highest technological requirements of all of the blended learning models:
In the video below, Dr. Chawana Chambers shares some insight on how to decide which learning model is right for your classroom or school. She stresses the importance of selecting a model with equity in mind.
Reflection question: How do issues surrounding equity impact the bended learning model that you adopt?
It can be challenging to know where to start. In the video below, 5th grade teacher, Bridgette Joskow shares how focusing on one activity or using one tool at a time to elevate her student learning helped build her student’s capacity and her student’s confidence when introducing blended learning!
Reflection question: How can you make small changes that lead to a larger impact?
Now that you’ve reflected on some blended learning models, it’s time to consider strategies for creating the actual learning activities. One way to look at these activities is that they are a collection of the following types of interactions: student-content, student-teacher, and student-student interactions (see Figure 2.4). When designing a blended classroom, we blend the online and in-person versions of each type of interaction.
Figure 2.5 shows a quadrant with student-content interaction on the right and student-human interaction (i.e., instructor and peers) on the left. Traditional classrooms typically teach in the bottom half of the quadrant while fully online courses are more in the top half of the quadrant. Blended classrooms, however, can include interactions in all four quadrants.
In fact, “blended” learning implies that we use the online interactions with in-person interactions. Most blended learning will combine digital and physical course content and learning materials. However, for students to have a more meaningful experience, their interactions with you, as the teacher, and with the other students should be also be both on-line and in-person. (Chapter 5 focuses on blending student-teacher and student-student interactions.)
Quality blended teaching will not only have some student-teacher and student-student interactions online, but the use of technology will also make in-person interactions better. For instance, it is often easier for blended teachers to work with students 1-on-1 or in small groups than it is for more traditional teachers because
By working with students in small groups on data driven activities, you are empowered to target your efforts on student needs and misunderstandings. In fact, some of the most powerful learning opportunities that occur in a blended classroom happen offline. As a result, when thinking of the term blended learning you don’t actually need to only picture students on tablets and laptops. Instead Figure 2.6, where a teacher is working with a small group of students, is much more indicative of blended learning. However, it is important to note that digital devices do play an important role in being able to harness the advantages of online learning—a significant element of a blended classroom.
The word “blended” in blended teaching is used intentionally. Blended teaching goes beyond technology integration that simply adds online content or online discussions to an in-person course. The activities should be integrated in such a way that the online activities support the in-person activities and vice versa. It can actually be highly frustrating for students when online components are simply added to a fully in-person class (referred to as the “course and a half syndrome”) because they feel like they have to complete a course (the in-person activities) and a half (the online activities).
One of the most common mistakes novice blended teachers make is to have students engage in both online and in-person activities, without those activities complementing each other. Read the scenario below and see if you can identify the weakness in the blend.
The following scenarios describe some ways that learning activities can blend online and in-person activities:
Learning management that includes specific classroom systems, procedures, and guidelines is especially important in blended courses for four reasons:
What to Look For: Think about which of the systems, procedures, and guidelines from this video could be useful in your blended classroom.
Just as a brick-and-mortar classroom holds physical learning materials, student projects, and spaces where students go to discuss, collaborate, and receive feedback, blended courses also need to have an online environment where students can go for online versions of those same materials and activities. Due to this need, most school districts now have learning management systems (LMS) that help you, as the teacher, organize online content, assignments, directions, projects, discussions, announcements, and feedback.
Many LMSs also help with a different aspect of blended teaching: managing digital distractions. In addition to monitoring students’ in-class behavior, teachers need to manage online behavior, which is easier for students to conceal. LMSs typically provide a wealth of tracking data, including login, time in system, and click data, which can be used to monitor online behavior. In fact, some LMS software now provide you with helpful dashboards that display students’ behavioral data in visual ways that help you to quickly recognize patterns and deficits (see Figure 2.12). In some cases, you may also want to look at the browser history for those students who you suspect may have been off task during class. Some school districts have actually disabled incognito modes on the internet browsers to make it more difficult for students to hide their online behavior. Other schools provide teachers with software that allows teachers to see their students’ screens in real time. Figure 2.12 provides examples of data that can be provided by an LMS to monitor and track student actions while in the online environment.
Two strategies that work very well for helping students stay engaged in the blended environment are the clamshell technique and the screen-time/face-time technique.
In addition to monitoring student behavior in the online setting, blended teachers use many strategies for managing students’ locations and movement during various rotations. The following list outlines some of the strategies that teachers commonly use to guide where students should be during a station rotation.
You can view examples of station management in Video 2.12.
What to Look For: Consider how you could use some of these teachers’ guidelines in your own classroom.
You probably already have many procedures in your classroom that work well for managing student movement. Many of these can be adapted to fit your blended learning style. In the end, it’s important that you find which strategies work best for you.
Technology hardware is expensive and needs to last. Managing hardware is an especially new responsibility for many young students, and it can be hard on you, particularly in classrooms where there are one-to-one devices. Proper handling of devices is one thing, but what about updating software and keeping track of student login information? The following list includes some techniques for managing hardware (the actual computer, tablet, etc.) and software (online programs, apps, games on the device, etc.) in the blended classroom.
Hardware Management:
Software Management:
Again, you probably have some procedure for retrieving class materials and getting ready to learn in place already. Many of the procedures you already have can be adapted for blended learning. What matters most is that you find some procedures that work for you, and more importantly, work for your students.
Once appropriate routines are in place, feel free to put rules in place that let students help their peers with devices, questions, and routines. Students can usually follow routines and get answers to simple questions with the help of their peers. If you take time to answer every question, or lead every transition, you will lose valuable instructional time. The following ideas are ways for your students to help each other (and in turn, help you) manage blended learning.
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