Module 2: V.) Preparing Students for Blended Learning

It's exciting to think about all these new models, but we also have to remember that our students have logged a lot of hours in models that are very different than this.

So dropping students into a blended learning setting and expecting them just to succeed magically is a little bit like dropping students into a pool that have never seen one before and expecting them to be able to swim.

We love panaceas in K12 education. What I will say is student ownership is not a panacea. And this is one of the first things that innovators figure out. So when you let kids loose, students behave in a broad spectrum of ways. It's almost scattershot, but it's very predictable. So the first thing we see is those students who just take off. They were clearly held back in their previous educational placement. And all of a sudden, you hear about sixth graders doing 1,000 math problems in three weeks. You see some set of kids, they enjoy it, but they languish at what they're good at. They do what's comfortable for them. And then you see another set of kids who want nothing to do with it. They're begging for the teacher to come back. And for most of our innovators today, we're saying, okay, we see this range of responses now. What supports can we put under these students so we can get as many students successful in these environments as possible?

So knowing this, it means that we actually have to train students very intentionally to learn how to take ownership for their learning.

Summit told us a great story about this. What it looked like when one student got dropped into the setting for the very first time last year. This student was staring at his computer screen for the entire class period and literally not doing any work while everyone around him was cranking away. And the teacher said, be calm. He'll come around. Second day, same thing. Students stared at the screen, and they said, be calm. We'll wait him out. It's like a game of chicken, right? By the third day, the teachers were about to break. They were getting really nervous. And towards the end of the third day, the student raised his hand. So the teacher very excitedly, kind of quietly walked over, and the student looked up at the teacher and said, I think I'm falling behind. And it was in that moment that that student really understood he was responsible for his own learning. And he had been in a system up until then that kept him progressing whether he did any work or not.

So when we think about training students to actually take over their learning, we're not talking about training them on how to use the technology systems or like that, we'll get to that later. That's important. But what we're talking about is creating routines that they practice over and over again, systems that really help manage that transition to them owning their learning so that we can build this culture in these schools.

This is learned, not intuitively known.

One of the lessons we did was a what to do when you get stuck lesson. And so you can get stuck in anything whether the wireless network goes down or whether the website won't load or whether there's just something that you're stuck on. So our teachers built a lesson around what to do when you get stuck. And students voiced, drawing from their previous experience, strategies they've used to overcome challenges or get unstuck, then that gets turned into something that is in front of the kids like a checklist of what to do when they get unstuck. We continue to develop these as we explore new parts of our model so that kids can be empowered to develop what their checklist looks like look like to how to get unstuck.

To teach kids that they're self directed learners, we spent a lot of time in the first two weeks of school just really focusing on like different learning styles. Like how do you learn, what way do you learn best? Like how, how do you note, take what are like various note taking strategies and like what works for you and what doesn't? And does watching a video, is that easier for you or is reading something easier for you? And so like just helping them be a lot more self aware of like how they learn best. And I think taking that initial time for them to figure out what works helped them to become self directed learners, which is like a work in progress and not everyone's good at it yet. But the idea that eventually with time and with checking in with a specific teacher each week and like figuring out what their goals are, each kid like knows exactly what they should be working on and what they can work towards on a weekly basis.

Having, you know, we call them here community groups. So these times and places where students get together, it's not academic time, but it's, it's talking about, it's a chance to talk about these kinds of skills and let them reflect and let them discuss with each other, I think that's actually really important because I think they need to be able to take a step back and just kind of process all that information and think about how they can do better.

We've mapped out a technology vision as a school for K through 4. We're saying that by fourth grade, we want our students to be using technology for social change rather than learning how to use technology. So we backward mapped from that vision, where in fourth grade, we want them to be creating graphic art, to be communicating with students in other parts of the country, to be creating plans and communicating those to other people, making a class publication online, we want a backwards map from that. Having third graders use the technology to get information, having them do research projects on what colleges they might be interested in attending one day, and having them do informational research projects on animals or mammals or something that they're learning about in science.

The first two weeks, we just practice procedures. I mean, obviously we have content within the procedures, but we really just focus on those first two weeks, making sure that ready, set, you know, however many times we have to say, eyes on the target, we look for 100%, and we just take those two weeks to do it. And some people might say, oh, well, you're not focusing on the content. But in those two weeks, I get my kids ready to do the 100%, and then it makes learning all the rest of the content so much easier. So those first two weeks are fundamental to what we do here. It's practice, practice, practice, practice, practice.