In this module Michael Horn and several blended‑learning teachers discuss the concrete, day‑to‑day moves that make blended classrooms work. The conversation moves beyond software tools to focus on teacher‑level routines: (1) attention‑signaling strategies that work when many students wear earbuds, including a “stadium‑wave” tap system; (2) entrance and exit procedures that let students resume work where they left off and keep computer stations orderly, exemplified by the “knuckle‑keyboard” check; (3) managing the higher frequency of transitions inherent in station‑rotation or lab models, stressing tight timing; (4) establishing a help‑seeking hierarchy so students first use online resources, peers, or instructional cues before calling on the teacher, reducing the “whack‑a‑mole” hand‑raising problem; (5) fostering student independence and perseverance through explicit non‑cognitive skill lessons and a shared vocabulary. The teachers share real‑world scripts, signals, and routines that illustrate how blended learning can be disciplined, student‑centered, and scalable.
Chapters
A lot of the conversation about blended learning focuses on like the tools and the software, but it rarely talks about the on the ground techniques and tools that the teacher does in the classroom. And that's where we're going now. What I would call the moves of a blended learning teacher. Now a caveat, this might be a bit in the weeds and if you're not going to be in an actual classroom setting, feel free to skip this next section. But I personally think it's by getting into the weeds that we start to make this real intangible and you can actually start to understand how do we succeed as a teacher in these new kinds of classrooms.
Doug Limeuve wrote this great book, Teach Like a Champion that profiles some of these strategies for getting great student outcomes in traditional classrooms. So we asked the teachers in our blended learning schools what are their strategies for getting great student outcomes and they shared some great strategies and systems.
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Some tools and routines that I used in my blended classroom and that I've seen work in other blended classrooms, definitely you still always need an attention signal. Lots of blended teachers use lots of different signals. But imagine you've got 20, 30, 40, 50 kids with, with earbuds in and they're staring at their screen. They're not gonna hear your ding, they're not gonna hear your clap or your stomp or whatever it might be. And so I've actually done a lot of kind of stadium style wave with kids where I might tap a kid on the shoulder with two fingers, the first kid, and they put their hand up. But then they, or I'm sorry, before they put their hand up, they know to tap the next kid and the next kid and it kind of waves around the room. And honestly, the attention signal can take a little longer than a normal kind of classroom attention signal. But that's the sort of thing that we figured out.
Think about the act of starting a class and how teachers do what we call a do now or some sort of launching activity.
In a blended classroom, teachers and students need entrance procedures and they need exit procedures. One of the things I like about a blended classroom is that if your kids are walking in, you don't need to create a do now or a warm up or anything like that. The do now or warm up for those kids for whom it's their turn on the computers, it's go to your computer and start just get right back to work wherever you were when you logged out the last time, Whether the last time was an hour ago or two weeks ago or whatever it was. When it comes to an exit procedure, I think it's really important that kids, much like the old adage, you know, when we're off hiking and camping, we're gonna try and leave it cleaner than we found it, that you want to be really clear with kids about what you want the computer stations to look like when they exit. So I used to do one knuckle keyboards, which meant the kids would put their knuckle there. And that was the space between the edge of the table and the keyboard. And then we'd look down the rows and we could see basically what was correct. And it really helped kids understand because wires get crisscrossed and tangled, that this is this station's mouse and keyboard, and everything is the way it's supposed to be. And it gives that kind of structure and order, and then you can dismiss. And I found that it helped bring kind of an. An element of rigor to the classroom, Just a physical maintenance of the space.
In blended learning, there are often more transitions than in a traditional classroom. Just think about a station rotation model where students are rotating between the online learning and small group instruction. Or think about a lab model where students are rotating from the learning lab and then into the traditional classrooms. Managing these transitions and making them tight and really fit well with the learning schedule and is really critical.
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One.
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In a typical class, we simply ask students to raise their hand for support. But in a blended class, that might look different.
When we first see students enter environments where they can learn at their own pace, we see the ping pong effect is what we call it. And students don't know what to do. Their hands start shooting up. The teacher's looking around. There's 20 hands, and they don't know who to respond to. And if you were to put a camera at the top of the room, you would just see them. It's like whack a mole. They're ping ponging around the room. And pretty consistently, we've seen folks who are thinking about pedagogy and basically inventing pedagogy on the fly, but really getting to the same place where here's a hierarchy of things that you need to explore when you need help as a student. And some of that is the online resources before you. Some of that is knowing to turn to a peer next to you. Some of that is knowing who the expert is in the room, either teacher or peer. Some of it's reading the instructions again, some of it's asking the teacher, some of it's asking the resource person that's around. But really helping kids know what resources are available to them is what but allows the teacher to free up their time in a way where they can use it really strategically.
Getting help in a blended classroom, you need a routine on blended, on getting help. And I like to have a really high bar that the kids, that the teacher doesn't be the helper when the kids are online for a few steps down the road. So in a blended classroom, as in any classroom, kids are going to need help. And one of the things that I think is really important is that kids have a long Runway of kind of working and trying to help themselves and be as self directed and independent as possible. So in my, what I've seen sometimes is that a kid might not actually raise their hand and get the teacher's help for maybe two or three days worth of sessions on the computer, struggling and working their way through because they're doing things like taking the hints, watching the videos that support checking another website, trying to master that concept in another program that teaches it a different way, and bringing the learning then back into the original program, maybe quietly checking with a neighbor, lots of strategies that I want the students to use before they raise the hand looking for in class. Human teacher support.
One of the most challenging things in working with students when they show up here is that they're used to putting their hand in the air and having a teacher answer their question and, and do the learning for them. So we've had a lot of work to undo or things for students to unlearn. It's taken time and it's taken intentional lessons that our teachers have built around how you can be challenge seeking, how you can shift your strategies, all of the non cognitive skills that go along with developing perseverance and grit. We've built lessons for those and having a common vocabulary and common lessons goes a long way, especially working with our young sixth graders.
