Category Archives: Blended

Pandemics, Emotional Roller Coasters, and Edwige Simon

Posted on by
Way back in March when this pandemic became a significant part of our reality, I innocently thought that it would last one to two months, maximum. I thought to myself “okay, it’s no big deal (it was a big deal) don’t panic (I panicked), we’ll stay in our houses and after shelter in place, everything will be fine” (it wasn’t fine.)
And now, here we are, nearly five months later and not much has changed…back in March I truly didn’t fathom that we would continue to plan for having online classes, and hybrid classes in the better case scenario. When the months passed, and I came to the harsh reality that I wasn’t going to be able to teach how I naturally teach and how I’ve always thrived and was comfortable and I was going to return to the chaotic dumpster fire that was remote distance learning (I’m being dramatic), I was definitely in denial and disbelief…

I wallowed, and had a minor pity party and after I collected my thoughts, I did what any normal person would do in a time of emotional crisis: I went to ALLUDO! And I saw how many tasks there were to do, and I closed my computer immediately and watched Netflix instead.  🙂

But when I finally decided to be productive, I chose to take some online courses that were offered through Coursera. (And I became overwhelmed again…this was really an emotional roller coaster for me). I chose to take the Blended Language Learning through University of Boulder Colorado. Let me tell you: THIS COURSE WAS FANTASTIC (in my opinion). The course was taught by Edwige Simon, and I’m assuming she designed the course, and I’ve got to say, her teaching online style really appealed to me:

Edwige Simon
My takeaways from this course that I have and will continue to apply to my online classes are:
  • Divide the class into 3 parts: teacher presence, social presence (where students interact with each other) and cognitive presence (where students interact with the material and their own thinking). I took this another step and decided I’m going to organize my classes in that order and students will have the last bit of class be autonomous where they have the freedom to work on the assignment individually right in that moment, or take a break and continue to it that night or in a few days. Breaks from the screen and brain breaks are so essential (as I’ve come to find out after Zoom after Zoom on PD days)
  • Backwards planning is important for online courses. What do you want the student to eventually know at the end of the lesson? What is the culminating (summative) idea and lessons you want the students to learn? Then you start planning what activities and assignments will help achieve that objective.
  • The way the class itself was structured gave me a phenomenal example of how organized, clear and structured the class was: It was composed of a short video, followed by a short powerpoint, a small formative quiz (which gave feedback and multiple tries), a discussion board, a reading assignment, a written assignment, a few more videos and quizzes, followed by a summative test at the end. There was immediate feedback, and the structure was routine, clear, and consistent. I loved the seamless transitions and routine that I knew what to expect for every assignment and there were no surprises and no pressure. 
  • There was an “integrity” portion where students had to click a box agreeing to academic integrity and sign their name that they would use their own words and no outside resources otherwise there would be consequences. I’m not sure how I would’ve gotten caught, however just that reminder definitely was on my conscience and I didn’t use outside resources, even though I was tempted. I liked this feature a lot.
  • There was an approximate time slot for how long assignments should take. I found these time approximations to be overestimated, and assignments that took me 2 minutes were estimated to take up to 20 minutes. I liked this feature, however because it allowed me to budget my time and prioritize assignments. In my classes, I will give a more general time frame like “short, medium, and long” so that students are able to budget their time. 
I will try to emulate this structure as much as I can, because I really enjoyed how the class was structured and delivered. I felt no pressure to perform, and it was a relaxed learning atmosphere. I was eager to write this blog post despite not having put the strategies to practice, because I was afraid I’d forget, however I think it’s important in building my course right now. I may update this post to see how it all goes with students, but I’m optimistic. 

Blended Strategies

Posted on by

I have a problem and would like to know if anyone can help. I have a love/hate relationship with blended classes. I love the quality student to teacher and student to student contact time afforded by blended classes. I hate how many students do not make good use of their out of class blended time. I hate how it seems there must be a trade-off between quality class time and hit and miss out of class time. There must be a better way.

Just to add another layer, I would like my student teams to work together on some of their out of class blended days. Students see the benefits of teaming. When I have teams sit on the patio or in the hall, they can complete much work in their teams. Just having that extra space that allows them to not be sitting back to back in a crowded classroom really helps, but they still need supervision. Instead of monitoring a group discussion, I must patrol the teams to answer questions and to insure students are staying on task. There must be a better way. There is too much good about blended classes to give them up just because there are some problems.

One other great attribute of blended classes is that they prepare students for college. I still vividly remember when the president of San Jose State back in 1965 addressed my freshman class. He said he really appreciated the opportunity to meet all of us this one time because only half of us would make it to graduation. Wow, a fifty percent dropout rate! That really shocked me until I learned how many distractions there are in college. The current average college dropout rate seems to be about thirty percent. That’s still a lot of students who never learn how to discipline themselves to study independently. What better place to learn independent study habits than in high school? In college there are not helicopter parents and no incentive for teachers to be helicopter teachers. Blended classes can provide that transition students need to be successful in college.

So, here is the question. How do we wean students from depending on a closed and structured classroom environment without losing them to the myriad of distractions right outside the classroom door?

This second semester I am going to try some “in house” blended teaching. Students will have time on their own outside the classroom, but must stay on campus. Since I will be in the gigantic I-Center, there should be plenty of quiet spaces for students to work. But I need ways to insure they are really working. One idea is to have team members spend the last few minutes of the class time summarizing what they have learned is a short discussion. They will record the discussion and turn in the recording as an assignment. Another is exit tickets. These can be done as a team or individually at the end of the class. The students would not be in class, but it is the same idea. I thought of journals, but so far I have found that students tire of them and I don’t have time to look at them. Maybe I am doing it wrong. This is not a long list of ideas. I would like to have a few more, especially ones that work.

I don’t want to go into this cold turkey. I will have had enough of that after Thanksgiving. Please let me know if you have tried anything to monitor blended independent time work. What has worked for you? What has not worked for you? Am I the only one who thinks about this?

A Student-Centered Approach to Teaching a Novel

Posted on by
This past October, I went to the iNACOL conference in
Orlando, and spent three days in the humid periphery of Disneyworld learning
about blended classes, disruptive innovations, project based learning, place
based learning, student agency, personal pathways, individual assessment and of
course plenty of ways to leverage technology in personalized learning.  I even checked out the virtual reality booth
at the exhibit hall and a coding booth that involved programming robots.  I took pages of notes and felt like I was
bursting with ideas for how I could bring some of this back to my classes.
It is easy to get overwhelmed at conferences, but if I were
to synthesize what I got out of the iNACOL conference, it would be a renewed
faith in the concept of student agency. Over the years I have attempted to give
students choice in my classes by letting them select their own outside reading
books, giving them options for projects, or giving three essay prompts to
choose from instead of one, but I have come to realize that true student agency
is much more comprehensive than offering options.
When students are given a high degree of agency, the
traditional teacher-centered classroom model is blown up.  Metacognitive awareness is central to the experience.  Students are given the opportunity to
determine how they are going to learn the material best and how they are going
to demonstrate mastery.  The teacher is
no longer instructing towards the middle of the class, creating content that
reaches the most students possible, but is collaborating with every single
student.
With three weeks left in the semester, I decided to try
teaching the book Old School in my
English 4 class by giving my students complete autonomy.  Before assigning the novel I took a class
period to brainstorm with my students (seniors, who have years of experience
with ways that novels are taught in high school) to get feedback on what has
worked most effectively for them when they have read books for English
classes. 
The typical approach, in my classes and many English
classes, is to assign reading deadlines to get through the novel.  With each deadline there might be some type
of reading quiz or assessment.  While
everyone is reading the novel at the same pace, I always create activities or
projects that build context and promote deeper understanding of the different
sections of the book.  At the end, there
is almost always an essay.

After talking to my students, I wondered what would happen
if I put it in their hands, and gave them everything ahead of time.  So I wrote a very basic explanation of what
we would be doing with this book and gave it to them before we started
reading.  I told them that they were
responsible for doing the following three things:  having an authentic reading experience,
making connections between the novel and something outside the scope of the
novel, and producing a piece of writing that demonstrated their understanding of
the novel and made relevant connections to the world as they know it.  There would be no reading quizzes, no
lectures, no context-activities, and no prompts for the essay.  This would be their final exam for the
semester.
I also told them that the goal was to demonstrate mastery of
reading the novel and in their piece of writing, and that they would be
assessed on how close they came to mastery for the work that they produced.  Our classes would no longer be structured
with activities that I created, but every day that we would meet, they would be
responsible for determining the best use of their time.  I also told them that since it is a blended
class, only half the class would report on any given day, and that I would be
meeting with every student individually and taking notes on their progress.
This made me extremely nervous, letting go of the reigns
like this.  The book is only about 200
pages, but I suspected it would not exactly be a high level interest book for
many of my students.  I assigned this
Monday of Thanksgiving week and required that my students post a response on
Schoology by Sunday night describing their progress with the book so far.  When I checked Sunday afternoon, only one
student had posted.  I had a brief moment
of panic and scrambled to come up with a back-up plan which mostly included the
types of lessons and activities that I have always given when I teach
books.  I started to doubt this
idealistic notion of agency, and wondered whether my students could actually handle
such academic freedom.  I checked Schoology
again Sunday night, and when I saw that only about eight of my 50 students had
responded, went to bed feeling defeated.
But when I woke up the next morning, I checked Schoology
again to find that the majority of my students had submitted reflections.  I tampered my joy a bit though and wondered
what the content of these responses might be. 
After all, this is not a novel I chose for this class, and would not be
one that I would expect high levels of enthusiasm for.  But as I read through the responses, I was
surprised by the authenticity of the responses, and by the fact that students
were largely enjoying this book.  One
girl, who has never struck me as being a motivated reader, said that she had
gotten completely caught up in the book and was taking a break to write her
response, and anticipated that she would continue reading after she submitted
her reflection.
In the next few weeks, I met with every student individually
several times, discussing the book, their progress and their ideas for the
final written piece.  This is the beauty
of having a blended class where I can have small groups of students come every
day.  For the final reading assessment, I
met with each student individually and discussed the novel.  I looked at their annotations, and mixed up a
variety of questions from the book, trying to probe and ensure that they were
not simply reciting a second-hand plot summary. 
By the end, I was surprised to find that most everyone had read the
book, and that many attributed that to the fact that they were given the
freedom to read it independently, at their own pace.  One of my senior boys told me that this was
the first book he had actually read in high school, and that up to this point,
he had managed to get through all of his English classes by using internet
resources.
When we came back to school last week, I wanted to probe
deeper into this, so I gave my unit evaluations for the two novels my class
read last semester, The Bean Trees
and Old School.  While we spent months on The Bean Trees completing a variety of assignments along with the
reading, only 23% of my students read the entire book.  Almost 37% stated that they read internet
resources instead of authentically reading. 
My Old School evaluation, on
the other hand, indicated that 92% of my students had read the book in its
entirety.
I have been thinking about this for a few days now, and the
skeptical side of me remembers that this is a small sample size (two classes),
and that these are two very different books. 
Students might have been more inclined to like Old School more than The Bean
Trees.  Also, there are scant
internet resources on Old School, so
this probably had some influence on the data. 
But I think it is fair to be optimistic when there were such drastic
results with the same group of students in the same semester with the same
teacher, but two extremely different approaches.  Many of the comments that my students gave in
the Old School evaluation stated that
they appreciated being able to complete the work at their own pace.  Also, these are seniors who will need to be
able to complete their college work independently next fall.

I know that some classes and novels need more scaffolding
than others, but there also seems to be great power in student agency and
autonomy.  For most of my teaching
career, I have been an effective teacher-centered instructor, but I am
beginning to believe that I can be more effective when I create more
student-centered learning environments. 

Blended Thoughts, September

Posted on by
One of my greatest fears as a teacher is stagnation.  This is a challenge in our profession
because there is great satisfaction in achieving mastery of a lesson or unit, only
needing to make minor tweaks and adjustments from year to year.  My first principal, Sister Liam, recommended
that at the end of every year I throw out all the lesson plans I had created
and start from scratch again in the fall. 
While I never had the guts to do that exactly, her advice instilled a
willingness on my part to be flexible and open to reinvention in my
instruction.  So when Hayley asked me
last spring if I would be open teaching three sections of blended English this
year, I saw it as a great opportunity to get knocked out of my comfort
zone. 
Over the summer I took an online class through Stanford on
blended teaching and read as much as I could absorb without feeling overwhelmed.  One thing I realized early on is that a
blended class has many different appearances, and that it is important to
create a model that works for a particular school, subject and student
population.  My starting point for creating
my own blended classes was to ask the question, “What problems in my current
classes can a blended model improve?” 
Often in education, we are pummeled with possibilities for what we can implement
into our classes, but it is essential to identify the problems first before looking
for solutions.  After a bit of
reflection, I realized that there are two primary issues that I believe blended
English classes can address.

Issue One:  The Bell Schedule
Last week I was sitting at the library desk working with
Joan when the bell rang.  There are some
locations around our school, the library desks being one, where that jarring metallic
thought scrambler is especially amplified. 
Throughout a seven period day, the bell rings 16 times, each one an
indication that our students should stand up, shift their attention and move on
to something entirely different.  This
mass Pavlovian response to the ringing of a bell has always struck me as one of
the most unnatural behaviors exhibited in schools.

Throughout the day, students continually enter the realm of
the next class, and teachers, like me, often feel that every one of those
forty-five minutes is essential. 
Sometimes I can get so caught up in my own content that it becomes a
challenge to have empathy, or even recognition, for my students’ challenge of
pivoting from trig identities to a rhetorical analysis to an overview of
mercantilism, on and on until they get home and have piles of homework awaiting them. I
cannot think of any professions (with the exception of teacher) that require
such a halting, fragmented pace.  These
days are exhausting for me, and I at least have the benefit of teaching the
same subject all day.  While I still
believe that it is in our students’ best interest to learn a breadth of
subjects in school, the reality is that our current schedule allows for limited
cohesion in their learning.
A blended model can address this issue.  My students meet twice a week, and complete
the online assignments on their own time. 
They are not required to do English work during the class period that
our days do not meet.  This way, if they
want to work on their chemistry homework during third period because it is still
fresh in their minds, they have the freedom to do so.  Or, they can even take a break if they need
to refresh after a challenging test.  The
flexibility in schedule afforded by blended classes allows students more autonomy
in their learning.  They can identify how
they work best instead of trying to fit within a uniform time model.  Much like college, and careers, they are
expected to complete rigorous work, but are self-determining in how to pace
themselves.
Issue Two:  The Challenge of Teaching Revisions and Differentiated Writing Instruction
One of the most important skills that I try to impart in my
students is to understand that writing is a process.  Good writers understand this and are not
afraid of what Anne Lamott calls “Shitty First Drafts.”  In fact, this blog entry originated with an
island conceit, blended classes being the island and me being some sort of intrepid
explorer.  I’m ashamed to admit that there
was even a message in a bottle for a draft or so.  Thankfully I have enough good sense to
identify my own garbage writing and vaporize it with the delete button.  My students are still learning this though,
and sometimes struggle differentiating between their best ideas and their still
“emerging” ideas.  With the stress of
deadlines and their own procrastination, they often shoot for good enough in
their written work.  It is challenging to
get them to accept that deleting sentences that have already been written and
saved can actually be a step forward in their compositions. 
I encourage, and often require, my students to go through a
process of prewriting activities that usually follows a course of brainstorming,
finding evidence and organizing before beginning to write.  I tell them that they should write drafts of
their work and I encourage them to come meet with me to discuss the progress of
their essays.  Some do, but many do
not.  I would love to collect rough
drafts and offer individualized feedback before they turn in their final
drafts, but with the number of students I have this is logistically
impossible.  I can either offer
superficial feedback, or get the drafts back days later when my students’
momentum and enthusiasm has fizzled.  Not
to mention that I generally prefer sleeping at night over reading essays.
While a blended class is no panacea in and of itself, I am
trying to use the schedule to improve my instruction of the writing
process.  My English 4 Blended students
are currently writing an essay on The
Glass Castle, and I am requiring that they meet with me for personal
writing conferences so that we can discuss their progress.  Next week, my classes will meet on Monday as
usual then the other days are broken up into forty minute increments.  During each time period I will have about six
to eight students in my class working on their essays and meeting with me to
discuss the drafts of the work that they have submitted so far.  My hope is that not only does this reinforce
the idea of writing being a process, but that I can offer individualized
instruction to each student so that I can address their various skill levels.
At the risk of another overwritten blog post, I want to conclude
by articulating a few takeaways from my early days of teaching blended classes.
      1.  Planning is totally transformed.  Instead of thinking week to week and filling
days with activities, I     realize that I must plan long term in my blended
classes.  This has forced me to put the
end of unit assessments and learning objectives in the forefront of my
planning, and create activities that build towards those goals.  This has made me think, what are the specific
learning objectives in any given English class? 
We all want our students to get better at writing, reading and critical
thinking, but how do we specifically deconstruct those skills?

2. There is less student contact in a blended
class.  As a teacher who understands the
salesmanship required in convincing students that they should want to read
literature and write essays (despite their strongest inclinations otherwise) I
have always made a concerted effort to connect to my students.  I’m a mostly mellow dude in life, but I know
how to ratchet up the swag during class. 
I make an effort to talk to a few different students every day, ask them about their lives
outside of class and show them that I am invested in all of them as people, not just students. When I
only see them twice a week, it is challenging to build that rapport, and it
sometimes feels like we spend too much time going over a checklist of the work
that they are going to be completing online.

3. I need to improve my online presence.  I am someone who uses technology minimally in
my personal life – I have never even had a Facebook account.  So this is a bit of a steep learning curve
for me because I need to find ways to be present online.  So far, I have learned the importance of
giving feedback to work submitted online promptly, and I sometimes participate
in online class discussions.  I am also trying to contribute regularly to our department blog to get a sense of the type of online work that I ask my students to do.  But I am a
novice and am open to any suggestions that anyone can offer.
On the first day of my blended classes, I told my students
that I will fail sometimes this year.  My
approach is to be attentive, open myself to new ideas, push my ego aside and
learn from my mistakes. I tell my A.P. Language students over and over
again, it is necessary to write bad essays to learn how to write better ones.  Growth mindset is not just for students – it
also needs to be embraced and modeled by teachers.