I am making some comments on Blended Learning tomorrow at the Forbes 400 Philanthropy Summit. My goal in doing this is to excite education philanthropists about the potential of Blended Learning to reshape our K-12 classrooms and improve learning outcomes in them.
For those of you who are not familiar with Blended Learning, it is a growing movement in K-12 education in the US and around the world. Some conflate Blended Learning, Online Learning, and Flipped Classrooms. They are related but they are not the same.
Blended Learning, at its core, is a repudiation of the one size fits all model of K-12 education that has been the standard model in the US for at least the last century. Blended Learning uses a combination of classroom redesign, schedule redesign, online learning, peer learning, and tutoring to delivery a personalized learning experience to each and every student.
In its simplest form, I like to think of Blended Learning as a restructuring of the teacher’s role from being the broadcaster at the front of the room to the person who creates the “aha moments” for the student, often in one on one or small group settings. Blended Learning would not be scalable without technology but it is not a technology centric approach to education. It recognizes that we need teachers more than ever in our K-12 system and attempts to leverage teachers for what they are best at and uses technology and process redesign to free the teachers up from the work that can be done in other ways (like content delivery and evaluation). It gets the teachers teaching more. As Michael Horn of the Clayton Christensen Institute says in this Forbes column:
the real insight behind what it is doing is that it is not about the technology first and foremost. It’s about the learning model itself, and technology then acts in service of that model
I am sure there are people in the AVC community that know more about Blended Learning than I do and I would welcome suggestions on case studies, examples, papers, books, and other resources I should know about as I prepare to advise the wealthiest people in the world how to spend their money. Please leave those thoughts and suggestions in the comments.
That said, I have been doing my homework and reading up on Blended Learning. Here are some links I found valuable.
Clayton Christensen Institute’s Blended Learning Resources
A video on Rocketship Charter School’s approach to Blended Learning
A Foundation Strategy Group whitepaper on Summit San Jose’s High School Math program
A New Classrooms web page where they show how they redesign classrooms for Blended Learning
Kahn Academy Course on Blended Learning
A blog post on Summit’s Personalized Learning Software
A Virtual Tour (video) Of Acton Academy
A Forbes article on Teach To One, a Blended Learning program for middle school math
