Signing up for the class was a gamble. A blended learning class had never been offered at the school before, and the teacher had never taught a high school course. On the first day of class, students explained their reasons for choosing the course: the promise of a chance to pursue their own interests; only having to be in class two days a week; the opportunity to try something new; and because they hated history and hoped the class would change that. By the end of the term, both students and teacher realized that they had worked harder than they had expected, but also felt more rewarded than they could have imagined.
A blended learning model can leverage the technology and flexibility many independent schools have to create more authentic and engaging learning opportunities with students. It preserves those things that many independent educators and schools do so well, but it also leverages digital technology to allow for better use of class time and increased flexibility for students and teachers.
Many independent schools are rightfully proud of the high quality classroom instruction their teachers provide. Tossing aside that resource in the name of progress is a foolhardy move. However, ignoring the possibilities technology and new visions of what school offer is equally foolish.
Last year, Cary Academy (North Carolina) offered its first blended learning environment U.S. history course for juniors and seniors. Below we offer some reflections on how the class has combined both traditional and innovative elements to create an engaging and innovative model of learning for the future.
What a Blended Learning Class Looks Like
Teacher Perspective:
While traditional classes at our school meet for five 45-minute blocks per week, the blended learning course meets in person twice a week for 45 minutes. The other periods were spent independently preparing for the next class meeting, collaborating on group projects, or pursuing independent research. Responses to readings or videos, projects, and papers were all posted to a publicly accessible blog. Students were assessed based on individual and group projects and their contributions to the class blog. Blog comments were required to both address posted material for the class meeting and engage other students’ comments related to the material.
Student Perspective:
In my other history classes, I primarily memorized dates of wars and presidential inaugurations in order to spit it back out on a test. In Blended Learning, we worked on in-depth, long-term projects in which we had to motivate ourselves to research and learn about the topic and offer our insights into that topic. Alongside the projects, we had discussions about the readings and our reactions to them. I got the most out of this process because, while I was subconsciously learning facts, I also actually remembered the stuff we talked about. I took the initiative to investigate more into U.S. history because I actually liked learning about it in this class. As a result of my class project on the history of race and sports in the U.S., I became more interested in current events. I subscribed to daily email news updates from several newspapers, so I could be informed about what is happening in the world. I also think more critically about the news that’s being reported, rather than just accept it at face value. The lesson for schools seems clear: it’s OK to stray from the accepted standard of always having class in class. We still had class; we just didn’t spend all of our time actually in the classroom.
A Model for Today’s Student
Teacher Perspective:
NAIS's A 21st Century Imperative: A Guide for Becoming a School of the Future notes that, for today’s students, knowledge is “open, collaborative, accessible, often from the bottom up, and frequently presented in multimedia.” A blended learning class is especially well suited to exploring this kind of knowledge. The class doesn’t ignore text-based documents, but the online portion of the class offers students the opportunity to explore, at their own pace, non-text-based sources that can serve to illuminate or challenge the types of documents that are more traditionally used.
While it may be the case that today’s students are, as the NAIS Guide puts it, “connected, mobile, social, instantaneous, and entertainment-oriented,” they still crave the interactions and relationships that flourish within the classroom. In a blended learning course, this class time can often be used for a variety of purposes — especially for extending discussions begun online, exploring misconceptions about a topic, or presenting research.
Student Perspective:
We all know how hard it is to learn and remember things from a straight lecture. The biggest thing about blended learning history is the way we learn. We used technology we were familiar with and sometimes Ms. Stewart pushed us even farther by requiring that we incorporate a variety of different types of media and sources in our research and projects. We also completed engaging projects, had debates and discussions which broadened our thinking, applied things we learned, and viewed topics from different perspectives. It’s interesting that when it was our turn to teach the class, we didn’t choose to lecture about anything. We used simulations, games, and debates to engage our classmates.
Pursuing Passions and Taking on Responsibility
Teacher Perspective:
The time outside of classroom meetings gives students the opportunity to pursue their passions. By offering some degree of choice in each project, students had the opportunity to dig into aspects of history that they found compelling. Students chose topics such as children and labor, race and education, transportation, food preparation, and dance. Because students cared deeply about the topics they’d chosen, they worked to convey their passion and knowledge to their classmates. Time outside of face-to-face meetings was also used for independent research. Students could use available resources, such as the library, without having to take time away from class meetings.
Choices about how to structure outside of classroom time offered an opportunity for students to experience the responsibility that goes along with the privilege of pursuing their passions and directing their own research. For some students, this new responsibility resulted in an adjustment period as they recognized the need to budget their time in order to thoroughly complete their work. Because I am not monitoring their time outside the classroom, students had the very real-world experience of developing a working style that suited them. This responsibility has helped them feel more prepared for the prospect of managing their time during college and beyond. One student called the class “anti-procrastination training.”
Student Perspective:
Students need to understand the responsibility and independence it takes to keep up with this kind of class. Without the structured five blocks per week, we had a number of “free periods,” but it was our responsibility to take that time and keep up with our work. Only having two blocks a week allowed us more time in the library for the individual projects and also time to casually talk with our classmates, in the hallways and elsewhere, about the issues brought up in class. Just because we were not in an actual classroom didn’t mean that there wasn’t plenty of work to be done.
Engaging with and Becoming Experts
Teacher Perspective:
As the NAIS Guide puts it, publicly presenting and defending work before peers, faculty, and experts in the field can be a powerful motivator for students engaged in project-based work. The blended learning model has been useful in facilitating these sorts of interaction. Scheduling visits from practitioners or academics to the classroom can be challenging, but an online platform allows them to more easily respond to student work. An architect responded to students’ war memorial designs and an education professor with a law background responded to the judicial opinions students wrote as part of a mock Supreme Court experience. Pre-service teachers offered feedback on the lesson plans students wrote in preparation for teaching the class. Throughout the course, other teachers visited the class blog and left comments that helped push discussions forward. Coordinating this many visitors to a class would have been virtually impossible, but the blog platform allowed those outside the class to respond when they were available. As a teacher, the feedback of those outside the class was invaluable to me as well. Through the comments of other teachers, I was able to imagine possibilities for the class that would not have occurred to me otherwise.
The flexibility of the course also allowed students themselves to have the opportunity to become experts. As part of their cumulative project, students took on the role of teachers, choosing an area of focus and tracing the shift throughout U.S. history. They were responsible for posting prep work for students to complete prior to their class, facilitating the lesson, and evaluating students’ preparation and participation. Student participants in the lesson offered feedback to the student-teacher and evaluated their own participation. Students shared their views about the class with the academic community. Several students presented about the intent and design of the class at the North Carolina Association of Independent Schools Innovation conference.
Student Perspective:
The use of technology in our blended learning class allowed students the opportunity to engage not only with a teacher but also with professionals and outside professors through our online blog that we filled with our discoveries and accomplishments. Feedback from people outside the classroom made our work feel more real. This class has also allowed the quiet students to speak up, and the more confident students a chance to listen.
Seeing Connections
Teacher Perspective:
In addition to the course utilizing online and classroom time, the class was organized thematically, rather than chronologically. While this need not necessarily be the case for other blended learning course, the flexibility of the course seemed to lend itself to this approach. A blended learning environment may also mean that, as the NAIS Guide says, the “selection of content, use of time, and the ratio of knowledge acquisition to conceptual understanding as demonstrated through application” need to be examined and perhaps adjusted. In the course, we covered fewer topics than a conventional course, but we were able to do so with greater depth and a sense of continuity within topics. The course focused on five topics: What Is an American?; War Stories; For the People: Rights and Responsibilities; Shifts; and Secrets and Conspiracies. With each of the topics, we used a comparative approach and sought to understand the changes and commonalities throughout our country’s history. For the students’ final projects, they also followed this comparative model and chose an area of focus and traced the changes in this area from colonial America to today. Topics chosen included race and education, alcohol, labor and children, health care, dance, race and sports, and transportation.
Student Perspective:
Throughout the course, we focused on connecting things. First everything was put into perspective, then after learning about some aspect of U.S. history, we related it to our own lives today. We always had engaging discussions, which often turned into heated discussions. Getting controversial and arguing history? I had never experienced that before this class. My favorite thing about this class is that we learned things thematically, rather than chronologically. I have a better grasp for the world, especially our own country. Blended learning history pushed us not only to learn history, but also to learn about who we are and create our own points of view. Once you reflect on the connection between history and our lives today, and throw in some politics, you end up with a lot more students interested and involved in the world, not just their weekends.
Shifting Understanding of Teacher and Students
Teacher Perspective:
If content needs to be delivered, it no longer has to happen within the classroom because of the availability of the content via the Internet. This meant that there were virtually no lectures during the class. Instead, my role has shifted to creating and curating materials, seeding discussions, and highlighting misperceptions.
In some ways, a blended learning class has required more work for me as a teacher. Because there was no single text, I spent more time seeking out and posting resources and responding to students’ discussion on the blog. The pay-off from this effort has been tenfold, however. Because students were reflecting on materials before class, I could target our classroom time to addressing those areas in which students were most interested and in which clarity was needed. I also didn’t feel the pressure to “teach harder” when things did not seem to be going well. Instead, these were opportunities for conversations with students about what was not working and how we could all work to make changes. To see students on the verge of shouting because they feel so passionate about what we are studying is incredibly satisfying, especially considering the attitude toward history of many students going into the class.
Student Perspective:
We all gained a level of respect for each other. Our classroom was not about students sitting quietly and listening to a lecture from a teacher. It was about a group of people communicating and pushing each other to question and learn. In turn, both teacher and students learned more than we could have imagined. That feeling of accomplishment makes seeing and sharing the results of everything we have learned even better.