I'm trying something different this summer. On Tuesday, June 23, I am going to be leading a full day of four sessions at the Blended Learning Symposium in Santa Clara, CA. Unlike my usual workshop presentations, I will be working with the same group for multiple sessions (we limited it to 30 participants who had to pre-register for these four), and in the spirit of the conference, we will be working on constructing knowledge together. While I like giving and hearing talks, and I see real value in hearing an inspiring speaker (it is even pretty good to hear me), it seemed highly incongruous to me that a blended learning workshop would be built around traditional workshops alone. So God punished me by answering my prayers, and the countdown is on.
In preparation for the day and to start the conversation (and, let's face it, my post count is really down this year), I'm going to write a short post each day between now and the workshop. I'll post the links in the conference Dropbox folder so the 30 participants will have an opportunity to read and respond. Some of these will be directly about blended learning topics. Others will be about other aspects of education, technology, or frankly anything that interests me. I invite you participants (or any of the other regular readers, who range into the high single digits) to suggest topics that you might find of interest.
I HATE the term blended learning…there, isn't that a great way to start the discussion? I have three key objections (outside of essential contrariness). First, I can't hear the term without thinking of a blender, and (aside from making smoothies) I don't see what a blender has to do with a classroom. Second, it is never clear to me (and to many who use the term) what exactly is being blended or mixed together. Is it subject matter? techniques? the students themselves? Finally, for this and other reasons, it is a squishy, jargony term that can be used to describe almost anything that goes on in a classroom. What is the focus of a blend? I do think I know pretty well what is being described by the term, but blending ain't it.
The term I prefer, and the one I've used for this workshop, is decentralized learning. If we work from the assumption that traditional education was built on two principles; 1) the centrality of the teacher and textbook as the source of student information and animus of student activity. 2) the centrality of the classroom as the place and the class period as the time where and when learning takes place. Now if we decentralize these two, the focus becomes clearer. We need to design (or rediscover) teaching strategies that increase student learning from other sources than the teacher and the textbook, and we need to design a learning plan that increases the emphasis on learning as something that can happen in any place or time.
In the days ahead I'll talk in more detail about both of these and other characteristics I see in this decentralization of education (or to put it in a more positive tone, a centralizing on students). For those of you attending the session on the 23rd, I hope this will whet your appetite for the sharing and work together that we will be doing, and (as always) I welcome your comments.
Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/ElectricBlender.jpg
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Thank you! I hate the term as well. I will be attending but since I just got in with Carol’s group I do not think I will be in your sessions. I am reading Matt Miller’s book Ditch That Textbook and have been sitting and listening for countless hours to reps from textbook publishers on new ELA and math series. All the middle school teachers care about is the grammar component (where are the worksheets?!) and the math teachers want a hard cover 50 pound textbook. I am ready to scream. I want other sources-what is going to engage the student learning and increase it while not making the teacher the center of the classroom. It’s going to be challenging.
Decentralized learning: Love that term; used it at the St. Mary’s Press presentation to teachers about how to use home groups/expert groups to personalize and decentralize learning. Was interested in the day at Santa Clara, but could not fit within the year’s budget, so will be following your posts! It’s an uphill battle, regarding textbooks–they are great as resources, but students learn so much more, and get a broader, wider, arguably even deeper view, by going beyond the text. Still have teachers who keep going back to the text as their curriculum, as opposed to the items on which we’ve agreed and mapped, which engage much more than the text. And, it’s also hard to weave integration of authentic performance tasks if we remain wedded to the texts. They have a role, but are not the curriculum. Important to construct learning paths that open up learning-there are simply too many ways to approach an essential learning, and those paths can best be personalized to student interest and motivation by the student, with teacher as mentor and resource. Looking forward to seeing more of your ideas, and hopefully, getting some insight into the day that I will not be able to make.