31. Short Film: "Reflections"
Ready to Blend
This podcast includes the audio from Patience Nyanway's short film: "Student and Parent Reflections from this School Year." You'll hear Patience interviewing several families. Patience's production gives voice to her community and reminds us of the real children affected by school closures. To see the video version of the film, subscribe to our YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/readytoblend01.
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30. Online and Blended Learning Fundamentals: Learning from the Pioneers
Ready to Blend
In this class, you’ll look backward at how online and blended learning emerged over the past 20 years in K-12 education. With that context, you’ll look forward to imagine the online and blended solutions for the future. You’ll consider your personal openness to trying new strategies. You’ll analyze your learning design to check for the quality of engagement. And you’ll prioritize how to optimize the teacher’s use of time.
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29. Helping Children Feel Safe to Share
Ready to Blend
In this class, Heather teaches three ways to build bridges that help learners connect across any divide they might be experiencing so that they feel safe enough to speak up and express themselves, whether at school or home.
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28. Using Games to Support Children Socially and Emotionally
Ready to Blend
I've restructured this podcast as a class, so that each episode going forward will teach a skill to help you blend online learning into school and home.
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27. Where Do We Go from Here? with Atomi's Simon Hennessy
Ready to Blend
We are alive right at the moment when there's an opening of opportunity to retool the classroom for the end user. We have the will plus the disruptive innovations to do it.
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26. Developing Student-centered Teachers
Ready to Blend
What's the best way for school leaders to equip teachers with the skills they need to transform their instructional model? In this show, Heather Clayton Staker shares her latest research from the Christensen Institute that proposes a way forward for the PD solution that schools urgently need.
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25. Hacks for Solving Esteem Gaps
Ready to Blend
Inequities grow worse for each day that children lack “flex” environments that are blended (online and face-to-face) and that help them make progress, whether they are in in-person or remote setups.
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24. Hacks for Solving Social Belonging Gaps
Ready to Blend
Feeling lonely, depressed? Small wonder . . . the world is locked in social distancing, and humans brains are wired to suffer as a result. We can’t fully solve for social isolation right now. But we can avoid pitfalls that make loneliness worse.
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23. Hacks for Solving Safety Gaps
Ready to Blend
The shifting pandemic and school closures are opening safety gaps for many families and children, including personal, financial, and emotional insecurities.
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22. Hacks for Solving Physiological Gaps
Ready to Blend
School closures and lockdowns are causing major physiological gaps for some children in the form of food, exercise, and sleep shortages, while other children are benefiting physiologically. Caregivers and educators want to help solve for physiological gaps, but it's not obvious how to do that.
info_outlineImagine you're in charge of building a new school from the ground up. You've worked on it all year and now it's time to open the doors to your first class of 4-13 year olds. What is your life like right now? In this podcast, we'll hear from Matthew Clayton as he faces this exact scenario.
Matt is founder of Slope School, opening this month in Provo, Utah. It's part of the Acton Academy network, a fast-growing micro-school model that began in Austin, Texas and now has over 200 offshoots.
Matt was the chief operating officer for Acton Academy for four years and has answers for why its model is growing so fast. “When I first saw Acton Academy, it changed my life,” Matt tells us in the podcast. He explains how Acton reframed his brain about what is possible.
So why did Matt leave Acton to start his own school? Matt shares how why he and his wife, Maria, decided to take the leap.
"K-12 education is roughly 16,000 hours of a child’s life," Matt says. "Big picture, what should all that time accomplish?"
Matt explains the seeming paradox that technology is not the heart of Slope School, but that tech frees up the learning community to have even more human interactions with each other.
Slope School, like other Acton Academies, has several key elements—Socratic discussion, Core Skills, Public Exhibitions, Learning Quests. Which of those elements does Matt believe he absolutely has to get right? Matt says if he had to prioritize, he'd choose team building and helping students learn to drive their own learning through goal setting and follow through.
Matt describes a few of the key elements in detail:
- Socratic discussion
- The Hero’s Journey
- The first Quest: “Pitch a Playground”
At the end of the show, Matt suggests two strategies that every educator can adopt to empower their learners:
- Give Respect—Always give learners the respect that you’d give to a trusted friend or coworker. Avoid the words “student,” “child,” or “kids.” The goal is to avoid hierarchical language. We are fellow travelers on a journey together. A metric to measure is how many times learners need to come to you to ask for help. What systems can you equip learners with so that they can solve problems themselves and with each other without requiring your instruction? Empowering your learner is a sign of respect.
- Give choice—Invite learners to set their own ground rules. You could start by saying: “Here is our mission and purpose. We need some ground rules to get there.” Then discuss and arrive at those commitments together. Also, get out of the mindset of teaching students and into the mindset of equipping learners to learn. Look for tools that give more choice around content, direction, pace, and timing.
Listen in for more details about how Matthew Clayton is opening the most talked-about school in Utah this year.
Accompanying Ready to Blend blog: Opening a School like Slope School