13. Finding Time to Transform Your School, with guest David Medina
Release Date: 11/06/2019
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_outlineIf you walk into a Pasodale Elementary School classroom, you’ll see students scattered everywhere, each working on an independent or group objective. To someone unfamiliar with the model, it might look chaotic. But each student can explain what she’s working on and why.
A growing number of teachers and principals want to make this shift. But how can they build it? How do they find the time? It takes considerable time to convert a traditional, teacher-led unit plan to a series of student-driven stations, tutorials, on-demand resources, projects, and assessments.
Teachers are willing to do the work, but they simply need time.
Our guest today is David Medina. For nine years, David has been the principal of Pasodale Elementary School in the Ysleta Independent School District located in El Paso, Texas, less than a mile from the border of Juarez, Mexico. Roughly 98 percent of his students are Hispanic, and 50 percent are English language learners.
For years his school was mostly teacher centered, meaning that teachers led. He thought that blended learning meant giving children access to technology.
“Little did I know that it really has zero to do with technology and more to do with having students be active learners,” David says. He realized four years ago that technology was not the answer; the answer was to shift from teacher-led to student-centered learning.
In today’s interview, Heather Clayton Staker talks to David about how he freed up teachers’ time to allow them to build the new model. Of all the things he tried, David found that canceling after-school tutoring was the most successful. Instituting “Blended Rounds” every 90 days and weekly 90-minute planning meetings were crucial enablers as well.
It takes time to build a student-centered model. But then, once in place, the new model gives back time because students are less dependent on their teachers. In other words, giving teachers time to build is an investment that more than breaks even.
For a one-page visual about this podcast, go to www.readytoblend.com/blog. It will be available on 11/12/2019 as part of the regularly scheduled Tuesday Share program.
Thanks Principal Medina for your stirring words!
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