14. Districts Can Support Principals, with guest Micha Villarreal
Release Date: 12/10/2019
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_outlineBringing about a major shift in teaching and learning might seem impossible in a large, urban school district. Processes tend to hold firm. But Ysleta Independent School District in southern Texas is bucking that pattern.
Now in its fifth year of implementing a system-wide blended learning project, Ysleta ISD has transformed 10 campuses.
Part of Ysleta's success stems from bold school principals, such as David Medina, the guest of our previous podcast (episode 13). But there's a second essential piece: support from the school district.
In this episode, Heather Clayton Staker talks with Micha Villarreal, who served as David's district counterpart to support his efforts as he changed his school.
Micha shares the view that "in education, we've not been doing what's right for kids for many, many years. Kids are all different. To grow our kids and allow them to be successful as adults, we have to change the work that we do."
Micha explains how her district runs discovery sessions to help campus teams get unstuck as they innovate. Next week, Ready to Blend will post a resource to help you run your own discovery session with your team. You can find it, as well as all the other Tuesday Share resources that accompany each Ready to Blend podcast, at https://www.readytoblend.com/tuesdays.