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_outlineCaution: If your school has embarked on “tech integration,” that’s a red flag. Often that phrase is code for cramming devices on top of the traditional instructional model. Multiple studies show that approach to be a waste of effort.
In this podcast episode, Heather talks to Lisa Adams, assistant superintendent at Temple Independent School District in Texas. Lisa says that for years, Temple ISD was great at giving each student access to a device and giving teachers Google Classroom training. But results were only marginally better, and the devices likely had nothing to do with the improvements.
It wasn’t until 2015 that student performance started to climb. That was the year Lisa’s district switched from “tech integration” to a deep transformation of the fundamental learning design. Leaders and teachers worked together to envision four pillars of a new student experience. They visited exemplars to see model schools in action. They defined a “Learning Progression” for teachers, which articulated what the pillars of the student experience looked like in classrooms that were just getting started with the new design, in classrooms that were advancing, and in those that were going deep.
The results have been dramatic, but Lisa cautions that the effort takes patience on the district’s part. Veteran teachers can feel uncomfortable as they are asked to evolve. But today, 90 percent of Temple’s teachers say they would not return to traditional instruction.
For a free resource on how to use Learning Progressions to help your schools move beyond tech integration, download the Tuesday Share that accompanies this episode 15. It will be available next week at https://www.readytoblend.com/tuesdays