Education Week - October 24, 2012 - Special Report - S15

each year, and the proportion of computer time climbs slowly to 16 percent by 2nd grade. But classes at the school feel, by and large, similar to other early-elementary classrooms around the country, with equal parts carpet squares, group songs and rhymes, and colors and shapes designed to appeal to the young soul as well as mind. The rotational blended model is meant to be an extension of that approach. “I feel like we are meeting the students at their levels, so there’s definitely an emotional part of that” model, said Alonda Casselle, the school’s dean of culture and after-school-program coordinator. The adaptive software used in the model is generally designed to log student progress on individual concepts and respond to that progress by either accelerating or easing the difficulty of the content depending on a student’s needs. Further, the set of 15 laptops in each of the school’s 12 classrooms stays anchored within the classroom to help keep a community atmosphere within the room even when the children are using the computers. For teachers, that means exceptional classroom management-skills are imperative, perhaps even more so than technological acumen. “You really as a teacher have to think of every single step that they’re going to do and break it down,” said Karla Cienfuegos, a kindergarten teacher who was one of the four founding lead teachers when the school welcomed its first kindergarten class in August 2010. Kindergartners in Ms. Cienfuegos’ class are broken into two or three groups for all of their core subjects—reading, writing, math, and science— and in the first three subjects spend blocks of time rotating between workstations led by herself, intervention teacher Monica Gallo, or an automated laptop lesson. Ms. Gallo, along with paraprofessional teaching assistants, is a shared resource for Ms. Cienfuegos and her three kindergarten leadteacher colleagues. The result is an intricate scheme of student movement that works only if the children are comfortable both in their logged-on and logged-off surroundings. “If you want them to stand up and go one way, you do that, and you practice and you practice and you practice until you get it right,” Ms. Cienfuegos said.

TECHNOLOGY AND ACHIEVEMENT
Educators can also feel some frustration with the quality of available software for students as young as those at the kipp Empower Academy, Mr. Kerr said. That’s partly because the industry simply doesn’t focus as much on the early grades, he said, but also because the school is attempting to move toward programs that give students consistent and constructive feedback on their own progress, not just provide usable data for teachers. And while teachers say they have learned valuable information about their students from data provided through a range of about a half-dozen math and reading programs the school uses, they haven’t yet gained an ability to directly mesh the work on student laptops with lessons led by teachers. That’s something Ms. Cienfuegos said she would like to move toward. Her colleague M.J. Mathis said, though, that as long as computers allow more individualized instruction, it’s OK if they are only an imperfect match for the lessons she delivers. “I appreciate and I know that a lot of research has been done looking into what games are going to be effective for the kids,” said Ms. Mathis, who was also a founding kindergarten teacher. “Honestly, from a teacher’s perspective, I am not as concerned on what they are doing on the computers, but I am more concerned with the fact that I can have small groups, because they are on the computers for such a short amount of time in the grand scheme of the day.” Perhaps for that reason, kipp Empower has become one of the kipp organi-

zation’s best-known elementary school models. Its teachers appear satisfied with their job descriptions, as well as their students’ progress, and not one teaching-staff member has left in the school’s first two years, though some have grown into more senior positions. Meanwhile, the school has shown potentially promising achievement results as well. On the Strategic Teaching and Evaluation of Progress, or step, literacy test, an assessment designed by the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute, the proportion of kipp Empower pupils reading at a “proficient” or “advanced” level jumped from 36 percent to 96 percent during the course of its inaugural 2010-11 school year, according to the Dell Foundation case study. On the Measure of Academic Progress, or map, test created by the Portland, Ore.-based Northwest Evaluation Association, 96 percent of that same 110-student inaugural class scored above average in both reading and mathematics, according to the study. As a result, more educators from across kipp’s 125 schools and 31 regional consortia are hoping to learn from what is happening at kipp Empower, as are potential future kipp school leaders who are progressing through the Fisher Fellowship educational leadership program that Mr. Kerr completed before launching kipp Empower. That is so, despite his repeated emphasis on being skeptical of doing any sort of blended learning model simply for blended learning’s sake. “In the presentations that those Fisher Fellows gave for their school design plans this August, over half of them talk about blended learning,” Mr. Kerr said. “Two years ago, no one was talking about it.” Steve Mancini, kipp’s public-affairs director, echoed Mr. Kerr’s stance that neither blended learning nor any other trend in education should be perceived as an easy fix to the problem of creating pathways to college for students in underserved communities. And mostly, schools launched under the kipp umbrella have emphasized a fairly traditional classroom environment and pedagogy, combined with extra resources, time, quality, and effort sometimes not always available in district-run public schools in the same communities. “There is no magic bullet, and there is no secret sauce,” Mr. Mancini said. “It’s about great teaching, and more of it.” But he also said the impression that kipp in any way had been against technology or blended learning in the past is false. He added that because Fisher Fellows visit already-operating kipp schools as part of their education, and because of the organization’s emphasis on allowing educators within the network to learn from one another, the kipp Empower Academy’s success may be pushing other educators from the organization in a way they hadn’t been before. If anything, kipp schools have lagged behind the trend of blended learning, which Mr. Kerr said may not necessarily be a bad thing, considering how “faddish” educational models can be. Still, the kipp Washington Heights Middle School, in its first year of operation in New York, and the kipp Ascent Primary and Middle schools in Chicago, in their third and 10th years of operation, respectively, are all implementing portions of Mr. Kerr’s blended learning model for their mathematics instruction. At kipp Empower, the greatest success of the blended model may be in how well it’s camouflaged with the rest of school. While kindergartners generally need a week of practice to learn logging on and logging off their individual portals, the work with the adaptive program soon becomes just another measure of children’s academic success and their progress toward long-term goals. Pupils such as Darryl Lewis, now a 2nd grader, immediately understood the importance of learning how to function on the new technology when he started kindergarten a few days late. “I was worried that I wouldn’t be as smart as the other kids” on the computer, he said. “So I thought when the other kids in my class were going to go to college, I wouldn’t,” he recalled. “I was going to have to stay in kindergarten.” Darryl found, though, that it only took “a few days” to catch up. n

We’re skeptics here, and we’re not folks who are toeing the party line for blended learning.
MIKE KERR, Founding Principal, KIPP Empower Academy

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2010-11

96%
KIPP Empower students reading at ”proficient” or “advanced” jumped from 36 percent to 96 percent over the course of the first school year
End of 2010-11
EDUCATION WEEK: EVALUATING WHAT WORKS IN BLENDED LEARNING > www.edweek.org/go/elearning-blended

36%
Beginning of 2010-11

96%

On the Measure of Academic Progress, 96 percent of the inaugural class scored above average in both reading and mathematics

OCTOBER 24, 2012

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http://www.edweek.org/go/elearning-blended

Education Week - October 24, 2012 - Special Report

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