Education Week - October 24, 2012 - Special Report - S21

EVALUATING WHAT WORKS: PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

BUILDING BLENDED PD INTO SCHOOLS
Educators say a hybrid approach to training will help teachers differentiate instruction

O

BY ROBIN L. FLANIGAN
stand certain concepts, she recalls last school year as one of the most powerful of her 11-year teaching career. She started with the goal of creating one blended course by the end of her training, and she wound up with four. Whether such training comes from school districts, nonprofit education organizations, or for-profit businesses, the overarching message is consistent: Professional development for educational technology has to move away from its historical focus on technical training and toward a broader focus on what educational approaches work best. “Is it better to make a podcast? Or should it be a video? Teachers need to know how to help students make these decisions,” said Barbara Treacy, the director of EdTech Leaders Online, a national program affiliated with the nonprofit Education Development Center based in Waltham, Mass. In other words, teachers not only need to be proficient at integrating virtual experiences into the classroom, they must also be confident in why they’re doing so. “One of the biggest reasons why technology initiatives tend to fail is because they’re all about the tool and not about the learning,” said Amy Michalowski, the director of academic affairs for the vhs Collaborative, a nonprofit organization in Maynard, Mass., that allows districts to share online courses and access to virtual teachers. “With many blended initiatives, the failure is not because of a lack of interest, but a lack of outcome-oriented training for teachers.” The 308,000-student Clark County district in Nevada, the nation’s fifth-largest school district, launched an online and blended certification program in March 2012 in part to make that shift in mindset among educators. The spur was the district’s goal of having 100,000 students learning in an online or blended environment by 2015. “What we found was that we had a lot of people deploying our curriculum, but they hadn’t changed their pedagogy,” said Kimberly K. Loomis, the program’s executive leader. “Their teaching had to change.” By design, the certification program is split into two tiers. The first includes foundational courses aimed at helping teachers understand various strategies for online and blended learning and make decisions about how to use them to create engaging, differentiated classrooms. The second tier provides instruction in the tools and techniques for turning those ideas into reality. Fawn Canady, an English teacher at the 1,300-student West Career and Technical Academy in Las Vegas who helped create the program, said her priorities were making sure that teachers already pressed for time were being given relevant information, self-directed activities, and the chance for collaboration. “It’s a learning process,” she said. “I began blending my classroom about five years ago,

fficials in the 24,100student Academy School District 20 school system in Colorado Springs, Colo., came to this conclusion in the spring of 2011: If blended learning is one of the biggest trends in education, it should offer a way for teachers to practice the approach themselves. Using federal Title II, Part A funds, the district offered a professional-development course that combined four online modules, including Moodle, which took teachers through a series of online tutorials and face-to-face activities over six months in 2011-12. It then expanded the blended learning model to many of its 2012 summer institute courses for teachers, and has begun offering a round of professional development to another batch of teachers—31, roughly the size of the waiting list—in 2012-13. “The training put us in touch with what our students go through,” said Wanda Lepillez, a 4th grade teacher at the 568-student Academy International Elementary School, who took part in the inaugural training. “It has changed my teaching forever.” The more she learned, added Ms. Lepillez, “the more I began to see the possibilities.” Despite having to watch tutorial videos up to four times on occasion before she could under-

EDUCATION WEEK: EVALUATING WHAT WORKS IN BLENDED LEARNING > www.edweek.org/go/elearning-blended

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OCTOBER 24, 2012

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

Education Week - October 24, 2012 - Special Report

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - October 24, 2012 - Special Report

Education Week - October 24, 2012
‘Smart Pills’ Promising, Problematic
At S.C. School, Behavior Is One of the Basics
Obama Finding Teacher Support Secure, if Tepid
Focus On: Curriculum: Calif. Laws Shift Gears on Algebra, Textbooks
Table of Contents
News in Brief
Report Roundup
‘Value Added’ Use at Secondary Level Questioned
National Board Seeks to Revive Impact on Profession
Industry & Innovation
Blogs of the Week
Debates Push Fate of NCLB Waivers to Fore
Policy Menu Varies in State School Board Elections
Policy Brief
The Election: Debating Education
Genevieve LaFleur & Scott Poland: Schools Can Be the Difference in Preventing Suicide
Kenneth Wesson: From STEM to ST2REAM: Reassembling Our Disaggregated Curriculum
Letters
Top School Jobs Recruitment Marketplace
Erica Frankenberg & Gary Orfield: Diversity or Resegregation? Why Suburban Schools Need a Plan
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