Education Week - June 9, 2016 - Technology Counts - 27

A Harvard View of E-Learning
A Pennsylvania district's blended
learning effort captures the attention
of a business school researcher.

midterm data collected, it's more like two-thirds in the
blended classes are doing better and a third are doing
equal or not as well as traditional classes.

I

MUSSOLINE: The first year we had about 300 students
taking blended courses, this year we have about 750,
and next year we'll have over 1,100 students taking these
courses in just about every subject area. The students are
telling us the teachers are more productive-they're more
on point, they're not wasting any time.

n the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia, the affluent
Downingtown, Pa., school system has high test
scores, plenty of digital resources, and features
one of the best high schools in the country.
Even so, Superintendent Lawrence J. Mussoline decided
to shake things up. The 13,000-student district already
offered students online courses
from a vendor, but Mussoline
wanted a blended-learning
program taught entirely by
Downingtown teachers with
Downingtown-created courses.
He hired a coordinator
of blended and cyber learning to oversee the new Ivy
Academy. She spent a year training teachers on blended
instruction for classes that only meet face to face half the
time, while students work independently the other half,
but cover the same ground as traditional courses. Ivy
Academy is now finishing its second academic year.
The model captured the interest of John Jong-Hyun
Kim, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. Kim
used Ivy Academy as a case study in his Entrepreneurship
and Technology Innovations in Education class at
Harvard, in part because of the district's efforts to
measure effectiveness and initiate a change in district
culture. Education Week spoke to both of them.

Q&A

Why disrupt things in Downingtown when
95 percent of students already go to college?
MUSSOLINE: If we're investing a lot of money in 1-to-1
technology, we better be using the technology in productive
ways. We're trying to get to the golden egg, which is
individualized instruction.

Some teachers haven't been enthusiastic about
the blended-learning courses. How have you
handled that?
MUSSOLINE: Where there's a lot of the pushback is from
teachers who say it's not for every student. I still have a
math department that has not bought into this. We have
teachers who will tell students, "You won't learn it unless
I'm in front of you every day." It's going to take a while to
break that. But we're breaking it.

Do blended courses work for all students?
MUSSOLINE: We have common midterms, common
finals, and we're comparing those in blended classes and
traditional classes. We're seeing gains in the blended
classes. Not everywhere, but even when there aren't
gains, they're about the same. This year, from the

What's the feedback from the students?

Where will you take this in the future?
MUSSOLINE: We started in high school; now, we want to
move the blended program to the middle level. Then we
want to take it to full cyber at the high school. My vision is
to have Mrs. Smith teach a traditional class Period 1, Period 3
she teaches a blended class, and Period 4 is a full cyber class.

LAWRENCE J. MUSSOLINE
Superintendent of the
Downingtown Area School
System since 2009, he
created the renowned STEM
Academy magnet high
school in 2011.

What was interesting about this program to you?
KIM: I was seeking an example of a district that had
implemented a new approach coupled with real results.
There are a lot of districts investing in technology, but
many fewer districts are actually looking at results and
trying to learn from that.

What was significant about the approach in
Downingtown for your business school students?
KIM: We often think about change in districts that are
very urban, or where there's a performance gap. When
you think about incorporating technology in a place like
Downingtown, some of the resistance you'll get is from
people who are actually very good in the current system.

What measurements would signal success for Ivy
Academy?

JOHN JONG-HYUN KIM
A senior lecturer at Harvard
Business School, Kim heard
about Ivy Academy through
Downingtown's work with
the District Management
Council, a Boston-based
education firm where Kim
is executive director.

KIM: The true test will be whether this prepares
students better for the way college is set up, which is
one of the motivations behind it. We have traditional
high schools with a pretty strict period-and-days
rotation, and then you go into the world of college,
and it's very different. I hope to follow these students
and see how well they do over time.

What are your business school students going to
do with the knowledge they get from your class?
KIM: Of my class, about a third will go directly into some
education-related enterprise, whether it's a charter
school, an ed-tech startup, or a traditional school district.
They care deeply about improving public education and
education overall, but they're looking for entrepreneurial
opportunities to do so. Another third will end up doing it at
some point in their careers, but it might be later. The third
group will probably never work directly in the sector but
may end up sitting on boards or volunteering their time or
donating money. I want to make sure they know how to
support the organization that has the greatest impact.
-MICHELLE R. DAVIS

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Education Week - June 9, 2016 - Technology Counts

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