Blended Update #2 - Marcia Kish Conference

It’s time for a Blended Update! As a reminder, this year Dawn Bodden is blending her section of Geometry and I’m blending a section of Honors Spanish 3. Here’s a post I wrote back in September about our initial experience with blending our classes.

As with any pilot, there is a learning curve and lots of trying of new ideas, strategies, activities, etc. Speaking for myself, I was pleased with some of the blending and what the students were achieving, but kept thinking, “I know there’s more we can do!” While I thought that the students were progressing well and as expected in an Honors Spanish 3 class, to me, the purpose of blending is to better meet the individual needs to each learner. And while I was providing them with the time and space to do work in a variety of ways, I kept coming back to the idea that there was something more that we could be doing to achieve that goal of more personalized learning within our classroom.

On November 17, Dawn and I attended a “Blended and Personalized Learning Conference” presented by +Marcia Kish. During the conference, we learned about how Marcia implemented a specific model in her elementary classroom to lead to greater student-led and personalized learning. Marcia shared that she moved to a wonderfully progressive and personalized model in her classroom in a series of three phases. The first phase is straight up “Station Rotation”. The beauty with Marcia’s station rotation is that it leverages technology to help engage students and also provide information in the form of data to her. In her classroom, she sets up four stations. Here is a brief breakdown of the four stations:

Station 1 Mini-lesson

In this station, the teacher directly teaches the students or works with them directly on a task specific to the topic.

Station 2 Independent Practice

In this station, students work on something on their own. Given that students could be at this station before the mini-lesson, Marcia recommends

doing something that has 4 review questions, 2 new questions, and 2 real-life questions.

Station 3 Digital Content

In this station, students access some sort of technology that can provide the teacher with feedback on student progress. Examples are Khan Academy, FrontRowEd, EdPuzzle, Newsela, a textbook website/program, etc.

Station 4 4 Cs

In this station, students work on the four Cs: creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking in a wide variety of activities that fit the goal content/skills.

These four stations are completed by all students for a set amount of time (10 minutes in Marcia’s classes).

Source: http://www.dsdprofessionaldevelopment.com/

In the second phase, the four stations are the same, but now the time element has been removed. Students are able to work through the stations at their own pace. If a student needs to spend more time with the teacher or needs more time to work on a specific task, it’s available to them. This phase also allows teachers to differentiate instruction to a couple of levels of students and to use data to drive the decisions for those levels.

In the third phase, the classroom really becomes differentiated and very personal. Students work at their own pace and in a variety of different ways to achieve the learning objectives. Students can choose a variety of different activities/projects geared toward their personal learning needs. As Marcia stated in her conference handout “students work at their own pace, place, and path while being driven by data.” In this phase, students could potentially be working on various activities outside of both the physical classroom and/or assigned class time.

The conference was really successful in that it got us thinking about what we are doing in our classes, what our goals are with blended learning, and what our path can be to achieve those goals. In the next blog post, I’ll share with you what I took from this conference to implement into my own classroom and what my next steps will be. Dawn and I are also working on a post with additional resources that would help anyone interested in trying out some of the above ideas.

Is there a topic you’d like to see on the blog? Give us some ideas and let’s get the conversation started!