Craft Category: Do

In blended and personalized learning, students often access resources and complete learning work outside of traditional school boundaries (physical, digital) and time. These learning experiences include both the accessing of online tools and programs, as well as the addition of authentic learning experiences, like projects and internships. In addition, educators also bring typically inaccessible resources into the classroom, like external experts and community resources.

In blended and personalized classrooms, educators use space (physical and digital) flexibly, adapting spaces to learning tasks and student needs. Physical layouts of blended and personalized classrooms vary considerably. In some cases, educators are able to completely redesign learning spaces to allow for flexibility, varied groupings, and greater student choice over where to work. In other cases, educators reconfigure more traditional spaces to allow for more bounded flexibility.

Blended and personalized classrooms often use time more flexibly, using non-traditional schedules to allow students to work at their own pace, alone, with peers, or in smaller groups. In addition, time is used differently across the school day to give teachers more time for planning, design, and student meetings. Changes to scheduling are accomplished by staffing flexibly during certain times of the day (for example, through having teachers work in teams or through pushing specialist support directly to the core classroom) as well as through the notion of “time technology swaps” where online instruction or practice is used to free up student and teacher time for different types of in-person learning.

Blended learning classrooms employ different structural models to integrate in-person and online learning components. The Christensen Institute has developed a taxonomy to describe these models.

Software is a general term used to describe a collection of computer programs, procedures, and documentation that perform some task on a computer system. Software used in a blended or personalized setting will include both teacher- and student-facing tools, and can be used for a variety of purposes, including assessment, content delivery, content creation, classroom management, collaboration, communication, and data management.

Reporting tools such as progress reports, report cards, and transcripts need to be adjusted to clearly communicate a student’s mastery of individual learning objectives. This includes a move away from traditional letter grades, separating assessments of effort, work habits, and behaviors from indicators of what skills and content a child has mastered.

By offering students greater control over the learning experience, personalized approaches also shift greater initiative and responsibility to the student for managing, assessing, and progressing. Learning activities are undertaken with the guidance of teachers rather than at the direction of. The transition to self-directed learning often requires significant supports and scaffolding as students “learn how to learn” in new ways.

Teachers in blended and personalized environments will often organize students into groups so that teachers can provide more targeted support or individualized instruction.

Blended and personalized classrooms employ different modes of in-person learning. These can include:

• Direct instruction, where a skill-set or concept is explicitly taught using lectures or demonstrations;
• Peer-to-peer learning, where students work collaboratively;
• Small-group instruction, where a teacher divides the class to focus on instruction or coaching with a subset of students;
• One-to-one tutoring, where a teacher provides one student with direct support and coaching; and
• Individual practice and/or reflection, where a student works alone but in close proximity to peers and teachers so they can ask for help or engage others as needed or desired.

A student-teacher ratio expresses the relationship between the number of students in a given classroom to the number of full-time teachers. In blended and personalized environments, a “classroom” size can vary significantly. For example, in some cases, a class might be traditionally sized, with one teacher working with a group of 25-30 students. In other cases, a group of teachers might be working in a more open classroom with a whole grade of 80 students.