Blended Learning Sports Variety of Approaches

Teacher Katie Glass, middle, talks to student Christian Guillen about history at Bronx Arena High School in New York City while student Maribel Peralta works on an assignment. Bronx Arena blends online instruction and face-to-face teaching to help students who have not succeeded in traditional public schools.

—Emile Wamsteker for Education Week

As schools mix online instruction and face-to-face learning, educators are identifying promising hybrid approaches

As blended learning models, which mix face-to-face and online instruction, become more common in schools, classroom educators and administrators alike are navigating the changing role of teachers—and how schools can best support them in that new role.

"This is a whole new world for education," says Royce Conner, the acting head of school for the 178-student San Francisco Flex Academy, a public charter school.

In the grades 9-12 school, students spend about half the day working on "the floor"—a large open room of study carrels where students hunker down with their laptops to work with online curricula provided by K12 Inc.—and the other half of the day in pullout groups with teachers. Which students are in pullout groups, when the groups meet, and how often they meet depend on the progress each student is making in his or her online classes, says Conner.

Having a passion for using data is one of the skills that Conner looks for in his teachers, he says, since it becomes such an integral part of their planning process each week.

The school employs one teacher for each subject area—math, history, science, and English—so each teacher needs to have a wide breadth and depth of content knowledge, Conner says.

Meghan Jacquot is the school's English teacher. "I'm teaching everything from freshman [English] to AP," she says. "It makes the job both intellectually stimulating and intellectually challenging." Because students work through curricula online, instead of in a face-to-face class, teachers are able, however, to focus on academic intervention and enrichment instead of traditional lesson planning and content delivery, she says.

"It would be impossible to do this job without that framework [of online-delivered curriculum]," says Jacquot.

Since the school opened in fall 2010, it has hired mostly new teachers, in their first or second year of teaching, says Conner. Those teachers go through about 40 hours of professional development before they begin teaching. They also receive ongoing, in-person training at the school.

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At the Carpe Diem Collegiate High School and Middle School in Yuma, Ariz., students spend about half their time working through online courses from the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based curriculum provider e2020 and the other half in workshops and small-group instruction with face-to-face teachers, says Rick Ogston, the founder and chief executive officer of Carpe Diem Schools, a public school model that uses technology to improve education. "Our teachers are different," Ogston says. "They're there to facilitate learning, to coach, and to mentor."

Jaya Chopra has been teaching science at Carpe Diem for seven years.

"All our instruction is data-driven," says Chopra, "so we know where each student is and where their struggles are."

Students are grouped on the basis of what they're learning and the data that teachers receive on their progress.

As with the San Francisco Flex Academy, a wide range of content knowledge is important for teachers at Carpe Diem because there is only one teacher for each content area, serving grades 6-12.

Louis Van Hook has been teaching social studies and history at Carpe Diem for 10 years. "Because of the online direct instruction, I don't have to do the curriculum, so I actually work on enrichment and have time to remediate [with students]," he says.

Ogston, the school's founder and chief executive officer, says learning to adapt into that new role requires a shift for teachers. "They don't grade a lot of papers, but they've got to do a lot of assessing and analyzing data," he says. "They don't traditionally come fully equipped to understand and aggregate the data."

Those are skills that can be learned, though, and each teacher goes through professional development to help in understanding how to use the data effectively, Ogston says.

Like the San Francisco Flex Academy and the Carpe Diem schools,Rocketship Education takes content delivery out of the hands of the teachers and uses data analysis to help inform teachers of what their students need.

Rocketship Education currently operates five K-5 schools serving about 2,500 students in San Jose, Calif., and will expand to include 20 more in California over the next several years, says Sherri Dairiki, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit elementary school charter network.

In the Rocketship model, students spend part of the day in a face-to-face environment with teachers and part of the day in what the schools call the Learning Lab, where they use software to focus on math and literacy skills. About 90 percent of the schools' students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and three-quarters of the students are English-language learners.

The blended model allows a Rocketship school to provide one less teacher and one less classroom than a traditional school with a comparable number of students, and the money that is saved as a result is funneled back into the classroom, says Dairiki. The money is being used to ...

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