by Kim Loomis | Oct 31, 2020 | Blended Learning, Online Learning, Personalized Learning, Professional Development
This past week Aurora Institute held its annual symposium, virtually of course. Typically, I look forward to this annual event to catch up with national peers, hear stories of personalized learning and competency-based education, but most importantly to increase my well-being by enjoying time with like-minded professionals. Speaking of well-being… Dealing with the pandemic, the uncertainty on the political front, and the rising call for social justice has all of us in a bit of a craze. COVID-19 started as a crisis (back in March 2020), but if we continue to manage the educational setting as if it is a crisis, we will exhaust ourselves. We must recognize a need for finding our rhythm. Our mental health is at risk should we continue to act in haphazard manners – exhausting ourselves, our students, and families. Even prior to the pandemic, in December 2019, the Texas Association of School Boards posted an article titled Teacher Stress and Burnout is Real, stating, “It’s no secret that teacher stress is at epidemic proportions, and it’s affecting students in the classroom more than ever.” That was before COVID-19 came into our lives! Add in the stress of the last seven months. In September 2020, Psychology Today, posted an article about the effect COVID-19 is having on teachers, stating “A new study shows decreases in teacher well-being during the pandemic.” Educators need to find a rhythm, get over the manic crisis mode, and focus on their well-being. Like the airline steward who reminds us to put on our own mask first, educators need to breathe. Jumping from deployment models (classroom, hybrid, online) is...
by Kim Loomis | Sep 17, 2020 | Blended Learning, Online Learning
Remote learning has been difficult for teachers, administrators, students, and parents. No one signed up to be an online or from a distance teacher or student. Parents did not expect to be ‘home schooling’ their children. Administrators had no desire to run a hybrid or fully virtual school. Yet, these are the times we live in with the COVID-19 pandemic. Today’s world is all about “adjust and adapt” baby. This is new for all stakeholders. It’s like starting all over. Think about a baby, first learning to walk. That’s us! We will stumble a lot. We will fall down often. We will teeter on the brink many times. Also like an infant, we must fail forward. Get up, get over it, and try again. What we are forgetting to do is celebrate the successes along the way. Recall, the infant learning to walk was surrounded by people coaxing, cheering, and celebrating all the failures along the way. Teachers, administrators, students, and parents also need praise in their efforts and understanding that it’s okay to “adjust and adapt.” Knowing that failure will be part of the process and that we can fail forward by getting up, getting over it, and moving on. The pandemic reminds us that we must focus on where our feet are today. Planted in remote learning. We cannot linger in the days of yesteryear, nor dream of a better future down the line. I like to say, keep a WIN attitude. WIN is an acronym for What’s Important Now. When I say now, I mean in the moment – within the moment of the lesson or...
by Kim Loomis | May 25, 2020 | Blended Learning, Personalized Learning
I once believed that the term blended learning, would slowly vanish, as it would just become the classroom norm – taking the best of online learning matched with the best of face-to-face instruction. That, in this new century, teachers would partner with digital curriculum, guide instruction based on the data available within their digital partner, and have the time to craft peer-to-peer active engagement and authentic assessment opportunities. In other words, embrace what I like to call the curriculum, instruction, and assessment, or the CIA of Blended Learning – digital curriculum, guided instruction, authentic assessment. This huge worldwide experiment of school closures and adopting remote learning has exposed the great truth. Blended learning is not the norm. And yet, had it been, the transition would have been much easier. Yes, there would still have been access issues, but instruction and pedagogy shifts would have been minor, as would have the learning losses. Had we embraced blended learning, school closures would have still allowed students to continue learning within digital partners with teacher guidance – focusing on the core business of schools: relationships and learning. Yet, too many were caught off guard, ill-prepared to continue with learning new concepts aligned to standards and benchmarks for the remainder of the school year, as learning losses got deeper and deeper. See the NWEA COVID-19 Slide report. As we look to the future, our education system should aim to recover but not replicate the past. We have an opportunity to “build back better.” Use the most effective crisis-recovery strategies as the basis for long-term improvements in areas like pedagogy, technology, assessment, financing, and...
by Kim Loomis | Jan 27, 2020 | Blended Learning, Personalized Learning
Let’s talk about the path to developing a successful digital learning program. Mike O’Callaghan Middle School just completed its third year of adoption of blended learning. When speaking with the principal, Scott Fligor, he shared a 40.5 growth in student performance in 2018-19, the highest in the District. I remember the day that Principal Fligor came to me and said, “My school is at the bottom. We have nowhere to go but up. I’ve heard about this thing called blended learning. Can you help us?” My advice was to go slow to go fast. The plan was to create a small pilot as a proof point with some incoming sixth-graders, then roll up a new grade each year. This was at the same time we rolled out the 7 Steps to Program Design and now we celebrate with a new infographic. See Roadmap for Blended Personalized Learning infographic below. It started small, yet with a BANG! Check out the 2016 i3Learn Academy promo video. As stated by the assistant principal in the video, “The proof is in the pudding…the students in the blended classrooms were growing academically faster at a higher rate than in the traditional classroom.” Principal Fligor could not ignore that the data was showing greater academic gains in the handful of blended classrooms and felt that he had to give every student the blended classroom advantage. He had staff visit the blended classrooms to notice the instructional differences. He brought in professional development for staff to transition pedagogy mindset when partnering with digital curriculum using the CIA of Blended Learning, to help his staff with a...
by Kim Loomis | Jan 7, 2020 | Blended Learning, Digital Learning Models, Online Learning, Personalized Learning, Program Design, Research, Uncategorized
When students struggle in the traditional classroom and absences become daunting, creating larger and deeper learning gaps, where can educators turn? One way to help struggling students is by providing opportunities for success in different learning environments. Past practices often led students away from neighborhood schools, to alternative placement educational facilities. Yet, not all students that struggle need such a drastic remedy. Access to digital curriculum in a comprehensive school setting can be an excellent way to create opportunities to thrive. Digital curriculum is the first piece of the CIA of Blended Learning (digital Curriculum, guided Instruction, authentic Assessment), yet it’s important to ensure that educators understand the partnership between digital content and teacher-led guided instruction. Otherwise establishments create digital learning environments that isolate and remove high quality instructional practices, such as teacher and peer interaction, plus they tend to lower standards/expectations. This is often seen in credit recovery programs across the nation, as documented by Nat Malkus in his whitepaper Second Chance or Second Track (September 2018), were second chance credit recovery becomes a lower-level pathway of isolated, independent study programs designed for struggling learners. When we lower expectations, we are creating a lower track of students, many of whom were struggling to begin with. The TNTP whitepaper Opportunity Myth (2018) notes how schools and teachers are letting students down with low level learning opportunities that just don’t meet the standards. Yet, we must cultivate classrooms where struggling students learn how to take ownership of their learning. Where students can track and manage their learning outcomes in a digital platform, that allows them to pick up where they...
by Kim Loomis | Nov 6, 2019 | Blended Learning, evaluation, Personalized Learning, Program Design
Blended learning, when teachers partner with digital content to create a personalized learning environment, may be difficult to measure – but not impossible. Measuring a pedagogical shift requires data collection from classroom observations using a walkthrough tool. Establishing a blended classroom walkthrough tool begins with identifying observable actions such as the implementation of the CIA of Blended Learning. This includes the one-third, one-third, one-third balance: utilizing digital Curriculum to deliver low level basic understanding, skills, and practice,partnered with extension into higher order thinking via teacher guided Instruction, plus student engagement, project learning, and peer collaboration via the 4Cs – communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking through authentic Assessment. Measuring a pedagogical shift, is focused on only one of the four P’s of evaluating the effectiveness of a blended program: Performance, Pedagogy, Perception, and Partnership. When measuring a pedagogical shift (a process measure) we are seeking an answer to: Is classroom instruction changing (and how)? To answer this question, we use a classroom walkthrough tool to collect data. The walkthrough tool should be developed in-house and focused on self-selected priority practices and instructional strategies. The CIA of Blended Learning balance of one-thirds: digital, teacher, and student is a great place to begin when developing a classroom walkthrough tool. Typically, classroom walkthroughs are just a snapshot of the learning. Observer(s) may only be in the room ten minutes, looking for a handful of items. When working with schools and districts in the implementation of the CIA of Blended Learning we help them identify a handful of goals and priority practices that are expected when transitioning to a blended personalized learning environment. Through this...
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