Education WEEK Spotlight on MAth inStruction n edweek.org

iSto

ck

_???

???

Editor’s Note: School districts are experimenting with blended learning and adaptive instruction, mixing face-to-face instruction with online learning. This Spotlight explores blended learning models and their effectiveness, using adaptive testing in common-core assessments, and tailoring word problems to increase student confidence in math.

TablE of CoNTENTS:

1 Online Opens Real-World Doors

4 Blended Learning Choices 6 Shifting to Adaptive Testing

8 Virtual Ed. Dives in to the Common Core

9 Studies Probe Power of ‘Personalization’

CommENTary 11 How Blended Learning Saved

My Teaching Career 12 Let’s Use Technology To

Support ‘Creative Agency’ Classrooms

rESourCES: 14 Resources on Blended Learning

and Adaptive Instruction

2013

On Blended Learning and Adaptive Instruction

Online Opens Real-World Doors

By ian Quillen

Published October 24, 2012, in Education Week Special Report: What Works in Blended Learning

Virtual courses give Grand Rapids students time for internships and on-site experiences

F or many schools, mixing online courses with face-to-face learning is primarily a method for serving struggling or advanced students while keeping them inside school walls.

But for several hundred high school students in the Grand Rapids, Mich., school district, blended learning is the key that unlocks the door to the real world.

In 2008, the district launched the first of five Centers of Inno-vation, one at each of the 17,000-student district’s high schools. They are designed to give students a pathway to in-school in-ternships and fellowships that could eventually lead to careers. Two of the centers now use online courses from e2020, a provider located in Scottsdale, Ariz., for students’ core academic subjects.

Melissa Gorman, a special education teacher at the academy for design and construction at union High School in Grand Rapids, Mich., works with delvonte Jackson-Stewart, an 11th grader, in his blended learning class. the course takes place in the school’s computer lab with a 1-to-8 adult-to-student ratio.

Br

ian

Wid

diS

fo

r E

du

ca

tio

n W

EEk

2Education WEEK Spotlight on Blended learning and adaptive inStruction n edweek.org

“The overwhelming factor [in building a blended program] was the flexibility of being able to pull [students] out of class” for internships or college coursework, said Misty Stallworth, the assistant principal of the Academy for Design and Construc-tion, one of those two centers. The academy serves roughly 120 students in a small wing of the much larger Union High School.

“We have a lot of students who just crave the flexibility of being able to work on what they want and when they want,” Ms. Stall-worth added.

The blended models within the Academy for Design and Construction and the School of Business, Leadership, and Entrepreneur-ship, housed within the district’s Ottawa Hills High School, were not a result of a district emphasis on online learning when the district launched the initiative, however. And the district’s first Center of Innovation, Grand Rapids University Preparatory Acad-emy at the district’s University Prep High School, was created in response to a group of local businesses that originally wanted to open a charter school with the aim of arm-ing students with the skills needed to suc-ceed in four-year colleges.

“A charter gets into many different areas

of a system we hadn’t explored yet, includ-ing teachers’ unions,” said Mary Jo Kuhl-man, the district’s executive director for or-ganizational learning, when explaining why the district resisted the charter proposition in favor of school-based innovation centers. “We really wanted to be collaborative.”

online Study Schedules

So instead of stopping at the creation of one center, the Grand Rapids district used the momentum from University Prep to charge each high school with creating a separately focused Center of Innovation by partnering with community players in sep-arate vocational sectors. Career readiness is especially relevant in a community that has seen increasingly difficult economic times in the past two decades.

Because of the exodus of students from more affluent families to private schools and a local industrial economy that was slowing long before the recession that officially began in the final quarter of 2007, the percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch in the district had climbed steadily to 87 percent by the 2009-10 school year, from about 40 percent in 1991-92.

“Our goals were to expand school choice, increase student achievement, and also re-duce the racial achievement gap,” said Ms. Kuhlman. The 2006 measure of adequate yearly progress, or AYP, found fewer than half the district’s schools to be meeting the standard under the federal No Child Left Behind law, the most recent version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

“Our other important factor was to be able to design and influence curriculum that was specific to that particular indus-try,” Ms. Kuhlman said.

With each high school developing its innovation-center idea organically, only the Academy for Design and Construction and the School of Business, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship chose to use online courses to cover core academic subjects when those centers were launched in 2009.

Their blended approaches were more structured than what some other online students would encounter in a self-blended model, in which students select courses to supplement their brick-and-mortar studies to fill gaps in their schedules.

Freshmen and sophomores at the Acad-emy of Design and Construction study both design and construction in a vocational

While the Grand Rapids school district reports that students in its Centers of Innovation are, on average, getting better grades than students not in the program, it’s difficult to gain more isolated data on the results of the blended programs at the Academy of Design and Construction and the School of Business, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship.

Neither host school—Union High School nor Ottawa Hills High School—

made adequate yearly progress, or Ayp, in 2012, according to reports released in August and available on the district’s website. Both schools, though, showed double-digit percentage-point gains in the number of students meeting or exceeding their growth targets on the Measures of Academic progress, or MAp, assessments in reading. Both schools have shown marginal increases in student retention since the centers were launched in 2008.

RESultS

Both schools showed gains in students hitting growth targets in math and reading by a minimum of 5 percentage points, as measured by map assessments.

ottawa Hills High School

100

80

60

40

20

0

reading

Math

2010-11 2011-12

40%

69%

43% 45%

100

80

60

40

20

0

reading

Math

2010-11 2011-12

34%

57%

45% 53%

union High School

SourcE: Grand rapids Public Schools

3Education WEEK Spotlight on Blended learning and adaptive inStruction n edweek.org

technology classroom, while usually com-pleting their core academic courses online and their electives in courses mixed with other Union High School students.

Their online study occurs in labs of 30 to 40 students of the same grade level. The labs are staffed by a lead teacher, a special education teacher, a paraprofessional, and a student advocate. That team combines to monitor students’ progress, gives optional mini-lessons when needed on particular subjects that a number of students may be tackling at the same time, delivers re-quired one-on-one assessments to allow students to pass units of a given course, and intervenes whenever students run into academic difficulties.

Freshmen and sophomores are generally scheduled for no more than two consecu-tive hours of online coursework—a policy established as a result of lessons learned earlier in the center’s operation. “Our students in the first couple years were screaming that we take too much time on the computer,” Ms. Stallworth said. “Even now, it takes until about halfway through the students’ freshman year for them to say, ‘You know, this is kind of good. This is working to my advantage.’”

measuring Progress

Melissa Gorman, a special education teacher for the Academy of Design and Con-struction for the past four years, previously taught special education in a more tradi-tional classroom for five years. She said the transition to the computer-lab model took some adjustment for her as a teacher, but has since become second nature.

“I really didn’t know what it was going to look like, and I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it, until I was in it and doing it,” said Ms. Gorman. She spent several summer days before her first year in pro-fessional-development sessions learning how to instruct with e2020’s content, as well as observing other schools in the state that incorporated online courses.

“We are given liberty,” she added. “Be-cause it’s our fourth year working with this program, we’ve kind of figured out what is working best with us.”

By their junior year at the Academy of Design and Construction, students choose either a design path that involves a nearly full-day, twice-weekly internship, or a con-struction path, in which students spend two days a week working on houses being constructed or renovated through the Kent County, Mich., chapter of Habitat for Hu-manity. Students in the School of Business, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship take a similar path toward increasing specializa-

tion in their junior and senior years.The result for Academy of Design and

Construction students like junior José Ru-elas is an increased amount of time spent working with the e2020 content during days he is not on the Habitat for Human-ity job site. Because Mr. Ruelas has worked through some required classes, he spends the second half of his Monday taking a col-lege-level introductory construction course, Ms. Stallworth said.

That still leaves him three hours on Mondays, and five on Wednesdays and Fri-days, to work solely online, either on mate-rial in his Algebra 2 and English/language arts courses, or in other online electives, such as economics. He also has a one-hour early release those days.

“It does take some practice,” Mr. Ruelas said of the need for self-discipline. “You’ve been going to middle school and you’ve never been taking a class this way, asking for checks and for help from a teacher. But you get used to it. You pay attention to your lectures, take notes, and you get used to it.”

It’s tricky to measure the success of the blended programs of the Academy for De-sign and Construction and the School of Business, Leadership, and Entrepreneur-ship, in part because both Centers of In-novation will only be graduating their first seniors during the spring of 2013, and also because it’s hard to separate their results from those of their host schools.

Neither Union High School nor Ottawa Hills High School made AYP in 2012, ac-cording to progress reports released in Au-gust and available on the district’s website, with the latter school missing out because it did not attain target achievement goals for all subgroups of students in math and reading. Both schools, though, showed dou-ble-digit percentage-point gains in the num-ber of students meeting or exceeding their growth targets on the Northwest Evalua-tion Association’s Measures of Academic Progress, or map, assessments in reading.

There is, however, some evidence that the Centers of Innovation and, more broadly, in-creased school choice options across primary and secondary grade levels, are working in a holistic sense. The number of Grand Rapids schools making AYP has increased for five straight years, according to the district’s 2011 strategic plan, and in 2010, rose to 47 of the district’s 59 schools total.

“I think what’s important here is what the intent was, and the intent was that we knew we had academic-achievement gaps and we knew we needed to make greater gains in academic achievement,” Ms. Kuhl-man said. “When you looked at the data [in 2006], it told you, you needed to do some-thing different. It was a natural fit.”

“Our goals were to expand school choice, increase student achievement, and also reduce the racial achievement gap. Our other important factor was to be able to design and influence curriculum that was specific to that particular industry.”Mary Jo kuHlManExecutive director for organizational learning, Grand rapids, Public Schools, Grand rapids, Mich.

Advertisement

Every Student Can Become a Mathematician

You dreamt it. We built it. Intelligent Adaptive Learning™

LEARNING

Students using DreamBox Learning Math explore, learn, succeed, and smile as they play their way through a rigorous Pre-K to Grade 5 curriculum aligned to the Common Core State Standards.

Gamelike learning environment motivates students to persist through challenges until concepts are understood, internalized, and mastered.

Dynamically adaptive engine delivers millions of individualized learning paths, each tailored to a student’s unique needs.

Real-time reporting gives educators the details of usage, proficiency, and progress they need to gain insight into student achievement.

Call 877.451.7845 or visit www.dreambox.com/ew-apr to learn more.

4Education WEEK Spotlight on Blended learning and adaptive inStruction n edweek.org

S ince blended learning exploded onto the K-12 scene with prom-ises of personalized and student-centered learning, it has prolifer-

ated into dozens of different models, with educators continually tweaking and chang-ing those methods to find the perfect bal-ance of face-to-face and online instruction to meet the needs of their students.

Interest in blended education remains high, spurred partly by research offering support for advocates’ claims that blended learning is more effective than either on-line or face-to-face instruction on its own.

But more research is needed to determine the effectiveness of the evolving blended learning models, including best practices and which models work best for which types of students, said Susan D. Patrick, the president and chief executive officer of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, or iNACOL, an advocacy and re-search group based in Vienna, Va.

“The more we know about the variety of blended learning models in K-12 edu-cation, the more we know we don’t know everything that’s out there,” she said.

Michael B. Horn, a co-founder of the San Mateo, Calif.-based Innosight Institute, which conducts research on both education and health care, defines blended learning as the delivery of content and instruction partly through an online portal and partly in a brick-and-mortar location, in addition to individualization in time, pace, path, or place of learning.

Mr. Horn and his team published a white paper in May that provided updated defini-tions of the classifications of different types of blended learning, a follow-up to a paper written about blended learning in 2011. The new paper whittles six categories of blended learning down to four: the rotation model, the flex model, the self-blend model, and the enriched-virtual model.

However, educators are coming up with blended learning models that may not be easily classified into those four categories, said Ms. Patrick.

“There’s such a diversity of different types of programs and models that are using content in different ways,” she said. “It parallels the range of student needs that are out there.”

More research is needed, Ms. Patrick said, on the different models and which types are most effective with different students.

Keys to Success

Still, some common themes and best practices have emerged among the diverse blended models.

“The ability to pinpoint needs and the abil-ity for teachers to use data at a very high level for individualized instruction—that’s probably the biggest change that we’ve seen over the last six years,” Ms. Patrick said.

Delivering instructional content online opens the door for a wealth of data to be collected about each student, proponents of blended learning say, which provides real-time feedback for teachers, students, and parents.

But making sure the data are being tracked properly can also be a challenge, said Ms. Patrick.

blended learning Choices

By katie ash

Published October 24, 2012, in Education Week Special Report: What Works in Blended Learning

a variety of models for mixing face-to-face education and online instruction are generating lessons learned

rotation ModEl

Station-rotation Model

lab-rotation Model

Flipped-classroom Model

individual-rotation Model

flEx ModEl

SElf-BlEnd ModEl

EnricHEd-Virtual ModEl

Bricks and Mortar

Traditional Instruction

technology-rich instruction

online learning

informal online learning

full-time online learning

dEfininG BlEndEd lEaRninG ModElSrotation—Within a given course or subject, students rotate on a fixed schedule or at the teacher’s discretion between learning modalities, at least one of which is online learning.

flEx—Content and instruction are delivered primarily by the Internet, students move on an individually customized, fluid schedule among learning modalities, and the teacher of record is on site.

SElf-BlEnd—Students choose to take one or more courses entirely online to supplement their traditional courses; the teacher of record is the online teacher.

EnricHEd Virtual—A whole-school experience in which, within each course, students divide their time between attending a brick-and-mortar campus and learning remotely using online delivery of content and instruction.

SourcE: innosight institute

5Education WEEK Spotlight on Blended learning and adaptive inStruction n edweek.org

“Both districts and schools need to look at an enterprise architecture so that their systems can generate the types of data that teachers need to know to be able to provide that direct instruction,” she said.

Judy Burton is the president and CEO of the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit charter or-ganization that operates 21 middle and high schools. The organization began pilot-ing blended learning models last year and now operates three blended middle schools and four blended high schools.

Like Ms. Patrick, Ms. Burton believes that finding the right learning-manage-ment system, and using programs that will work with that system so that students and teachers don’t have to log in and out of multiple systems, is critical.

Through the blended learning pilots that Alliance College-Ready Public Schools has conducted, Ms. Burton said she has also learned to bring a “much keener eye” to selecting vendor programs.

“They’re not all equal in terms of rigor and the degree to which they engage stu-dents,” she said.

Ms. Burton’s organization is experi-menting with a blended rotational model, in which groups of 45 students rotate be-tween group work, online course work, and face-to-face instruction.

“I see our kids so much more interested in and excited about coming to school and about their learning because they’re no lon-ger receptacles,” she said. “They’re playing a major role in driving their own learning.”

One area of need, Ms. Burton said, is for more classes that prepare future teachers to teach in an online or blended classroom. “We’re not seeing teachers coming out of universities prepared to work in a blended classroom,” she said.

And it’s not just teachers who need more education about blended and online learning environments, Ms. Patrick of iNACOL said.

“Administrators are not being trained to manage or implement or plan and manage blended learning programs,” she said. Pro-viding that training in colleges of educa-tion for both administrators and teachers

is critical to the success of such programs, she said.

Vision With flexibility

Another common thread between suc-cessful blended learning programs is a clear and targeted instructional strategy, said Cheryl Niehaus, a program officer for the Austin, Texas-based Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, which aims to im-prove the health and education of children.

The foundation recently released case studies of five different blended learning programs.

“[Each of the five programs] were very clear as to what the instructional aspi-ration was and the way that technology plays a supporting role in achieving that vision,” Ms. Niehaus said.

On the other hand, while having a clear vi-sion is important, being willing to change or adjust that vision during implementation is key, she said. “The need for upfront planning is critical, but at the same time, there’s also a need to learn along the way and have the flexibility to make changes,” she said.

Diane Tavenner is the founder and CEO of Summit Public Schools, a Redwood City, Calif.-based charter school organization that operates four high schools in Califor-nia. It piloted blended learning in math for 9th graders at its San Jose, Calif., location last year and now wants to take it further.

“What we discovered as an organiza-tion is that [blended learning] completely opened our thinking to the possibility and power of what this could look like if you really took it from blended to optimized classrooms,” said Ms. Tavenner.

“Blended learning itself is an important piece, but it’s not going to fundamentally change our schools or learning or education the way we want them to change,” she said.

reinventing the Classroom

To create a truly 21st-century education model, or what Ms. Tavenner refers to as “optimized schools,” blended learning is combined with competency-based learn-

ing—in which students progress not on the basis of time spent on each subject but rather on their mastery of the cur-riculum—and personalization of learning, which she describes as “the behaviors and dispositions of people who really can drive their own learning.”

In such a model, teachers work in teams rather than as individuals, and the class-room itself looks much different, she said.

For Summit Public School students par-ticipating in the pilot, the approach means that instead of individual classrooms, stu-dents gather in an open, 4,000-square-foot room lined with breakout rooms with long tables in the center. Students receive their own laptops and individual workspaces, and for two hours, 200 students, accompa-nied by four teachers and two instructional assistants, fill the room.

Students work through “playlists” of re-sources, including online curriculum and videos from Khan Academy. Teachers hold seminars in the breakout rooms on various topics the students are learning.

Students create their own schedules; they attend the seminars that are helpful to them and work through their playlists of curricula. When they are ready to take an assessment and move on to the next topic, a teacher unlocks the quiz for them. If they pass, they move on. If they don’t, the assessment tells them exactly what topics they need to focus on to improve.

“It totally empowers the kid because they get immediate feedback, and they know exactly what they need to do,” Ms. Tavenner said.

For now, students are still getting used to being in control of their own learning, she said.

“It’s a lot of hard work, and it’s uncom-fortable, and it looks messy,” she said. “But we believe that unless school organizations are set up [in new ways], they aren’t really going to move forward.”

“ I see our kids so much more interested in and excited about coming to school and about their learning because they’re no longer receptacles. They’re playing a major role in driving their own learning.”Judy Burton President and cEo, alliance college-ready Public Schools

6Education WEEK Spotlight on Blended learning and adaptive inStruction n edweek.org

W hen Delaware switched to computer-adaptive testing for its state assessments three years ago, officials

found the results were available more quickly, the amount of time students spent taking tests decreased, and the tests pro-vided more reliable information about what students knew—especially those at the very low and high ends of the spectrum.

But the path to launching those tests in-volved a significant education of students, parents, and teachers, a sizeable technology investment by the state, and the development of hundreds of test items for every exam.

As many states move to put in place on-line testing tied to the Common Core State Standards in 2014-15, at least 20 states have indicated they plan to use new com-puter-adaptive versions of the tests, and they’re looking at states like Delaware to learn some lessons.

“Adaptive testing is really beneficial and can pinpoint a student’s learning level more closely,” says Gerri Marshall, the supervisor of research and evaluation for the 15,000-student Red Clay Consolidated School District in Wilmington, Del., which piloted such tests.

Nationally, two coalitions have received federal funding to develop English/lan-guage arts and mathematics tests for the common standards. Both coalitions—the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consor-tium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC—have said their assessments will feature high-tech, interactive questions that incorporate video and graphics and are designed both to identify what students know and to be more engaging.

Both assessments will be given online, but Smarter Balanced will use adaptive testing, while PARCC will use what are known as fixed-form tests, which feature set questions that generally do not change.

Only a handful of states—including Dela-ware, Hawaii, and Oregon—are now using adaptive testing on a widespread basis. Even supporters acknowledge challenges

to its implementation and use, considering that many school districts are currently doing little, if any, testing online.

“It’s a big philosophical shift for people,” says John Jesse, the director of assessment and accountability for the Utah department of education, which is in the process of de-veloping its own computer-adaptive tests for the common core. “If your district is still using paper, shifting to online is big, and then shifting to adaptive testing might be too much of a move all at once.”

Seeking Greater Precision

So what exactly is the difference between a traditional test, which presents a student with a set number of test items that don’t change during test-taking, and adaptive testing?

Testing experts say that traditional, or fixed-form, exams work well with the ma-jority of students, who hover around the level the assessment is seeking to evaluate. Test questions are developed to appeal to most students and can assess how much those students know.

However, students at the farther ends of the spectrum—high achievers and strug-gling students—fare worse on those types of tests in terms of allowing teachers to identify exactly what material those stu-dents have or have not mastered.

With exceptional students, a fixed test can’t determine just how extensive their knowledge may be, and for struggling learners, it can’t determine how far behind they may be. A teacher won’t know exactly how far gaps in students’ learning on cer-tain concepts go because the test questions don’t move far in that direction.

“The range of proficiency among kids in a grade is huge,” says Jon Cohen, the executive vice president and director of assessment for the Washington-based American Institutes for Research, which is already delivering statewide adaptive tests in several states and has been selected by the Smarter Bal-anced consortium to do pilot and field testing and to create the adaptive-test algorithm.

“With a typical test, a kid who is strug-gling is not going to see many items they can get right, and a kid at the top is not going to see many items they’ll get wrong,” he says. “Kids on the ends get a less precise score.”

Adaptive tests operate from a large test-item bank. For example, for a 40-question test, an adaptive test bank might contain 800 items, Cohen says.

An algorithm guides the computer as it picks questions based on the answer given to previous questions to pinpoint a stu-dent’s skill and knowledge level. Typically, a student will get about half the questions offered by the computer correct, whether he or she is a high, middle, or low performer, since the questions are tailored for that stu-dent’s particular level.

“With a computer-adaptive test, the per-cent correct is no longer relevant,” says Tony Alpert, the chief operating officer for Smarter Balanced. “The adaptive test is al-ways challenging for every student, and we need to help people understand that.”

Computer-adaptive assessments aren’t scored on the basis of how many right or wrong answers a student gets. A student’s score depends both on the number of items he or she got right and the difficulty of the items presented. Early trials, or field tests, present items to representative samples of

Shifting to Adaptive TestingBy Michelle r. davis

Published October 17, 2012, in Education Week Digital Directions

the goal is to build better measures of student skills and knowledge

“With a typical test, a kid who is struggling is not going to see many items they can get right, and a kid at the top is not going to see many items they’ll get wrong. Kids on the ends get a less precise score.”Jon coHEnExecutive Vice President and director of assessment, american institutes for research

7Education WEEK Spotlight on Blended learning and adaptive inStruction n edweek.org

students to evaluate the difficulty of each item in the pool and to translate that into values that will provide a score, Cohen says.

Personalization Improves Security

The biggest advantage to a computer-adap-tive test, experts say, is the ability to evaluate all students at their own levels. Because of that, students often report that they are more engaged with the test and find it more inter-esting, says Dirk P. Mattson, the executive di-rector of K-12 assessment for the Educational Testing Service, who is based in the nonprofit testing company’s San Antonio office. ETS, which has been hired by Smarter Balanced to develop several aspects of the computer-adaptive test, also produces the GRE, an adaptive graduate school admissions test.

“There’s a belief that this provides a more rewarding testing experience for the test-taker,” Mattson says. “A struggling student doesn’t need to be beaten over the head en-countering lots of questions they can’t han-dle, … and the student who is strong might welcome an additional challenge.”

In addition, because each test for each student is personalized and there are so many test questions in the bank, security risks are lessened, says Doug Kosty, the assistant superintendent for assessment and information services for the Oregon de-partment of education. His state has used computer-adaptive testing for nine years.

It’s unlikely that students sitting near each other would encounter the same test questions in the same order, for example. A student “can’t go out on the playground and compare notes on question 14,” Kosty says. “Kids are basically guaranteed not to have the same test.”

Some educators who have used adaptive testing say the test window is shorter since students don’t always have to answer as many questions. In Delaware, students used to spend multiple hours taking state reading and math tests, says Michael Stetter, the di-rector of accountability and resources for the Delaware department of education. The com-puter-adaptive tests shrank that time to one hour for reading and one hour for math, he says, making it easier for schools to schedule test times around computer labs. “We’re get-ting a more precise estimate of ability with the same or fewer questions,” Stetter says.

However, Smarter Balanced’s tests are ex-pected to take 10 to 13 hours, depending on grade levels. Because of concerns from states, the coalition is now developing a shorter ver-sion it says will produce comparable results.

In addition, users of computer-adaptive testing laud the immediacy of the assess-ment results, which typically are posted

when a student finishes the test, giving teachers the opportunity to adjust their in-struction more quickly based on the results. Officials from both coalitions say some re-sults will be available almost immediately or within days, while results from sections that contain more writing and constructed response may take several weeks.

But in the field, implementation of com-puter-adaptive tests can pose problems. Much like the PARCC tests, the Smarter Balanced tests will be given online, and that means schools will have to have enough devices and bandwidth. Delaware had to allocate funds to buy additional servers for districts and the state distributed 10,000 netbooks to get schools ready; the state also had to redesign training for teachers who were going to be test administrators. Districts are raising con-cern about lengthy testing windows tapping out their bandwidth for long periods of time and having enough devices with the right specifications to run the test.

Computer-adaptive tests can also be costly to develop since so many test items are needed. “The early years of computer-adaptive testing are extremely expensive,” Stetter says. However, since his state’s development of initial computer-adaptive tests, costs have dropped, he says, as test banks can be used for a long time.

Smarter Balanced estimates that once its adaptive tests are fully developed, its test bank will contain at least 30,000 items across all grades.

“Once you have an adaptive-testing pool, you can continue to run it for a long period of time, so there are a lot of efficiencies gained,” says Walter “Denny” Way, the se-nior vice president of psychometric and re-search services for the education publisher Pearson, based in London.

Smarter Balanced received $160 million and PARCC received $170 million in federal grants to develop the common assessments. Once the tests are ready, states will be ex-pected to pay for them, but just how much and how those payments will be structured is still being worked out.

‘Two Viable Solutions’

Experts seem to agree that computer-adaptive testing works well with multiple-choice questions, or one-word-response questions, but there are differing opinions about how it does with longer answers or with essays. That makes computer-adaptive testing more suited to some subjects than others. Oregon, for example, uses a writing assessment that is not adaptive that takes students three hours to complete.

“Things that are essays or that contain

more complicated projects that need to be evaluated through human judgment really can’t be administered [through computer-adaptive testing] in this situation,” says John Mazzeo, the vice president of research and development for ETS, based in Princeton, N.J.

Despite those limitations, Alpert says the English/language arts and literacy compo-nent of the Smarter Balanced assessments will be adaptive. The only exceptions will be a handful of performance tasks, which may be longer activities that take place in the classroom or offline.

As states and schools get ready to address the challenges of adaptive testing, training students, educators, and even parents be-comes increasingly important, says Steve Slater, the lead psychometrician for the Or-egon education department.

Melissa Fincher, the associate superinten-dent for assessment and accountability in Georgia, a state that has joined the PARCC coalition, says she appreciates the fact that the federal government has financed the work of both coalitions.

“The jury is still out, and I see this as an opportunity to look large-scale at the best way to assess students,” she says. “I don’t see this as an either-or situation. I’m pleased we have two viable solutions in the works.”

Coverage of the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the common assessments is supported in part by a grant from the GE Foundation, at www.ge.com/foundation.

“There’s a belief that this provides a more rewarding testing experience for the test-taker. A struggling student doesn’t need to be beaten over the head encountering lots of questions they can’t handle, … and the student who is strong might welcome an additional challenge.”dirk P. MattSonExecutive director of k-12 assessment, Educational testing Service

8Education WEEK Spotlight on Blended learning and adaptive inStruction n edweek.org

Virtual Ed. Dives in to the Common Core

P erhaps no segment of educators is more enthusiastic about the tran-sition to the Common Core State Standards than those who work

in virtual schools or in blended learning environments that mix face-to-face and online instruction.

With the standards’ emphasis on deeper learning, collaboration, and applied knowl-edge, some proponents of online education suggest their adoption could lead to the passage of policies that are more friendly to effective online learning. Meanwhile, many online programs are already prac-ticing the other changes inherent in com-mon-standards adoption, such as the use of computer-based online assessments.

“Opening up these learning trajectories and pathways through the common core—this is where we can really take advantage of tools and content in the digital environ-ment,” says Susan D. Patrick, the president and chief executive officer of the Interna-tional Association for K-12 Online Learn-ing, or iNACOL, located in Vienna, Va.

Because of that, leaders in virtual edu-cation have begun preparing for the tran-sition and, in some cases, launching proj-ects that, while not directly related to the common core, may stand to benefit greatly from its implementation.

For example, online content repositories have grown greatly in the number of repos-itories and quantity of learning objects—individual items of digital educational con-tent—thanks largely to the movement to align those learning objects to the common English/language arts and math standards and share them around the country.

At the same time, efforts to institute cer-tification of teachers for online instruction also appear to have gained steam from the belief that the common standards could help push momentum for the recognition of those credentials across state borders.

One of those efforts, the Leading Edge Certification program launched in January by Computer-Using Educators, a profes-

sional association in California, has aims already of becoming a nationally recog-nized credential. And Mike Lawrence, the executive director of the Walnut Creek-based group, says the implementation of the common standards will help ensure that the curriculum for the certification program is widely applicable.

“It was very much in our minds as we embarked on the project,” Lawrence says. “Without a common bar to demonstrate proficiencies, it’s difficult to know whether [the certification is] going to work for your online program.”

Lawrence acknowledges that policy dis-cussions are a big distance away from get-ting states to recognize certification from other states, but says he sees the adoption of the standards as a potential catalyst in that process.

“Just the fact that you have states talking to each other with a common language for the first time ever, that opens doors,” he says.

Emphasizing Innovation

At the Council of Chief State School Of-ficers’ Innovation Labs Network, the stra-tegic-initiatives director, Linda Pittenger, is trying to drive some of those discussions and open those doors, not only around on-line learning, but also around the broader spectrum of educational innovation. (The Washington-based CCSSO partnered with the National Governors’ Association to lead the common-standards movement.)

The Innovation Labs Network is a nine-state coalition supported by the CCSSO that Pittenger says will address challenges relating to how to supplement the next-generation assessments created to test the common core by two separate consortia, how to personalize education while meeting those standards, and how to expand educa-tional options for students and educators.

Pittenger, who previously served as the director of secondary and virtual learning for the Kentucky Department of Education and the state’s virtual school, says none of the nine states in the network is obligated to take a particular approach toward solv-

By ian Quillen

Published October 17, 2012, in Education Week Digital Directions

“ You’re looking at more digital, open educational resources and modularity. And I think this is one of the reasons that virtual learning, and online learning, is such a natural part of these kinds of environments. ... These are all characteristics of the sort of learning environments we are looking for.”linda PittEnGErStrategic-initiatives director,council of chief State School officers’ innovation labs network

9Education WEEK Spotlight on Blended learning and adaptive inStruction n edweek.org

ing any of those problems. The idea of the model instead is to enable a quicker and more reliable exchange of informa-tion and insights from any efforts at reinventing a portion of a particular state’s educational system.

But Pittenger sees online and blended learning as a likely vehicle for some of the states in the coalition of Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oregon, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. She says this is particularly an answer for increasing educational options and allowing a more flexible course of study.

“You’re looking at more digital, open educational resources and modularity,” Pittenger says. “And I think this is one of the reasons that virtual learning, and online learning, is such a natural part of these kinds of environments. ... These are all characteristics of the sort of learning environments we are looking for.”

The Florida Virtual School, the larg-est state-sponsored online school in the country, is having to rethink its curricula because of the common stan-dards—just like all schools, virtual or brick-and-mortar, in the participating states. Cindy Dulgar, a curriculum spe-cialist and the resident subject-matter expert on the common core for the FLVS, suggests that virtual education may be a good fit for standards that place a greater emphasis on skills application and collaboration.

focus on Effectiveness

For the past several months, Dulgar and her team have been delving into the content of the school’s courses in Eng-lish/language arts and mathematics, the two subject areas of the new standards. They’ve been cross-checking to see

where that content covers the necessary standards that are part of the course, and noting where gaps exist between current content and future standards.

During that process, Dulgar says, she’s become increasingly confident that the transition, while spurring some content changes, will in general be a natural one.

“The live lessons we do, the discussion-based assessments we do, ... those pieces are definitely going to help us make the shift,” she says. “I think the shift will cause us to change the way we do some of those things, but it will just be better.”

That’s not to say virtual schools won’t encounter their own difficulties during the adoption process, says Patrick of iNACOL. For example, the idea of hav-ing to give proctored online assessments could present funding challenges for virtual schools that have traditionally not had to build in the costs of facilities or face-to-face personnel, she says. For better or worse, she adds, the standards may also provide a more thorough and comparable measure of the quality of online and blended learning offerings at a time of increasing questions about the quality of online learning content.

“Now we can start to focus resources on high-quality curricula that are simi-lar across 45 or 46 states,” Patrick says. “The outcome of that is to start to be able to look at online courses and mod-ules of online courses and value-judge them on effectiveness.

“We could talk about that before, but it’s been difficult to do when there’s so many disparate standards.”

W hile “personalization” has become a buzzword in edu-cation, it can be hard to de-termine what really makes

a subject relevant to individual children in the classroom. An ongoing series of studies at Southern Methodist University suggests learning students’ interests upfront and in-corporating them into lessons can get strug-gling students to try harder and substan-tially improve their performance in algebra.

“You don’t think the words, the little details of context, will make a difference when you are solving a math problem, but it really does,” said Candace A. Walking-ton, an assistant professor of teaching and learning at Southern Methodist in Dallas and the lead researcher for the reports. The most recent of them is expected to be pub-lished later this year in a special issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology on advanced learning technologies.

The studies, which were discussed at a recent meeting here at Carnegie Mel-lon University, highlight one way to boost learning in algebraic expression, a concept considered critical in the Common Core State Standards but which educators say is perennially challenging to students. The study found that personalized math prob-lems not only made it easier for students to understand what was being asked, but also helped boost the confidence of students who may have been intimidated by the subject.

Intimidating Problems

Word problems at any level can be chal-lenging, but Michael Shaughnessy, a math-ematics and statistics professor at Port-land State University in Oregon and the immediate past president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, said it is particularly difficult for students to make the switch from looking at a concrete arithmetic problem—the cost of a sweater

Studies Probe Power of Personalization’

Published September 26, 2012, in Education Week

By Sarah d. SparksPittsburgh

‘

QuEStionS to aSK >>

Will states open policies to a common teacher certification?

Can virtual schools afford to fund proctored exams?

Do virtual schools have an edge on teaching to the standards?

Will standards lead to more educational choice?

Are standards-driven digital projects helping online learning?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

10Education WEEK Spotlight on Blended learning and adaptive inStruction n edweek.org

on sale for 20 percent off, say—to the gen-eralized arithmetic in algebra, such as an equation for finding the cost of any item in a storewide 20 percent-off sale.

“That process is one of the harder things in the algebra trajectory to do,” Mr. Shaughnessy said.

Steven Ritter, the founder and chief sci-entist at Carnegie Learning Inc., a Pitts-burgh-based publisher of math curricula, had seen similar problems while design-ing his company’s Cognitive Tutor soft-ware. Administrators found students who had learned how to identify an equation using a positive slope in one word problem showed no transfer of skills to identify a problem using a negative slope. Small changes to contextual details completely threw them.

In one high-poverty Texas school using the software, Ms. Walkington thought she saw a reason why students weren’t making those logical connections. Many didn’t relate to the question scenarios, which were often about harvesting grain or building greenhouses.

“If [a student is] already pretty fluent in math and has a high level of interest in math,” Ms. Walkington said, “it doesn’t re-ally matter how you dress up the problem, they see it as what it is: a math problem, linear equation in this case.”

Struggling learners, by contrast, often had little self-confidence in math. They weren’t sure how to approach problems and often wouldn’t even attempt them, even if they had just completed similar problems in class.

results for Students

Ms. Walkington surveyed 145 9th grad-ers who were using the software about their interests in areas such as sports, music, and movies. Then she randomly as-signed them to take the linear-equation unit either receiving standard word prob-lems or one of four variations tailored to their interests.

The students who received personal-ized word problems solved them faster and more accurately than students who received the standard questions, particu-larly when it came to translating the story scenarios into symbolic equations.

Moreover, the strongest effects occurred for students who were struggling the most before personalization.

“Problems that required a relatively high reading level and more-challenging knowl-edge components, those were the steps of the problem that were particularly affected by the personalization,” Mr. Ritter noted during the Sept. 12 discussion at Carnegie Mellon.

“It kind of makes sense if you think [about it], if you’re a big sports fan … you are prob-ably better able to read things about sports because you understand the vocabulary, you understand the situations, and for you, the readability is better,” he said.

Ms. Walkington, who did not attend the Pittsburgh event, thinks the personaliza-tion did more than just make it easier to understand the problems; it gave students a reason to try.

The tutoring software includes hints, and invariably some students will try to game the system by clicking through mul-tiple hints to get the answer. But students were significantly less likely to game the system for personalized problems, accord-ing to the researchers.

“If we gave [struggling learners] a non-personalized problem, often they wouldn’t even attempt it, but if it was a personal-ized problem, they were more likely to try it and often succeed,” Ms. Walkington said.

That’s encouraging, Mr. Shaughnessy said. “The whole thing with algebra for kids is they say, ‘This isn’t relevant to me.’ Making it relevant in any way is a good thing,” he said.

Moreover, the improvement continued for students two months later, when all stu-dents had moved on to a new unit—a find-ing that surprised Carnegie’s Mr. Ritter.

“Somehow they got interested enough that it carried over even when the prob-lems didn’t correspond anymore to the per-sonalization,” he said.

Next Steps

The findings build on Ms. Walkington’s previous pilot of the math personalization, which found similar results with only 24 students, and a study of a similar approach to reading personalization by researchers at Carnegie Mellon. The reading study also found benefits to incorporating student in-terests in texts.

“A lot of the previous work on person-alization used a method where they just inserted words—a favorite food or a pet’s name,” Ms. Walkington said. “We tried to make more authentic connections as to how they might use numbers in connection to following their own interests.”

Next fall, Ms. Walkington is expand-ing the computer personalization to 200 students, and also exploring whether a teacher could use surveys or informal in-terviews early in the school year to person-alize face-to-face lessons in the classroom.

“I don’t see a reason it shouldn’t work besides the logistics” of developing differ-ent versions of problems, which she said

took about five to 10 minutes each during the pilots. “It’s just a matter of the teacher knowing students’ interests enough to for-mulate the questions,” she said.

At the same time, Carnegie Learning has already incorporated the personaliza-tion format into the MATHia software it released this year for grades 6-8; the com-pany is evaluating whether the personal-ization improves performance in a wider student population.

Coverage of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education is supported by a grant from the Noyce Foundation, at www.noycefdn.org.

oRiGinal PRoBlEMOne method for estimating the cost of new home construction is based on the proposed square footage of the home. Locally, the average cost per square foot is estimated to be $46.50.

>> SPoRtSyou are working at the ticket office for a college football team. Each ticket to the first home football game costs $46.50.

>> MuSicyou are helping to organize a concert where some local R&B artists will be performing. Each ticket to the concert costs $46.50.

>> aRtyou have been working for the school yearbook, taking pictures and designing pages, and now it’s time for the school to sell the yearbooks for $46.50 each.

>> GaMESyou work for a Best Buy store that is selling the newest Rock Band game for $46.50.

SourcE: candace a. Walkington, Southern Methodist university

Advertisement

CHALLENGE:Transitioning to a new learning modelLocated in the heart of North Carolina, Rocky Mount Preparatory School is a public charter school serving suburban Rocky Mount, North Carolina. A Title I school, the majority of its students qualify for free and reduced lunch, which is 69% this year. With most of the elementary students below grade level in math, it was a situation that needed to be remedied from ‘the ground up.’ “Just to illustrate the lack of background knowledge some of our kids have,” remarks Angela Langley, Dean of Math, “some of our kindergarten students don’t know their numbers or the alphabet.”

After years of student math under performance and a need to transition to upcoming Common Core State Standards that would only highlight students’ background learning gaps, Langley describes the situation as “the perfect storm.”

The answer was a new strategy and learning model to accelerate the closure of achievement gaps.

SOLUTION:Finding and fixing the gaps After reviewing many options, Rocky Mount Prep decided on a blended learning approach that would leverage both the Singapore Method and a supplemental online learning solution.

Singapore Math is a teaching model in which instructional time is saved

by not re-teaching concepts from previous semesters. Most students can quickly make great gains, but those who have skill gaps run the risk of falling further behind.

To identify those gaps, and reinforce the basics while providing the rigor required by the Common Core, the school decided on DreamBox and its Intelligent Adaptive Learning™ engine. “We were impressed by DreamBox Learning’s excellent track record of supporting blended learning and Singapore Math,” says Langley, “and by its proven ability to identify and isolate gaps, remedy them, and enable learners to advance alongside their peers.”

Rocky Mount Preparatory Students Growth

ROCKY MOUNT PREPARATORY SCHOOL FAST FACTS

• Public K–12 charter school in Rocky Mount, North Carolina

• Independent North Carolina public charter school

• 1,107 total students

• College prep curriculum

• Title I school

• 5 percent English Language Learners

• 65 percent eligible for free or reduced lunch

DREAMBOX IMPLEMENTATION

• Deployed since September 2012

• All K–5 students

• 30 minutes per day, every day

• Singapore Math learning model

ABOUT DREAMBOX LEARNING

DreamBox Learning’s Intelligent Adaptive Learning™ program accelerates learning by ensuring every student works continually in their optimal learning zone and helps all students achieve math proficiency.

Partnership for Blended Learning Establishing a new culture for disadvantaged learnersLEARNING

Intelligent Adaptive Learning™

case study

DB000_0313 © 2013 DreamBox Learning, Inc. All rights reserved.

case study

ROCky MOUNT, NC

Advertisement

“Every child at any level of

proficiency stays engaged and

keeps on learning.”

— Angela Langley, Dean of MathRocky Mount Preparatory School

IMPLEMENTATION:Daily rotation for every K–5 studentTo support the new math strategies, Rocky Mount Preparatory School designed a new Learning Lab to accommodate 100 students at a time. A rotation schedule was set that gave every elementary student 90-minute intervals in the Learning Lab every school day. Then the ISTEEP assessment was administered so each student would have a customized curriculum, whether it was below, on par or above grade level. DreamBox Learning’s effectiveness as an intervention tool for struggling math learners was fundamental to ensuring that students did not become frustrated with the new blended learning model.

“DreamBox Learning’s super engaging, game-like environment was a natural for the students and they just jumped right in,” notes Langley. Even the younger children, who initially needed instruction on computing basics such as using a mouse, were thoroughly exploring and enjoying the lessons and needed very little intervention from the teachers during their Learning Lab time.

Learning gains on the scale that Rocky Mount was looking to achieve do not happen in the classroom alone, so the flexibility that DreamBox allowed—to be used anywhere, at any time—was crucial to achieving success. Rocky Mount Preparatory School made

DreamBox available for use from home, and encouraged parents to participate in and support their child’s learning process.

RESULTS:From left behind to working aheadThings at Rocky Mount have changed for the better in a relatively short amount of time. At the beginning of the 2012 school year, a majority of students entering kindergarten were working below grade level. At mid-year, all were at or above grade level. Many have moved on to 1st grade lessons and some have even accelerated to the 2nd grade curriculum.

Measured results for the 3rd graders have exceeded expectations. “When the ISTEEP pre-test was administered at the beginning of the 2012–2013 school year,” Langley reports, “all of Rocky Mount Prep’s 3rd graders were labeled as working below grade level. In a mid-year assessment, more than 76 percent were at grade level or above.”

Angela Langley expects even greater gains when end-of-year assessments roll around. She sums up the power of DreamBox by saying, “Every child at any level of proficiency stays engaged and keeps on learning.”

“DreamBox Learning’s

super engaging, game-like

environment was a natural

for the students and they

just jumped right in.”

— Angela Langley, Dean of MathRocky Mount Preparatory School

“Educators such as Rocky Mount Prep school who are embracing Blended Learning by implementing a state of the art Learning Lab and programs like DreamBox are giving their students the best possible opportunity to gain the skills they will need to succeed in the 21st century” — Michael B. Horn

Education Executive Director and Co-Founder, Innosight Institute

For more information, contact Client Care at 877.451.7845, email schools@dreambox.com, or visit dreambox.com.

© 2013 DreamBox Learning, Inc. All rights reserved. 2

DB000_0313

11Education WEEK Spotlight on Blended learning and adaptive inStruction n edweek.org

Published March 27, 2013, in Education Week

L ast year was my third year of teach-ing in inner-city Indianapolis, and I had reached my breaking point. I was a Teach for America alumnus,

Sontag Prize in Urban Education winner for excellence in teaching mathematics, a Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellow, and a two-time attendee of conferences by the Gates Foundation celebrating effective teachers and teaching. But this, my third year, was about to be my last in the class-room.

I adored my students and enjoyed teach-ing high school math. My students realized significant academic success, as measured by both district and state assessments. Additionally I was able to enjoy some per-sonal success by developing close, personal relationships with my students both in the classroom and through extracurricular ac-tivities I sponsored. However, after some deep soul-searching, I came to the realiza-tion that, despite such success-affirming indicators, including glowing performance evaluations and a comfortable paycheck, at the end of the day I did not view teaching as a true profession. I despised feeling like, despite my best efforts, I was having little impact in my school beyond the four walls of my classroom.

As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently stated, “The factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century. Today, our schools must prepare all students for college and careers—and do far more to personalize instruction and employ the smart use of technology.” Secretary Duncan’s comments spoke to my frustrations as a teacher. My greatest sources of frustration stemmed from my inability to be recognized and treated as a highly capable professional and the constraints of teaching within the same outdated school model of the last de-cades.

I had to make a change. So I did. I found a school that uses a blended-learning model, which has enabled me to view teaching as a true profession and career.

Without the opportunity to teach in a blended-learning environment, I wouldn’t be in the classroom anymore.

Personalizing Instruction

Blended learning is not about replacing teachers with machines. Rather, it’s about leveraging technology to provide students and teachers with immediate feedback, holding each individual student account-able for his or her academic success, and personalizing coursework to best meet students exactly where they are. Dave Levin, one of the founders of the KIPP charter network, recently emphasized that blended learning relies upon skilled teachers. This point is absolutely critical: Without highly effective teachers and in-struction, a blended-learning model cannot be successful or sustainable.

As enlightened and progressive educa-tors, we must get away from the notion that the most important thing about our students is their grade level. Where I cur-rently teach, we have 8th grade students taking 6th grade math, 7th grade history, and 9th grade English. Specific academic courses are assigned based upon each stu-dent’s instructional level. In fact, we do not have any two students taking the exact same course load. We also empower our students with the responsibility to choose their work at any given time, while con-stantly monitoring their individual data to ensure they are not solely working on one particular course while ignoring others.

Of course, school is also a place where social interaction is of the utmost impor-tance. Our students do not just sit in front of computers all day. In addition to their digital coursework, our students have workshops based on their grade level, along with office hours, or one-on-ones with teachers. I am able to design projects, experiments, and real-world applications to bring the concepts that the students are learning through their digital curricu-lum to life. I am able to teach them how to think creatively. For example, I have found that it is much more meaningful to have my students develop a formula for cutting

a piece of Laughing Cow cheese horizon-tally into equal pieces, or to take a leaky faucet and use math to calculate exactly how long it will take for that sink to fill up than to have them answer traditional questions from a textbook or worksheet. This is truly an exhilarating experience for a teacher. And, furthermore, I feel chal-lenged by it.

I firmly believe that teaching in a blended-learning environment is a path to a sustainable career for teachers who are looking for a change of pace from a tradi-tional school environment to one that val-ues autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

I work amidst a small staff (14 adults, including just four teachers, all with three or more years’ experience) that was en-tirely hand selected. We collaborate at our daily staff meetings before school and work closely throughout the day to maxi-mize the educational experiences for our kids. With an eye towards sustaining our high-commitment and high-expectations culture, our school leader implores us to be out of the building each day by 4:15 p.m. On Fridays, we release our students at 2:30 p.m. and the last hour of the day is devoted to professional development.

With a small, experienced, and profes-sional staff, we make many decisions collectively. Last year, I enrolled in an educational leadership doctoral program because I felt that becoming an admin-istrator was my only avenue to greater leadership opportunities and an income sufficient to support a family. But in my current school, I am able to take on many leadership roles and earn a higher salary while also staying in the classroom and en-suring that my students receive the best possible math education. This dynamic environment is enabling me to view teach-ing as a true vocation. I have since left the doctoral program, realizing administration is not my passion: Teaching students is my passion.

It’s clear that changes are needed in our country’s schools. Study after study has made it clear that the teacher is the most important in-school factor for stu-dent achievement. But we currently have

fiRSt PERSon

How Blended Learning Saved My Teaching Career

By Josh Woodward

12Education WEEK Spotlight on Blended learning and adaptive inStruction n edweek.org

an epidemic of teachers leaving the classroom just as they’re getting really effective at their jobs. By leveraging tech-nology and personalizing instruction in classrooms led by highly skilled teachers, we can change the educational outcomes for hundreds of thousands of students across this country. But blended learn-ing doesn’t only benefit students—it also provides opportunities for teachers like myself to feel, perhaps for the first time, like true professionals and instructional leaders. Sustainability and professional-ism are key to keeping teachers like me in the classroom. The blended-learning model provides both.

Josh Woodward teaches mathematics and is the lead teacher at Carpe Diem Meridian, a public charter school for grades 6-12 in Indianapolis. He is a Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellow.

Published May 23, 2012, in Education Week

T he most impressive technology-rich classrooms don’t look like classrooms. Instead, they look like creative businesses on deadline—

like advertising agencies pulling together a big campaign, architectural firms draw-ing up blueprints, or software companies developing new programs.

I recently visited a middle school sci-ence class as students toiled away on sci-ence fair projects using a classroom wiki: a widely adopted collaborative Web plat-form. As I watched, students uploaded graphic displays of their data, commented on each other’s hypotheses, and recorded video journals of their progress. The room buzzed with activity, as each of these young knowledge workers made contributions to their collective endeavor. When students got stuck, other students jumped from their desks to help. The teacher circu-lated through the classroom like a project manager, answering questions, providing feedback, holding students accountable to deadlines, and providing just-in-time in-struction.

In “creative agency” classrooms such as this one, learning technologies enable stu-dents to collaborate with peers, pursue their interests, publish their work to the world, and take greater responsibility for their own learning.

The creative-agency metaphor is particu-larly useful for thinking about the possi-bilities of new technologies since it stands in stark contrast to the dominant metaphor of schooling: the factory, where a standard-ized curriculum is delivered as efficiently as possible to groups of students treated as uniform receptacles. The fundamental question for education technology in the century ahead is this: Will we use new tools to rethink the purposes and structure of education, or will we simply use technol-ogy to boost efficiency in our factories?

For some advocates of blended, or tech-nology-enhanced, learning, efficiency is

measured by the pace at which students learn content. Technology entrepreneurs and evangelists envision a future in which computers personalize instruction: Each student sits at a terminal that delivers educational lessons at an appropriately challenging pace. By frequently assessing students with computer-graded assign-ments, the system delivers personalized instruction to each student. As a result, rather than requiring every student to sit through a 55-minute class on a topic, each student uses the minimal number of minutes required to demonstrate mastery. Proponents of this model are not looking to change the factory model of education so much as they are trying to give each stu-dent her own assembly line.

Many of the largest providers of online learning opportunities describe efficien-cies related to cost per student rather than learning gains per student. How many students can be taught with nearly teach-erless self-paced courses? How much can schools save by eliminating buildings and utilities? To what extent can online schools require parents to provide the pastoral care and academic mentoring that schools currently provide with teachers, deans, ad-visers, and counselors? In this model, the focus is less on personalizing the speed of the assembly line for each student and more on making it less expensive to run the factory. In an era of crushing pressure on school budgets, many systems find these arguments compelling.

The tension between demolishing and replacing the factory or making the school “factory” run more efficiently has been viv-idly displayed in the multiple visions es-poused by Salman Khan, the personifica-tion of digital teaching.

Khan Academy consists primarily of a collection of mathematics and science vid-eos, many which demonstrate how to apply standard algorithms for solving equa-tions. Khan Academy also includes a set of computer-generated practice problems, organized around a map of the mathemat-

coMMEntaRy

let’s use Technology To Support ‘Creative agency’ Classrooms

By Justin reich

13Education WEEK Spotlight on Blended learning and adaptive inStruction n edweek.org

ics curriculum from single-digit addition to calculus. When students complete prob-lems successfully, they progress through the map of the curriculum. When they enter incorrect answers, the system pro-vides links to hints and relevant video lectures. It’s a powerful tool, and Salman Khan has outlined at least two distinct vi-sions for its use.

In some talks and interviews, Khan has argued that his online videos should play an auxiliary role in mathematics instruc-tion within a “flipped classroom” model, meaning students would watch his lec-tures for homework and then use class-room time to solve problems, complete projects, work collaboratively, pursue in-quiry, and learn to write and think math-ematically. The Khan videos are resources that support student knowledge workers as they tackle the more cognitively rig-orous challenges of the creative-agency classroom.

At other times, however, Khan has de-scribed Khan Academy as the core, and not a supplement, to the math curriculum. In this model, students come into class, sit at a terminal, watch academy videos, and solve problems. The system motivates stu-dents with video-game-inspired systems of points and badges. Students then are freed to move at their own pace through lectures and problem sets, teachers have access to reams of data about student performance to provide individualized in-struction and remediation, and developers can use student-performance data to con-stantly iterate and refine the videos and problems. (Or, presumably, some school systems could use these tools to entirely replace human educators with machines, perhaps with inexpensive security guards to maintain order and protect the equip-ment.) In this vision, students are still learning in a standardized factory setting, and the technology serves to deliver an algorithm-based mathematics curriculum as efficiently as possible.

Writ small, teachers and schools face this dilemma with new technologies every day. Will that new interactive whiteboard be a station where students display and share their understanding, or will it be a Web-connected slide projector for deliver-ing bullet points? Will a one-iPad-per-pu-pil program allow students to pursue in-dividual research and create multimedia performances, or will iPads reduce costs by consolidating four textbooks onto one de-vice? Do student-response systems foster dialogue, peer teaching, and self-assess-ment, or do they speed up the grading of multiple-choice quizzes? Do schools spend huge sums on technology to do different

things or to do the same things faster?The most interesting debate in educa-

tion technology today is not about tab-lets vs. laptops or school-supplied tablets vs. bring-your-own-device scenarios. The choice is really between two metaphors and two visions of education—the factory vs. the creative agency. My hunch is that teachers and school leaders would almost universally agree that we hope our stu-dents are prepared to work in creative agencies rather than on assembly lines. Educators need to decide whether their technology investments are intended to speed up an old model of education or to fashion a new one.

Justin Reich is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University; a doctoral researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and the co-founder and co-director of EdTechTeacher, in Chestnut Hill, Mass., which works with teachers, schools, and districts to leverage new technologies. He also writes the EdTech Researcher blog on edweek.org.

Copyright ©2013 by Editorial Projects in Education, Inc. all rights reserved. No part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.

readers may make up to 5 print copies of this publication at no cost for personal, non-commercial use, provided that each includes a full citation of the source.

Visit www.edweek.org/go/copies for information about additional print photocopies.

Published by Editorial Projects in Education, Inc.6935 arlington road, Suite 100bethesda, mD, 20814Phone: (301) 280-3100www.edweek.org

14Education WEEK Spotlight on Blended learning and adaptive inStruction n edweek.org

res

ou

rces

WEBLInkS

Resources on Blended Learning and Adaptive InstructionnOW FEATURIng InTERACTIVE HyPERLInkS. Just click and go.

Blended Learning Case Studieshttp://www.msdf.org/programs/urban-education/initiatives/united-states/blended-learning/ michael & Susan Dell Foundation, 2012

Classifying K-12 Blended Learninghttp://www.innosightinstitute.org/media-room/publications/education-publications/classifying-k-12-blended-learning/ Heather Staker and Michael B. HornInnosight Institute, may 2012

Kahn Academy http://www.khanacademy.org/

Leading Edge Certification http://leadingedgecertification.org/

Using Adaptive Learning Technologies to Personalize Instruction: The Impact of Interest-Based Scenarios on Performance in Algebrahttps://www.zotero.org/groups/edevidence/items/itemKey/NaU7JQR3 Candace WalkingtonSouthern methodist University, may 2012

The Achievement Gap l Algebra l Assessment l Autism l Bullying l Charter School Leadership l

Classroom Management l Common Standards l Differentiated Instruction l Dropout Prevention l

E-Learning l ELL Assessment and Teaching l ELLs in the Classroom l Flu and Schools l Getting The Most From

Your IT Budget l Gifted Education l Homework l Implementing Online Learning l Inclusion and

Assistive Technology l Math Instruction l Middle and High School Literacy l Motivation l No Child Left

Behind l Pay for Performance l Personalized Learning l Principals l Parental Involvement l Race

to the Top l Reading Instruction l Reinventing Professional Development l Response to Intervention l

School Uniforms and Dress Codes l STEM in Schools l Teacher Evaluation l Teacher Tips for the New

Year l Technology in the Classroom l Tips for New Teachers

www.edweek.org/go/spotlightsView the complete collection of education week SpotlightS

get the information and perspective you need on the education issues you care about most with education week Spotlights

2012

On Implementing Online Learning

Editor’s Note: Online and

blended learning models have

reshaped how students learn.

Remote learning can assist

students with a variety of

needs, but there are also

accountability challenges

associated with virtual

education. This Spotlight offers

tips on how to best use and

apply online learning, inside

and outside the classroom.

InteractIve cOntentS:

1 Blended Learning Mixes it Up

4 Spotlight on Accountability

5 Districts Team Up on Virtual Ed.

8 Schools ‘Flip’ for Lesson Model

Promoted by Khan Academy

10 Virtual Ed. Faces Sharp

Criticism 12 Virtual Education Targets

Rise of Autism

14 New Vistas Online for Gifted

Students 16 ‘At-Risk Students’ Virtual

Challenges

cOmmentary:

18 The School-Internet

‘Relationship’ and Its Impact

on Online Learning

reSOurceS:

20 Resources on Implementing

Online Learning

Published March 15, 2012, in Education Week Technology Counts

www

Blended Learning

mixes it upBy Katie Ash

A s blended learning models, which mix face-

to-face and online instruction, become

more common in schools, classroom educa-

tors and administrators alike are navigat-

ing 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 de-

pend on the progress each student is mak-

ing 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.

iSto

ck/k

yosh

ino

2012

Published March 17, 2011, in Education Weekis

tock

/mbo

rtol

ino

ww

On Personalized Learning

A Vermont initiative to improve learning in middle schools is working through the challenges of using the latest digital tools and different teaching approaches

Navigating the Path to Personalized Ed

By Kevin Bushweller

Editor’s Note: Laptops, tablets, and other technologies can engage students and allow them to work at an individual pace. But, for teachers, administrators, and policymakers, there are questions about the implementation and effectiveness of tailored instruction. This Spotlight examines how educators can make “intelligent” assessments of their students and integrate technology to deliver personalized learning experiences.

INtEractIvE cONtENtS: 1 Navigating the Path to Personalized Education

4 The Personal Approach 6 Moving Beyond One-Size-Fits-All 7 Policies Seen to Slow Personalized Learning

9 Researchers Tackle Personalized Learning 10 ‘Hybrid’ Charter Schools on the Move

11 Credit-Recovery Classes Take a Personal ApproachINtErvIEw: 13 Passion-Based Learning for the 21st CenturycOmmENtary: 15 High Stakes of Standards-Based Accountability

rESOurcES: 18 Resources on Personalized Learning

I n a classroom on the third floor of a 110-year-old faded beige-brick building, 20 middle school-ers of varying sizes and attitudes flip open their black HP laptops for an inter-active lesson on the Declaration of Indepen-dence.The students at Edmunds Middle School are craft-

ing and revising poems about how they would have felt the day after the declaration was signed, but with a personal twist: Each student has taken on the per-sona of a patriot, loyalist, or moderate. Teacher Brent Truchon, a lanyard dangling around his neck with the attached keys and school ID badge tucked in the pocket of his red button-down shirt, moves constantly around the room, kneeling next to students and their laptops to give one-on-one attention where needed, before stepping to the front of the class to rally them all to put more imagery into their poems.

isto

ck/z

igar

rens

chac

htel

spotlightmAY 2010

On Differentiated InstructionPublished February 3, 2010, in Education Week Digital Directions

By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

the personal APPRoAch

Editor’s Note: With student diversity growing dramatically and schools facing mounting pressure to boost achieve-ment, many teachers are looking for ways to attend to students’ unique learning needs. This Spotlight focuses on how teachers are using differentiated instruction to give students individualized support.

CONTENTS:

NOw fEaTuriNg iNTEraCTivE hypErliNkSJust click on your story and go.

1 The Personal Approach

4 New Teachers Look for Differentation Help

5 E-Learning Seeks a Custom Fit

7 Exploring Differentiated Instruction

COmmENTary:9 Differentiate, Don’t Standardize

iNTErviEw:11 Making a Difference

aSk ThE mENTOr:14 Co-Teaching in the Multi-Level Classroom

Digital tools for defining

and targeting students’

strengths and weaknesses

could help build a kind of

individualized education

plan for every student.

T eachers have always known that a typical

class of two dozen or more students can

include vastly different skill levels and

learning styles. But meeting those varied

academic needs with a defined curriculum, time

limitations, and traditional instructional tools can be

daunting for even the most skilled instructor.

Cov

er p

hoto

illu

stra

tion_

Chr

istop

her P

ower

s/Va

ness

a So

lis/G

ina

Tom

ko_D

igita

l Dire

ctio

ns