Blended Learning Best Practices That Still Hold Up

Announcer (00:00)
This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:04)
We’re continuing our countdown of the top 10 episodes of all time for the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast as we approach our thousandth episode. Coming in at number five was a fascinating episode from Thomas Arnett from the Christensen Institute as he shared what the Institute learned from administrators and teachers about the best practices of teaching that happened during the pandemic. This one was also a little over 25,000 downloads. Today we have my friend Thomas Arnett from the Christensen Institute, and we are going to discuss some new research, Tom, that you and your organization have done about teaching during COVID-19 pandemic. What are some of the findings of your research, and would you describe it to us a little bit in terms of the audience that you surveyed?

Thomas Arnett (01:00)
Yeah. So back in the beginning of the pandemic, we decided, you know, we really need to get a snapshot of what is going on in schools to get a little bit more nuanced than just kind of the broad brushstrokes that you see in a lot of the media. And so over the last year, we’ve done a series of surveys, two, well, I should say two last year and two in this upcoming year. One to a national representative sample of administrators, school and district administrators, and then another one to a nationally representative sample of teachers. And we’re basically, we’re trying to get at, you know, what does instruction and online learning look like during this time of the pandemic? And there’s a bunch of findings in there. And folks can go to our website and read our reports on this if they’re interested. But a couple of things I’ll highlight. One is that in terms of in-person versus remote versus hybrid, it was actually a mixed bag. When we asked teachers, what was the model that you used the most throughout the year, they divided pretty much evenly into thirds. But a third of teachers had been mostly in person, a third had been mostly hybrid, and a third had been mostly remote. But when we asked those that were mostly hybrid, what did it look like?

Thomas Arnett (02:03)
By far, the dominant approach was what’s often called Zoom-in-room, or what we call in the reports, concurrent instruction, where teachers are working with students that are in the classroom with them and working with students over Zoom at the same time. And from a logistical standpoint, it makes a lot of sense why schools went to that because it was an emergency situation and people had to scramble and figure out what they were doing. And in that kind of a situation, you don’t want to throw out everything you’ve ever done and have to invent everything else, everything from scratch on the fly. The most logical thing was to say, well, let’s try and take the way we usually teach and preserve as much of that as we can and do it over Zoom. But unfortunately, what we found in the free response comments in the survey was teachers just said that was impossible. It was I can teach students online or I can teach them in person, but I really can’t teach them both well at the same time. And this isn’t serving anyone. And it’s exhausting and overwhelming. So one of the things we wanted to say is just like, you know, look, this is, although the logistics for a school administrator may have been easier in this kind of a model, it didn’t work well for teachers and therefore, you know, likely didn’t work well for many of their students. But there was some optimistic side too. I’ll pause there. But there’s some other pieces that were a little more encouraging.

Vicki Davis (03:14)
So just to clarify, you know, some schools had it that if a student was in quarantine or had to go home for a period of time, that they would be handed off to another teacher who had only remote students. And then when they moved back into the physical classroom, they would move back with the other teacher. I guess you had no way to get at that particular approach, but it sounds like that would probably be better than requiring teachers to try to teach both.

Thomas Arnett (03:39)
Yeah, we did see students in our survey. We asked about things that got at that. And there were, in the nationwide survey, there were some teachers that did that. But it was just that concurrent approach was about 79% of teachers that said that they were teaching both at the same time, as opposed to having teachers work with different staff or work with teachers at different times.

Vicki Davis (03:59)
So you said there was some encouragement. I think we probably all needed about now. What were the encouraging findings?

Thomas Arnett (04:05)
Well, again, in that free response part of the survey, it was so telling, kind of the night and day contrast between the two general types of comments. One was the one I’ve mentioned of teachers just saying, this was really hard, hardest year of my career, harder than being a brand new teacher. And I’ve been teaching for 30 years. But on the other hand, you know, there was a small minority of teachers that said that this actually worked really well. But what they did was very different. They weren’t doing concurrent instruction. Typically, what they were doing was something akin to what we’ve called from before the pandemic, the flipped classroom model, where they were taking their lessons and creating them as online resources that students could go through at their own pace.

Thomas Arnett (04:42)
And then class time wasn’t focused on how do I cover my material during my class time with students. It was focused more on, you know, let’s check in. Let me check in with individual students and find out how they’re doing. Let me answer questions that have come up as they’ve been going through those online materials. And teachers that did that kind of an approach had really positive things to say that, you know, I got to know my students better than I usually do. And it was easier to keep track of where they’re all at in their learning and to know how to cater to their needs. And so, you know, kind of as a corollary with that, we asked teachers, you know, what kind of tools do you use for online learning, both before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and what do you maybe plan to use afterwards? And the tools that were used the most were learning management systems like Canvas or Schoology or Google Classroom and video like, you know, Zoom or Microsoft Teams or Google Meet. But in a smaller subset of teachers, roughly, you know, 30 to 40%, they said they were using tools for creating their own online lesson materials or for video recording their lessons and posting those online. And we saw, when we looked at the comparison between who was using those tools before the pandemic and who planned to use those after the pandemic, we saw the biggest jump in adoption in those areas, which I think corresponds to those teachers, the teachers that had figured out how to flip their classroom, kind of change the instructional model to make it work better in an online setting. And we think those are the teachers that are really, that are driving that jump in adoption.

Vicki Davis (06:09)
Instead of trying to force fit, you know, I’ve seen some teachers who have gone back to in-person and basically dropped most of what they did online. And in my observation, it was the teachers who were having students take pictures of their work on paper and who were uploading handouts for the students to print at home. So there was no change at all in the instructional methodology. So you’re saying those who actually changed their methodology plan to keep…

Thomas Arnett (06:35)
Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it.

Vicki Davis (06:37)
Well, isn’t it kind of discouraging to come so far and go backwards? Are we thinking that perhaps maybe although some teachers have gone online, it’s not really been an improvement?

Thomas Arnett (06:48)
Well, I think it’s a mixed bag. I think there are teachers that just found the experience frustrating and they’re eager to just get back to the way things were, the things that they were used to, things that worked for them before the pandemic. But I think we also see, again, it’s a minority of teachers in our survey, but that small minority that figured out, and in some ways, they took advantage of the opportunity too. They said, you know, there’s not as much pressure around test scores right now, or there’s not as much pressure around other forms of accountability. So let me take this moment to say, let me try some things. Let me experiment. Let me see what I can do differently. And it’s that smaller subset of teachers that we see learning things during COVID that in our free responses said, you know, I plan to keep doing XYZ that I learned because I found it really useful. I found it, you know, easier to not have to worry about if a student is absent, how do I catch them up? because I can just point them to—here’s the materials online now and you can go catch up. Or if you need extra review, I don’t have to spend as much time figuring out how do I pull together resources to help you review. It’s all right there, accessible. So we suspect that in the long run, like a lot of things are going to revert back after the pandemic, but there’s going to be some folks that continue to move ahead. And I guess my optimistic hope is that those folks continue to improve what they’re doing and they share it with their colleagues and you start to see wider use that may drop after the pandemic, but grow in the longer haul of time.

Vicki Davis (08:03)
Well, and you say that some teachers are going back what worked for them, but the question is, did it ever work?

Thomas Arnett (08:09)
I think that’s a fair question, yeah.

Vicki Davis (08:11)
So when you look at the teacher survey and then you look at the administrator survey, do you think that administrators had an accurate picture of what was going on in their classrooms? Or were there any discrepancies between the two sets of observations?

Thomas Arnett (08:25)
Well, I think there were some discrepancies. One of the questions we asked to both groups, the teachers we asked, how well have you been able to provide effective instruction? How well have you been able to support social-emotional needs? And to administrators we asked them, how well do you think your school system has met students’ needs? And administrators tended to be pretty optimistic. We gave them kind of a slider they could put anywhere between zero and 100. And most of the responses were kind of toward the end of like 60 to 100. But they were pretty optimistic that, you know, in spite of the challenges, things were going well. With teachers, especially for teachers that were either hybrid or remote for most of the year, we saw a pretty strong split. Where some were more optimistic, not very many at the high, you know, 100 end of the scale. But there were some that were in like the 70, 80 range. And then there was another cluster that were in like the 30 to 40 range. So I think it was a really split experience for teachers, whereas for administrators, it was generally more optimistic. I think administrators were, in many cases, not seeing what teachers were seeing on the ground.

Vicki Davis (09:24)
Where do we go from here, Tom?

Thomas Arnett (09:27)
Well, you know, in the report we put out, we kind of make three areas of recommendation that hopefully, no matter where you are, you can see the one that fits for you. And I will say the recommendations we geared them toward administrators, but I think they’re applicable to teachers too. One is, if you’re one of those teachers that found new tools… Keep using them. Keep trying to figure out how to leverage them to transform your instruction and to better meet your students’ needs and to better differentiate. If you’re an administrator, recognize that there’s some teachers that have that experience and give them the support they need. Don’t cut off the software licenses when the pandemic’s over. And, you know, look into things like there’s a professional development nonprofit that I’ve become a big fan of called the Modern Classrooms Project. And they have free resources online to teach teachers how to shift to a blended, mastery-based, student self-directed model. And so, you know.

Thomas Arnett (10:18)
Help teachers find access to that kind of professional development support. That’s one. Now, that’s not going to work for everybody. Some people don’t want to do that, you know, big-scale transformation of their classroom. Another thing we recommend is stop trying to think of there being one ideal model for all students. On the administrator survey, we saw that around 30% of administrators said their school systems plan to keep offering virtual schools post-pandemic. And that’s up from, you know, roughly 10%, 11% before the pandemic.

Thomas Arnett (10:49)
And we see, you know, those virtual schools could turn into really crummy virtual schools where you just prop something up online and then say we filled the gap and move on. But they can also be really interesting laboratories for innovation where you say, well, let’s pair a virtual school with a learning hub or a learning pod and figure out how do we create a really rich blended learning experience where instruction works very differently, but it’s still in person. It’s still with teachers, but, you know, where you’re really shifting the roles of students and teachers to make the experience more personal. We think there’s huge opportunities there. So that’s the other thing we say is don’t shut those options down, but rather, you know, have the vision to see how could we turn this into something that really better serve students’ needs, not something we force everybody to do, but something that we make an option so that those that benefit from it can go have access to. I didn’t mention yet is just for school systems to take stock of where they are and look at their communities and say, if my stakeholders of my families and my teachers have appetite for change, go ahead and try and pursue that change. But recognize it’s going to vary from one context to the next. Some communities, I think, are ready for that and some aren’t. And our real recommendation is just for people to kind of read their situation and figure out, does that strategy make sense? If yes, then go ahead. If no, then consider one of the other two that I mentioned earlier.

Vicki Davis (12:01)
And watch out for hybrid because it may not be all that everybody thought it was.

Thomas Arnett (12:06)
Yeah, especially not the way folks were doing it for the most part last year. Sure.

Vicki Davis (12:10)
I will say that we are, at my school, we’re pretty much in person, but every so often a student ends up in quarantine and we zoom them in. And it’s as much a social connection and forward progress as anything else. But it feels different than hybrid where you have, you know, half the students online and half physically there. So, well, Thomas Arnett from the Christensen Institute and we will link to the research in the show notes. And thank you for giving us some insight and, you know, things keep changing. So it’s great to have some excellent research out here that we can kind of take a look at what we’re doing so that we can make decisions based on best practices. So thanks, Tom.

Thomas Arnett (12:49)
Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate it.

Announcer (12:52)
Thank you for tuning in to 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.