K-12 Blended Teaching Competencies
This series is a follow-up to K-12 Blended Teaching: A Guide to Personalized Learning and Online Integration (Volume 1). Volume 1 took a competency-based approach to planning and implementing blended learning. The competencies in Volume 1 were organized into the following areas: Online Integration, Data Practices, Personalization, and Online Interaction, with a final chapter that discussed how all of these areas come together to design blended learning. These competencies are built upon a solid foundation of blended learning dispositions and technology skills.
You can read more about these ideas by following these links to Volume 1.
Problems of Practice
Instead of using the competency-based approach from Volume 1, the Volume 2 series explores blended learning within various K-12 contexts through a problems of practice approach. These problems of practice are organized into the areas of Pedagogy, Social/Emotional Learning, the 6 C's of 21st-century learning, the 7 P's of transformational blended learning, and Access. Examples of these problems of practice are illustrated in this volume’s Chapter 1: Introduction to K-12 Blended Teaching. Below is an image from the English Language Arts edition that demonstrates some discipline-specific problems of practice.
New Content on Personalization
Chapter 2: K-12 Blended Teaching Competencies offers an overview of the competencies from Volume 1, but also provides new understandings of what some of these competencies look like in practice. Worth specific exploration are new understandings of what personalized learning looks like in K-12. Chapter 2 provides a framework for designing personalized learning that examines the relationships between the data used for personalization, who or what is controlling the personalization, what is being personalized, and the extent to which learners are practicing agency and ownership over their own learning. These new understandings of personalized learning come from working alongside the teachers who contributed their practices to this book.
New Content on Evaluating Blended Teaching
Chapter 3: Evaluating Teaching with the 4Es and PICRAT presents a new framework for evaluating blended teaching practices. Volume 1 used PICRAT to help explain some of the designing that goes into blended teaching. Volume 2 builds on Volume 1 by providing both PICRAT and a new 4E framework for evaluating blended teaching. This new framework focuses on evaluating the ways in which blended teaching Enables, Engages, Elevates, and/or Extends learning in meaningful ways.
New Teacher Video Resources
Much like Volume 1 offers resources such as blended teaching videos, artifacts, and reflection questions, the books in Volume 2 have their own resources worth accessing.
Each edition of this series is filled with teacher quotes and videos about teachers' experiences with K-12 blended teaching. Our hope in creating this book is that it can largely be seen as a book created through collaboration with teachers for teachers. The videos and quotes throughout this book should not be seen as optional content, but rather as the core content used to explore examples of blended teaching across content areas and grade levels.
Other Resources
The other key resources to be aware of in using this book for training, professional learning, or blended teaching implementation are the Blended Teaching Readiness Survey, the Blended Teaching Roadmap, and the Blended Teaching Workbook.
Each chapter of Volume 1 begins with a link to the Blended Teaching Readiness Survey, a brief readiness self-assessment survey. This survey can be helpful as your prepare for blended teaching regardless of whether you are taking a competency-based approach or a problems of practice approach. The survey takes 2-3 minutes per section of the survey. These sections include questions about your dispositions and abilities to use online integration, data practice, personalized learning, and/or online interactions. It provides users with a sense of their current aptitude for blended teaching specific to each competency. You can learn more about the Blended Teaching Readiness instrument and use it yourself here: http://bit.ly/K12-BTR.
The Blended Teaching Roadmap is a resource introduced in Volume 1 for guiding teachers in designing, developing, and implementing blended teaching. Like Volume 1 itself, this resource takes a competency-based approach to help educators implement blended teaching. Appendix C of Volume 1 provides links to examples and Google Docs to reference and use in creating a plan for blended teaching. To use the Google Doc, you should make a copy of the Blended Teaching Roadmap that you can edit and own.
This is an example of what the callout boxes for the Blended Teaching Workbook look like. You will find these scattered throughout the book. You can access the Blended Teaching Workbook here.
The Blended Teaching Workbook is a new resource introduced in the Volume 2 series. This resource takes a problems of practice approach to designing, developing, and implementing blended teaching. References to the Blended Teaching Workbook are scattered throughout each series edition with links to the Google Doc used to create the workbook. To use the Google Doc, you should make a copy of the Blended Teaching Workbook that you can edit and own.
We hope that you enjoy the book we have put together, and encourage you to share it with others! Thank you again for exploring our work!