Thank you for accessing one of the books in the K-12 Blended Teaching (Vol. 2): A Guide to Practice Within the Disciplines series!
The purpose of this preface is to orient you to the focus of this book, the original contributions that this book makes to blended learning, and the resources available to you within this book.
The Purpose of This Book
The purpose of this book is to provide rich examples of the four blended teaching competencies from a disciplinary perspective. The first three chapters of the book provide definitions and an overview of the blended teaching framework. Subsequent chapters are organized into sections that focus on blended teaching in a specific discipline. Each section has the following chapters:
- Introductions–Video introductions to the model teachers who will share written and video examples throughout the section.
- Why Blend?–Descriptions from the model teachers about why they chose to try blended learning in their classrooms.
- Online Integration and Management–Examples of how to effectively combine online instruction with in-person instruction.
- Online Interaction–Examples of how to facilitate online interactions with and between students.
- Data Practices–Examples of how to use digital tools to monitor student activity and performance in order to guide student growth.
- Personalizing Instruction–Examples of how to implement a learning environment that allows for student customization of goals, pace, and/or learning path.
What is This Book?
This book 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:
Instead of using the competency-based approach from Volume 1, Volume 2 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 chapter that demonstrates some possible problems of practice.
New Content in Volume 2
While Volume 2 understandably builds on the content of Volume 1 and offers new examples of blended teaching across K-12 contexts, it also offers some new insights that are generally applicable to blended teaching.
First, 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.
Second, 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 Resources in Volume 2
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 referencing.
Each chapter of this book is filled with teacher quotes and videos about teachers' experiences with K-12 blended teaching. Chapter 4 of this book introduces the teachers who contributed practices to the book. 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 grades.
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 I 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 Volume 2. Like Volume 2 itself, this resource takes a problems of practice approach to designing, developing, and implementing blended teaching. References to the Blended Teaching Workbook are scattered throughout this book 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!