Mark Engstrom is a Certified Blending Designer, Middle & Upper School Head at Allen Academy—and an ISM workshop consultant. This February, he was invited to lead his fellow consultants in a day-long professional learning opportunity surrounding one of the latest educational trends emerging from the Information Age: blended learning. This curriculum focuses on the integration of personal learning through technology with more traditional face-to-face interactions between teachers and students.
The Source had a chance to speak with him after his presentation and dig deeper into what he sees the impact of technology-fueled education will be on private schools now, as well as what it could be in the future.
Source: How did you fall into blended learning?
Mark: I was hired to work at Graded-The American School of São Paulo [in Brazil], and was sent to a workshop on blended learning. I immediately saw the benefits to my kids. The model made sense for the gifted, for those with learning needs, and outliers on both ends of the spectrum. Actually, the only group of students it didn’t work for were those who fell into the excellent sheep model.
[Note about the "excellent sheep" model: William Deresiewicz was a professor at Yale University on the school’s admission committee. He became deeply concerned with the caliber of student he saw applying—and enrolling—to the school, which he claimed focused on “gaming the system” and parroting back “correct” answers instead of encouraging critical thinking. His observations became the book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.]
Source: Blended learning is lauded as a way to customize education to an individual student’s learning type and an instructor’s personal teaching style, by offering a variety of options from which both students and teachers can choose. How do you see these choices impacting the class?
Mark: From the teachers’ perspective, their choices will matter when it comes to what they consider their non-negotiables: What are the skills, the knowledge that their students need to have by the end of the year? When coming up with lesson plans—whether through traditional teaching models or through blended learning—teachers must consider three components:
- Content—what actual information needs to be learned by the end of the year;
- Pace—how fast or slow that information will be passed on; and
- Modality—in what way the information is taught.
For blended learning to succeed, teachers must surrender control of one of these three things, and offer that as a choice for the students to decide how they’ll best learn.
For example, if students must learn about the Ottoman Empire (content) by the spring semester (pace), teachers should allow their students to pick the way in which their mastery of the content is evaluated. They could make a poster, a video, an infographic. They could present their knowledge to the class. They could even take a test! All of these are perfectly valid ways to evaluate mastery, and fully within the learner’s control. In this way, online activities would impact brick-and-mortar lessons [and vice versa].
I’ve got two teachers [at Allen Academy] who are really good at blended learning. Next year, I’m going to push them to the next step of the model, and ask them to give their students the rubric to see what they’ll do with it. I’ll suggest that they ask the students to demonstrate mastery in the way they select, or take a test. It really comes down to the question: If given total control, what will kids do?
Of course, my teachers probably won’t do exactly as I suggest. One in particular has a knack for taking my ideas and putting her own spin on things. Still, I’m excited to see what will happen.
Source: But that strategy sounds like you’d be turning students into guinea pigs. How would you get teachers and parents to be on board with that?
Mark: Students are guinea pigs already. The standardized tests, Common Core—they’re all just experiments in evaluation and instruction. We’re just comfortable about how we’re failing now.
Source: Do you think online courses could ever replace traditional (human) faculty?
Mark: There’s always going to be a demand for an adult to be leading child instruction. They’re needed for the feedback piece, or the compassion piece, or the guidance piece. Besides, parents will want that; they feel most comfortable with that.
The kinds of people who’re involved [and become teachers] will change, though. Schools will hire “kid specialists” instead of subject matter experts, as they do now. There won’t be any lectures or recitation.
Teachers will think, “I know teaching kids looks like this. I know digital citizenship looks like that,” rather than “I know two plus two is four,” as they tend to now.
Source: So say a school wants to implement a blended learning model. There are a lot of software options on the market specifically for educators and students. Do you have any advice on how to identify the programs that are best for a given school?
Mark: I’ll go to an ISM standby: The program has to be mission-driven. Does a makerspace, for example, fit your mission, your core values, your department’s mission? If so, it makes sense to do it. If not, there’s always another idea to try.
Right now, we’re in a murky, gray area when it comes to blended learning. In 20 years, we’ll have some tried and true methods. Right now, it’s just messy. And schools have to be okay with messy, with not smooth.
One of the hold ups with blended learning is that there’s no incentive. Teachers see no one down the hall, in other states, trying out these new techniques. It doesn’t show up on evaluation.
To implement this—or any other new educational model—you have to set up a culture where failure is okay. If teachers are struggling, they need to feel comfortable asking for observation.
On the backend, the focus has to be to graduate kids that have a skill set that we don’t. We want to put kids into college and the world that have a skill set that we don’t, and that has to excite us.
Additional ISM resources:
The Source for Division Heads Vol. 12 No. 6 20 Free Online Resources for School Administrators
The Source for Private School News Vol. 13 No. 10 School Spotlight: St. Margaret's Lives its Mission Through edX MOOCs
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 35 No. 3 The 21st Century School: Curriculum and Technology
I&P Vol. 39 No. 12 The Rhetoric of Rigor
