challenge

blend

Hybrid, blended, flipped no matter the eduwash, all speak to a shift in curricula delivery that has already arrived, but seems newish to some.

I remember reading an article back in 2011 The Flip: Why I Love It – How I Use It -it started my own learning journey into flipping my classrooms. The exploration ultimately did not arrive in a place where I felt that the students and the moments within the journey had any deeper value than what I had already established, my reality was better than the brochure.

I did not stop using tech tools or developing social media options or differentiating at all. In some ways my attempt to shift core curricula outside of the class time revealed similar sensibilities as Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach presented when she wrote about her flipped experience several months later The Flip: End of a Love Affair and I gotta admit, I agree with the all of her assertions – post flip.

She, luckily, arrived at an enlightened destination where student agency evolved out of her experiments. For others, including me, this actualization of student-centeredness is still out of focus – though critical to my modern learning realities.

My current path is chasing several big challenges:

  • homework bugs me – collaborative and connected learning must continue beyond the class walls and personal learning pursuits should be ‘personal’, %20 time makes sense, but I have not yet made peace with it in my pedagogy
  • core curricula is rigid – a friend of mine is going to explore a radical approach, bolstered with her mastery of content area and a bit of pedagogical bravery, she is going to ask her students ‘What do you want to do/learn /make this semester?’ Wow… what if?
  • curation is not creation – my class website has many resources that I have put there, my learner’s journey is robust and obvious, my students not so much…

The blended classroom will not fade anytime soon. The fact that we even speak of it is less a result of innovative teaching, but rather consumer gravity. Any learner attends class with social media expectations, learning skill toolkits, tech tool savvy, and an awareness that the learner should exist at the center of a classroom.

Throughout all of this, the relational connections, not transactional, are what keeps education social. The tech and the tools are secondary to this current iteration. The tech and tools are interesting and sometimes necessary accelerators, but are dead things without human mediation.