Welcome back.
We're thrilled by what we're seeing on the discussion
board, and the really robust energy that the course has.
It's exactly what we were hoping for.
Let's do a quick review of where we've been.
>> Great.
So in week one, we talked about the definition of blended learning.
Looked at some different models of blended learning.
And then thought about, what does it mean to do high quality blended learning?
In week two, we really dove into how does
a student experience change in high quality blended learning models?
And then last week, we thought about, how does a teacher experience change?
And as a preview, next week we're getting into some nitty gritty around
the hardware, the software, and the physical space required to do this work.
And this week it's all about scale at it, it's all about solutions at scale.
What does this look like, when we redesign an entire school?
Now, I know some of you are saying the
entire school, I, I don't have control over the school.
I have a classroom, or I work with one group
of teachers.
We understand that, but we think it's really important to understand what
this looks like, if you can
plan holistically across an entire organization.
>> And if you dig in with us, what
you'll see is that the principles we introduce this week.
While we're introducing them with the frame of changing an entire
school, they actually apply just as much changing an individual classroom.
Or if you're a teacher going over to the neighboring
teacher, and collaborating on how
to change your learning environments together.
>> The idea we want to focus on here, is that
you can't just focus on a single period of the teacher's day.
When educators start innovating on different kinds
of classroom models, they quickly bump into the
constraints of having a 57 minute period that's chopped up into six blocks a day.
So this week we want to remove those barriers, remove the constraints.
And think about what's possible, when you design
from the ground up at the whole school level.
>> Now some of you may already
be a part of this redesign process at a school level, and
others of you are just thinking about it at a classroom level.
But we suspect that, as you get into this
work deeper and deeper, you're going to ask the
same question that we started out this whole blended
learning course with asking at the classroom level, about schools.
Why do we run schools the same way, that we have for the last 100 years?
Do those assumptions still make sense? And now these assumptions
run very sexy and exciting topics, like bell
schedules and student grouping policies and grade levels.
I know, heart thumping kind of stuff.
But, I truly believe that if you show me how a school sets up their bell
schedule, their teacher assignments, I can show you
90% of where they're using all financial resources.
And frankly, already show you where they're
constraining all possible innovation into the future.
So this week, we're going to look at some assumptions
about how school has always been.
And then we're going to look at some schools that are actually
questioning these assumptions, and see how they're reorganizing school as a result.
And then we're going to at the economics of all this.
How much does it cost to go blended, and
how are schools thinking about affording these additional costs.
>> We finish by talking to the actual experts in the field who've done
this process, and see how they've navigated
the process of changing their schools to these
blended models.
Now it's easy to focus on the what of blended learning.
But how we get there, the actual change management process.
That's where the magic really happens, and
the best superintendents, principals and teacher leaders are
the ones that are, are really good at thinking about the leadership of all this.