From Theory to Practice

Educators constantly find themselves in a perpetual state of trying to get better at their craft.  As I have mentioned in previous blogs, I live and die by my PLC.  This year, we have decided to attempt to bring together all of our endeavors and professional development into a nice, neat package we like to call "self paced units with a side of guided reading".  As we begin to receive more training in literacy and guided reading groups, we hope to see this model develop even further next year (again with that perpetual state of growing).  However, after two full years of attempting the beginning stages of blended learning, we feel we have a strong grasp on how to structure our self paced units, and now we are ready to move one step further.

Management of Unit
Our learning management system, Schoology, has some great features that assisted us in this process.  One of the biggest obstacles we struggled with during our blended learning pilot was the management of student work.  We tried many different avenues on how to deliver directions to students whether it be through QR codes, Schoology pages, or hard copy paper. We also found it difficult to keep track of student progress.  These issues have been alleviated with the use of Schoology's student completion option.

The student completion option allows you to digitally manage the requirements for student work.  You are given options based on the type of assignment.  For example, assignments are given the option to "make a submission" or "score at least..."  This tackles the problem of delivering directions to students who are working at their own pace.  

The final problem to tackle is monitoring student progress while students are all at different places in the assignments.  The student completion option comes to the rescue once again!

Notice the requirements are also written under each assignment now

The student completion option will generate a class roster with a percentage bar that will inform the teacher of each students' progress throughout the self-paced activities.

Instructional Design
With the management piece under our belt, we were able to get creative with the instructional portion.  Since Schoology allowed for a seamless management of self-paced activities, we felt we could now tier the self paced work to each student's individual level.  We created three separate groups based on lexile level, and we created tiered activities using Bloom's taxonomy for each group.  Every group was working on the same four skills; however, their individual activities looked different.  Students were instructed to use their "Task Sheet" to guide their self-paced work.

While groups were engaged in self-paced work, we were free to pull small groups for traditional guided reading lessons.  We started with a mini lesson on our weekly skill focus every Tuesday.  This skill focus would be the goal of the guided reading groups.  Students would engage in before, during, and after reading activities with readings at their lexile level. Every Thursday, students would reflect on the skill focus using a 4-3-2-1 scale as well as answer an application question to determine if they truly understood the weekly skill focus.  This data would drive our one on one meetings every Friday while the remaining students worked independently on an Achieve 3000 article to help boost their lexile.

With our ever increasing knowledge base accompanied by the variety of tools in our educator "toolbox", we are able to design a classroom environment that catapults many of the educational theories into a working practice.  It is important to remember that every classroom looks different, and to turn every classroom into the same would result in the feared "robotic teaching".  Infusing these practices with our personalities and our desired classroom structure will result in a seamless transition.  While we keep in mind researched, best practices, we must also keep in mind what works for our classroom, and more importantly, our students.