When she introduced Khan Academy videos and quizzes to her sixth-grade math students, Suney Park had to “give up control,” she said at a Blended Learning in K-12 conference at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. “That’s hard.”
But the software lets her students work at their own level and their own pace, moving on only when they’ve mastered a lesson. More are reaching proficiency, says Park, who teaches at Eastside College Prep, a tuition-free private school in all-minority, low-income East Palo Alto, California.
“I’ll never go back,” Park said.
Before she tried blended learning, she struggled to “differentiate” instruction for students at very different levels. “You can try it, but you can’t sustain it,” she said. “Teaching to the middle is the only way to survive.” Now, her advanced students aren’t working on a task devised to “keep them out of the way.” They’re moving ahead.
Blended learning is taking off, said Michael Horn, co-founder of the Christensen Institute. It has the potential to “disrupt” the “factory model” of education. If students are practicing skills on their tablets, the teacher can be a small group discussion leader, coach, project organizer, counselor, curriculum planner or . . . who knows? If students are learning at their own pace, should they be organized into “grades” based on age?
However, he warned, “Just because a school is doing blended learning doesn’t mean it’s any good.”