Three common misconceptions that thwart school improvement
October 3, 2018 |Misconceptions are dangerous things. They shackle our visions of what’s possible and doom us to consequences we do not expect. For example, a student who believes her genes predetermine her academic abilities may avoid crucial learning experiences that are initially challenging. A student who believes his postgraduation success will flow from his intellectual prowess may […]
Who are great blended-learning teachers?
September 6, 2018 |What does it take to be a great teacher in a blended program? To ask that same question in education parlance, what competencies—meaning motives, traits, self-concepts, values, knowledge, and skills—matter most for teachers who are substituting online learning for part of face-to-face instruction? Online and blended learning are relatively new. The precise list of competencies […]
Is higher education teaching teachers to blend?
August 1, 2018 |In recent years, a lot of time and effort has been put into professional development and training for in-service teachers to prepare them to teach in a blended environment. Teacher preparation institutions have begun to take a more proactive role to improve preservice teacher exposure to blended teaching before they enter the classroom. For example, some states […]
Do specialized teaching roles help or hurt students?
June 28, 2018 |The success of our schools—and of our education system at large—hinges on teachers. From decades of research we know that teachers influence student outcomes more than anything else a school has to offer. Given the importance of teachers, many of the prominent ideas for improving education focus on increasing teacher impact through better recruitment, preparation, […]
Show me the evidence: Do new staffing arrangements actually work?
June 14, 2018 |As future-thinking schools experiment with ways to personalize learning—such as blended, project-based, exploratory, and mastery-based learning—it seems only logical that they also reconsider how they organize their instructional teams. This hypothesis guided our research with Public Impact over the last year, and culminated in a white paper released last month. Given the persuasive anecdotes and achievement results we saw from the […]
Teachers Shouldn’t Have To Work Alone—And Now They Don’t Have To
June 7, 2018 |With the rise of online learning in schools—what educators call blended learning—what teachers do daily is changing in big and small ways. A central question is what will teaching look like in the future, as online learning can increasingly help students learn knowledge personalized to their specific learning need. Recent research even suggests that learning […]