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, […]
At Education Elements, we’re really lucky to support the design and implementation of blended and personalized learning across more than 700 schools and districts around the country. In this work, we’re often asked, “How do we set up teams to build our internal capacity and support the implementation, scale, and deepening of blended and personalized […]
Are computer labs a thing of the past? Not so fast.
June 19, 2018 |
Recently, an education leader remarked to me that “the concept of a computer lab is obsolete”. The comment surprised me. In our blended learning research at the Christensen Institute, we see schools implement blending learning using technology along a wide spectrum, from a lab of desktops to 1:1 hand-held devices, 3D printers, VR headsets, and […]
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 […]
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 […]
Personalized learning’s rationale has strong intuitive appeal: We can all remember feeling bored, confused, frustrated, or lost in school when our classes didn’t spark our interests or address our learning needs. But an intuitive rationale doesn’t clearly translate to effective practice. For personalized learning to actually move the needle on improving student experiences and elevating […]