Creating the Anywhere, Anytime Classroom. Casey Reason
good fortune of coming from a school district that deeply embraced the Professional Learning Communities at Work model. I read the book you wrote with Dr. DuFour regarding virtual collaboration with great enthusiasm because of my recent career change (DuFour & Reason, 2016). I’ve always dreamed of being an innovative educator, and this fall I took a job with a national online middle school that serves at-risk students throughout the nation. They hired me because of my experience in working with PLCs and my background in supporting at-risk learners.
The teachers that I am working with didn’t know much about the PLC process. During one of my first meetings, I had a chance to share with them the concept and talk about what steps we could take to begin to initiate the process. When I talked to them about defining, as a group, the essential learning our students needed to demonstrate, the group responded that the essential learning was already provided in the course platform. When I mentioned the importance of the establishment of common formative assessments, they again told me that the platform maintained these documents and no additional work in this area was needed. When I talked to them about making changes to the curriculum or our approaches due to discoveries that we might make along the way, my team again informed me that the curriculum was set and that we would have to go through the designated designer in order to make any changes to the curriculum.
Did I make a mistake by coming to this school? Are all schools delivering online learning this inflexible?
Help!
Dana
What you will discover in looking at what teachers are facing in teaching online is that there are numerous variables when it comes to designing a curriculum. In Dana’s case, she clearly found herself with what she felt like was very little wiggle room in terms of design and delivery of learning thanks to joining this national, online delivery platform. We have seen other cases wherein teachers are asked to teach a high-stakes, relatively sophisticated class online and are provided little more than a cursory overview of what the e-learning platform can do and a good luck wish. This chapter is designed to help negotiate both ends of the continuum, as well as where most of us exist, which is somewhere in the middle.
Approaches to Curricula in Digital Environments
We have observed many prepackaged K–12 digital curriculum programs wherein, just like Dana, the instructors inherit a full complement of instructional units, individual lessons, and accompanying assessments when they log in to begin teaching. In Dana’s case, she was in for a bit of a struggle in that the flexibility required for teachers to own their essential learning, their common form of assessments, their results, and their ability to adjust their work to continue to improve is indeed more difficult under this permutation. There are, however, curricula solutions that are not strictly prepackaged and offer instructors incredible freedom to design their courses. Both formats have inherent advantages and disadvantages, something we explore in this section.
Advantages of Prepackaged Learning
One advantage of a prepackaged curriculum, like the one Dana experienced, is its potential for offering teachers who are new to digital learning facilitation the opportunity to truly focus their attention on interacting with the students and optimizing the learning experiences. These curricula are not unlike a teacher in a traditional classroom receiving an outstanding lesson plan from a colleague. This said, it’s important to establish that, although the heavy lifting has been done, these curricula still require excellence in execution.
Prepackaged curricula are also advantageous because, in many cases, the instructional designers have unique design approaches, access to content, and the ability to utilize the institution’s support to procure some unique artifacts.
Let’s revisit our friend Dana, who struggled mightily in wrapping her head around the inflexibility of the curriculum, assessments, and even opportunities for intervention and collaboration. The truth is she did experience some pleasant surprises. An avid scientist, Dana thought that she had some very impressive resources collected for her students. To her delight, she discovered that her digital school had invested in some exclusive content developed in support of the famous science superstar Bill Nye the Science Guy. His digital content was illuminating. This, combined with some additional hard-to-find resources from National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution made Dana realize that, although the content was less flexible than she would have liked, the digital school had invested some meaningful resources in gaining access to some content artifacts that she never could have, either working alone or even with the best efforts of her local PLC.
A prepackaged, fully loaded, digital learning experience revolves around the ability to create immediate availability of a learning experience that a local school may be unable to provide. For example, if a student in Sheridan, Wyoming, wanted access to a level 5 Latin class, that school might be too small to offer such an advanced language. In these situations, the existence of a prepackaged curriculum may minimize the need for a specialized instructor who is available in Wyoming. It may allow an existing foreign language teacher, still a language expert, to teach a class that he or she may otherwise have a challenge preparing to teach.
Disadvantages of Prepackaged Learning
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