Public Impact has released a new report emphasizing the potential of the combination of good teachers with technology. If school districts can incentivize good teachers who make skillful use of technology, they will achieve what Education Secretary Arne Duncan has called the “best combination.” Hiring the right teachers is the start, but from there, teachers need to be given enough autonomy to put their teaching skills to use.
Here is more from a press release about the report:
As blended learning becomes more common, how can districts, charter organizations, and states ensure it will actually improve students’ learning? Like other reforms, technology plus today’s typical schools and range of teaching quality won’t do it: Schools need a “better blend” of high-quality digital learning and excellent teaching.
In Public Impact’s latest policy brief, A Better Blend: A Vision for Boosting Student Outcomes with Digital Learning, Public Impact, and their initiative Opportunity Culture, explains what state policy changes could enable and incentivize this better blend in large numbers of schools.
Digital instruction has the power to personalize learning, letting students work along the paths and at the pace they need. But it can also help excellent teachers reach more students with their ambitious, connective teaching methods and provide the time for them to help good teachers make the leap to excellence. At the same time, excellent teachers can help ensure that digital instruction realizes its promise, delivering tailored, high-quality learning experiences to students.
Today’s blended models will likely fall short unless they are paired with excellent teachers playing instructional and team leadership roles that maximize technology’s impact in tandem with their own.
As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said, “The best combination is great teachers working with technology to engage students in the pursuit of the learning they need.”
A Better Blend shows how schools should shift to blended learning while enhancing teaching effectiveness, through:
- Selectivity: Hiring selectively based on indicators predictive of outstanding teaching
- Reach: Extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students, directly and through team leadership
- Freed Time: Scheduling to give teachers time to collaborate, develop, and analyze student learning data during school hours
- Accountability: Giving excellent teachers credit and accountability for the growth of all students under their purview, including those taught by the teachers on teams that they lead
- Authority: Vesting excellent teachers with control of the digital content they use, allowing them to continuously drive improvements in instructional materials in ways never possible previously
- Rewards: Investing savings in paying teachers far more for achieving excellence with more students, making stronger recruitment and enhanced selectivity possible.
The report shows how state policy changes can enable and incentivize a better blend in large numbers of schools, through:
- Funding that is flexible and weighted by student need, so that schools may invest in the people and technology that best advance their students’ learning
- People policies that let schools hire, develop, deploy, pay, advance, and retain excellent teachers and collaborative teaching teams to reach every student with excellent teachers
- Accountability, using increasingly better measures, that drives teaching and technology excellence and improvement, so that excellent teachers and their teams get credit for using blended learning to help more students, and so that schools have powerful incentives for a better blend
- Technology and student data that are available for all students, allowing differentiated instruction for all students without regard to their economic circumstances
- Timing and scalability, including implementing a better blend from the start in new and turnaround-attempt schools-when schools often have more freedoms to implement new staffing models that do not over-rely on the limited supply of outstanding school leaders. This also includes helping new schools develop systems for scale, and giving excellent new schools incentives to grow.
For more information and to download the full report, please visit:
http://opportunityculture.org/a-better-blend/
