Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

As school and school system leaders implement blended and personalized learning, they often look to make a shift, not only to their instructional models, but also to their organizational culture. As a part of an education consulting team, I’m often hired to support schools and districts to make the shift to blended and personalized learning, […]

Stories are all around us. Researchers found that personal stories and gossip make up 65% of our conversation. Some stories are as small as 6 words or 280 characters, and others are the length of a book or a movie. Your best stories are told in multiple lengths and forms. For successful branding, districts need to showcase […]

In our work on the BLU Directory, we have discovered that many schools choose to implement blended learning as a tool to support competency-based education (CBE). Why is blended learning particularly suited to support CBE? Do all models of blended learning have the potential to enhance CBE? We look to the directory to observe how […]

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 […]

Recently, an education leader remarked to me that “the concept of a computer lab is obsolete”.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 […]