Designer Blends

I have spent two years designing, redesigning, and improving my blend. I have spent an inordinate amount of time making and editing lecture videos, rewriting lessons for asynchronous online days, modifying them for synchronous AdobeConnect days, and scrapping both lessons at the last minute to teach the lesson face-to-face. I have surveyed my students extensively, exhausted my TAs, and pushed myself to the breaking point in getting this blend right--all while simultaneously rewriting my syllabus each semester to incorporate more lessons on information and digital literacy and transform many traditional assignments into digital ones.

From day one, my mission has been not just to maintain but to strengthen the productive, interactive community of learners that is paramount to my teaching. I believe that deep learning is rooted in Dewey's collaborative constructivism: we learn through doing, with each other. Critical inquiry and deep learning is predicated on a safe, supportive learning environment. As such, "going blended" has meant taking advantage of synchronous activities to foster exploration and experimentation in Googledocs and face-to-face classes and asynchronous activities to foster reflection in discussion boards and Voicethreads. My students are free writing, experimenting, drafting, revising, editing, and polishing work that is significantly better at the end of the semester than it is at the beginning. They are collaborating with each other more comfortably. They are writing more on the discussion boards than they ever could speak in class. We know each other better than we did even in my highly participatory, horseshoed-desked, discussion-based traditional classrooms.

The rewards can be seen through my students' writing and self-awareness. If writing is thinking on the page, and my job is to help students think critically about themselves as learners and writers, then my students need to be writing more. They are: My students produce an average of 70 pages of writing every semester, 30 of which are revised and polished. Even in my early semesters teaching blended, my students were making greater improvements in their writing than my students had in my traditional classes. They are reflecting on their digital literacy and media addictions, their research skills, and how well (or not) their high school teachers prepared them for college writing and research. They are providing more and better feedback to each other because they have more time to write careful feedback online. Plus, the online feedback is written, so students can't forget what their peers have said. They just need to go back and look.

If blended learning is seen as a method to save time and resources and increase convenience, then it's never going to gain acceptance among educators, especially compositionists. This does not bode well, for more and more college courses are being offered as blended/ hybrid every year. Resistance from compositionists is warranted if the format is pedagogically unsound, but done well, the format is not simply pedagogically sound: it's pedagogically obvious. Students are writing more, interacting more, and reflecting more. They are doing this by writing more. The net result is that my blended students are making incredible progress in fifteen short weeks, progress that I never would have thought possible three years ago. As a writing teacher, I will take nearly any risk if there's a possibility that it will help my students become better writers. The risks are high. The rewards are real.