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.

Timing Lesson Plans

I never leave enough time in my lesson plans. Like ever.

It's not for lack of planning: I write them all out--to the time. I rewrite all of my lesson plans, even lessons that I know are successful. So how did I run out of time yesterday?

Okay, this is what happened: I didn't have time to go over the one-sentence summaries from last Wednesday, so I tried to put them into yesterday's lesson plan, which really didn't work. Observe:

:00 Quiz
:05 One-Sentence Summaries from last week
:15 Aims/ Methods/ Materials
:20 Group Summaries: Module 2 → “How to Write a Summary”
:45-50: One-sentence  summaries w/ diff sent. struct.
:00-05: PCA Wed (asynch/ Voicethread)

Stop laughing.

Okay, the quiz actually was just five minutes. Super easy, most true/ false or multiple choice, like what's the TA's name, where is my office (one of the options was Florida), and then some fairly simple concept questions (like rhetorical context, which actually most students did not get, despite the fact that I went over it last Wednesday and it was in the WA homework. I honestly don't know why so many students missed that one--anyone? Insight/ tips?)

The one-sentence summaries: I did go over them in my first class, which of course took ten minutes, not five. Reinforced the precise verbs, putting the author as the grammatical subject, and that the information in the one-sentence version needs to include rhetorical context and authorial intent/ message. This is *your* thesis statement about the text. This is also...

...The "Aims" in Joseph Harris's Aims/ Methods/ Materials. Methods and Materials are basically the construction and the tools (Methods --> how the author builds the text; Materials --> with what (tools, or evidence). Methods and materials are what gets included in a paragraph summary.

That went well in my first class...except that it of course took twenty-five minutes, not fifteen. That said, packing sentence structure, precise verbs, does/ says, and aims/ methods/ materials in twenty-five minutes isn't half bad. I just don't know why I thought I could do it in fifteen.

So, writing a group summary takes forty minutes, not thirty. And I actually knew this--I remember this from last semester (and the one before, for that matter). So, in my second and third classes, I cut the one-sentence summaries from last week, a choice I don't like because I wasn't able to integrate this class as tightly with the last one--and because that opening fifteen minutes really was helpful in my first class. So, the net result is that my first class was stressed that they didn't have enough time to finish their summaries (they finished them by midnight) and my second two classes didn't get to see me discuss their sentences and how that relates to aims/ methods/ materials.

Moreover--and this is arguably the biggest fallout--cutting into those last fifteen minutes means that I run out of time for "context" notes, like explaining why we're doing what we're doing, how this relates to what we did last week/ what we will do next week. I also lose really key "housekeeping" notes, like explaining that my TAs and I work as a team, my TA "office lounge," and things like class notes, which I haven't yet talked about at all!

So: I'm writing Monday's lesson plan already and need to save myself 20 minutes to go over all the auxiliary details that I haven't had time to yet. Maybe 25. That will work--it's the first day after the add/ drop period ends, so Monday's students will officially have committed themselves to the class.

I might post Monday's lesson plan here first for C and R to comment on, as they've both TAd twice and know all too well the gap between my ambition and what is realistic in the classroom.

So, tomorrow is our first asynchronous day. Student's are watching K's Summary Video and then doing a Voicethread in which they're responding to each other's group summaries from yesterday. The Voicethread doesn't explicitly incorporate the Summary video, unfortunately (that's always the ideal with video lectures--students need to do something with them to make them relevant), but it's set up pretty well. My TAs are doing a "demo" slide so that after the first slides where I explain how Voicethread works, students can see a slide in action. I'm excited for this one--I think it will be cool for students to hear each other comment on each other's summaries instead of just writing about them in a discussion board, as they have in the past. This makes it more real.

I still want to do something with those sentences...I don't know what. Put them all somewhere and have students revise them? Possibly. Where--a Discussion Board (meh). A Googledoc? Maybe. I could do that sentence structure thing, i.e., revise this twice, one by opening with these two words ("In the...") and the other with ("Writing for..."). These are LAST week's one-sentence summaries (all of Gabriel), so in theory, they know more now about good one-sentence summaries.

Yeah....but then they'll all be exactly the same. They should really do them with the new articles. Maybe it can be in two parts: revise someone else's sentences in two ways, and then revise your group's Gabriel sentence from last week in two ways.

Hm. I might like this. This saves me from having to beat this into the ground next Monday, and gets rid of that holdover item from last Wednesday.

Okay. That's what I'll do then. Video + Voicethread + Sentence-level edits in a Googledoc. Good.