Image for Catlin Tucker’s Balance With Blended Learning Playlist

Catlin Tucker’s Balance With Blended Learning Playlist

Balance With Blended Learning Playlist

LINCSPRING transformative professional development

Catlin Tucker, acclaimed author, speaker, and ed tech innovator, has partnered with LINC to create Cycles based on her new book, Balance with Blended LearningNow, you and your PLC can learn together online at a time, place, and pace that works for you! Explore how blended learning can help you partner with students to reimagine learning and find a realistic work-life balance!

The following Cycles were authored by Catlin to support your ongoing learning and development.

CycleObjective
Developing a True Partnership with Students

Teachers must partner with their students to create learning environments that maximize the available technology and encourage students to take a lead role in designing, assessing, and reflecting on their learning. Too many teachers are exhausted and disillusioned with this profession because they are doing most of the work. It’s time to rethink our workflow, embrace new teaching and learning models that leverage technology, and shift ownership of learning over to students.

Rethinking Traditional Workflows

Teachers do far too much of the work in classrooms. Teachers must rethink traditional workflows and encourage students to take the lead when it comes to thinking critically about their work, evaluating what their work reveals about their skill sets, and reflecting on their learning. If teachers rethink traditional workflows, they can improve learning for students and save themselves hours of work!

Encouraging Metacognitive Skill Building

Teachers cannot be the only people in the classroom thinking about the learning happening. Students need to develop the metacognitive skills necessary to think critically about their learning and understand themselves as learners. Metacognitive skills can be learned and developed, but teachers need to create clear routines to support students in the process of thinking about their thinking.

Setting Goals to Increase Motivation

If students are not intrinsically motivated to engage with the work in our class, we must help them to see how they work they are doing can help them to achieve personal and academic goals that they do care about.

Prioritizing the Process with Real-time Feedback

Too often, teachers wait until students finish a product to provide feedback. However, feedback on a finished product does not help students to develop and improve their skills. It is critical that teachers design lessons that allow them the time and space needed to prioritize the process and pull feedback into the classroom. This cycle will help teachers rethink traditional approaches to providing feedback.

Creating Rubrics that Act as Roadmaps

Rubrics act as a roadmap for both teachers and students if they are descriptive and teachers make them available at the start of an assignment, task, or project. A well-made, standards-aligned rubric can support a student as they work to ensure they are meeting the requirements of that assignment. They can be used during side-by-side assessments to create clarity about why students are receiving particular scores and what they need to do to work toward mastery. Finally, they can be used to support the development of metacognitive skills as students reflect on their growth over time.

Conducting Side-by-Side AssessmentsThis cycle will focus on conducting side-by-side assessments that allow teachers to move the cumbersome task of grading student work into the classroom, while also creating transparency around the grading process for students.
Allowing Students to Own the Conversation About Their Progress

It is unrealistic to expect teachers to keep every student’s family updated about his or her progress. If students are going to be our partners in learning, they need to play an active role in updating their parents about their progress.

Offering Grade InterviewsStudents do not enjoy agency in traditional grading practices. They receive grades and rarely have the opportunity to influence the final grade they get in a class. The traditional approach to assigning grades does not motivate students to improve past work or invest additional time practicing concepts and skills to demonstrate growth. Since assessment scores are simply a snapshot in time, offering grade interviews can encourage students to continue growing and developing. It can also shift the conversation from the accumulation of points to the development of mastery.