In his 2011 blog post “Blended Learning’s impact on Teacher Development” (Hernandez, 2011) Alex Hernandez identifies six main areas that he believes teachers will need professional development to prepare for blended learning. The areas he believes that will be important when training teachers of the future include responding to real time data, targeting instruction, building culture and relationships, enhancing the curriculum, designing learning paths, and deconstructing the role of the teacher. He identifies core competencies that teachers will need to be competent blended learning instructors.
His six areas are essentially what teachers will need to
know to be able to transition from teaching whole class instruction, to be able
to analyze individual data to most effectively teach each and every student of
a classroom. He states that the old benchmark of getting student data every 6-9
weeks supplemented by individual teacher feedback will no longer suffice in the
era of blended learning. Instead, he implies, the new norm will be click by
click feedback to the instructor to provide real time feedback of student
needs. It will be imperative for teachers to know how to interpret data and
make decisions on how to best support each individual student.
A 2010 article, “Needs of elementary and middle school
teachers developing online courses for a virtual school” (Oliver, Kellog, Townsend, & Brady, 2010)came to similar
conclusions regarding what teachers need to be blended learning educators. The
article cited two primary things that teachers needed to transition from
regular educators to blended learning educators. They included strong guidance
from leadership, and more importantly, a high level of teacher development. The
type of professional development in the article shared many similarities with
Hernandez’s article. Both articles are founded on the belief that teachers need
to be able to design, and teach to students with real time data, and teach to
the individual learning the content. Blended learning lends itself to being a
very good way to accomplish many instructional goals and both articles identify
ways to best develop teachers that can accomplish those goals.
References
Hernandez, A. (2011, July 11). Blog.
Retrieved from Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation:
http://www.christenseninstitute.org/blended-learnings-impact-on-teacher-development/
Oliver, K., Kellog, S., Townsend, L., & Brady,
K. (2010). Needs of Elementary and Middle School Teachers Developing Online
Courses for a Virtual School. Distance Education, 31(1), 55-75.
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