Blended Learning

by Stephen G. Barkley and Terri Bianco

The jury is no longer out on the tremendous potential for e-learning. You can learn the knowledge and skills of your profession in an online environment at a convenient pace and time that suits your schedule. It is certainly less expensive, more efficient, and infinitely more convenient than traditional onsite training.

Yet brain research shows that transfer of knowledge best occurs through multisensory activities, life applications, and inductive experiences. When an instructor leads training, the facilitator's enthusiasm, the learners' social interactions, and class members' questions and comments add to the learning environment. Learners' brains tend to come alive in a stimulating environment where the learner has choices, feedback, an absence of threat, and time to reflect.

So what to do? Our experience says mix and match.

"Blending online and on-site training is the optimum for both efficiency and sound internalization of the skills and behaviors you need to be an effective educator."

There are essentially five tenets of sound teaching practices developed by researchers over the past decade, most notably Bruce Joyce and Beverly Showers. These tenets include the need to provide knowledge, to demonstrate the skills or knowledge through modeling, to give opportunities to practice skills, to be observed, and to receive feedback and coaching, all of which can then translate into the smooth performance called teaching.

Teachers need to acquire knowledge of a skill, both to understand its value to teaching, but also to then break the skills into specific steps. You benefit from seeing skills demonstrated by an instructor who has mastered them, or viewing a model on a CD disk. Opportunities for practice, feedback, and coaching added to the knowledge and theoretical base markedly increased the teachers' skills development.

Online programs can create the opportunity for practice, observation, and feedback. Educators taking an online course on multiple intelligences, for example, can submit their lesson designs online for instructor feedback. Then others enrolled in the course can benefit from the lesson designs submitted by other users as well as read the feedback from the instructor.

Teacher participants can also gather for a live keynote presentation on the concept of learning styles, for example. They can take The Kaleidoscope Profile® a learning styles inventory developed by PLS and then, after the presentation, form teams of three teachers, each from a different curriculum, content, or grade level. The team develops lesson plans that incorporate the various learning styles identified. They exchange email addresses and/or agree to meet at specific times in the future.

In the privacy of their home or classroom, these same teachers go online and study the characteristics and interpretation of each learning style and type of learner (knowledge). As they study online, they review sample lesson plans or rotational teaching styles geared to each of the four sensory preferences: kinesthetic, tactual, auditory or visual (modeling). Each teacher on the team then develops lesson plans geared to all four learning channels and shares them with their teammates either online or in person (practice). This gives each team member additional examples of how lesson plans can be designed (practice, modeling).

As they share their lesson plans, each coaches the other on where the learning style may or may not have been addressed (practice, observation, coaching). They then present their lesson plans to the instructor who reads and comments on all lesson plans developed, giving feedback on each design to all on the team (observation, coaching). Teachers correct or modify their designs according to the feedback and present them again (practice, observation, coaching).

Finally, the teachers deliver their individual lesson plans in the classroom with the instructor or coach present, making observations and giving feedback in a collaboration of professionals who seek to enhance the skills learned and delivered (observation and coaching).

Teaching remains a performing art, and just as a dancer can learn the theories and history of dance online yet needs practice and rehearsal to perform, the skills and performance patterns embedded in successful teaching require modeling, practice, coaching, and observation to underscore the knowledge and skills teachers possess.

Steve Barkley is Executive Vice President of Performance Learning Systems, Inc. With more than 20 years' experiences as a trainer, Barkley is a riveting and motivational keynote speaker, trainer, and consultant to educators and business people alike. Terri Bianco of Bianco Enterprises is a training designer of online and on-site training. She has designed several highly successful training programs for Performance Learning Systems.