Blended Learning Best Practices That Still Hold Up (Recorded 2021) - episode #5 of all time
NUMBER 5 IN OUR COUNTDOWN OF THE TOP 10 EPISODES OF THE FIRST 1,000. This one originally aired in 2021 and has been downloaded more than 25,000 times — the fifth most-listened-to episode in the history of the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast.
Thomas Arnett and the Christensen Institute surveyed nationally representative samples of teachers and administrators about what teaching actually looked like during the pandemic. The headline finding was brutal and clear: seventy-nine percent of hybrid teachers were running concurrent instruction — the room and the Zoom at once — and in the free-response comments they said flatly that it could not be done well. Hardest year of my career, said teachers who had been teaching for thirty years.
But a small minority said the opposite. They said it worked. What they did differently is the whole reason this episode still matters five years later: instead of stretching one live lesson across two audiences, they built their lessons as online resources students moved through at their own pace, and spent class time checking in with individual kids. Those are the teachers who reported knowing their students better than they usually do. And when the Institute compared tool use before and after, the biggest jumps in adoption were in exactly those tools — lesson creation and screen recording.
There's a second finding in here that has nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with your building. Asked how well things were going, administrators clustered between sixty and a hundred. Teachers split into two clusters — one around seventy or eighty, and another around thirty to forty. Same schools. Two different realities.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why concurrent instruction — teaching the room and the screen at once — failed for almost everyone who tried it
- What the small minority of teachers who said "this worked" actually did instead
- The tools whose adoption jumped the most, and why that tells you which teachers changed their methodology
- The optimism gap between what administrators reported and what teachers reported
- Three recommendations for school leaders, including what NOT to cancel when the emergency ends
- Vicki's question that outlives the pandemic entirely: teachers are going back to what worked for them — but did it ever work?
Full show notes, resources, and the complete transcript: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e989
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