This book, out of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, is a useful field guide to the design and implementation of blended learning models, which combine computer-mediated resources like MOOCs with conventional classroom instruction. Nonetheless, readers may greet its subtitle, “Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools,” with a pang of foreboding. Blended initially makes you worry that its pages will mostly be a blend of TED Talk doublespeak. Indeed, the foreword (contributed by the High Prophet of Disruption himself, Clayton M. Christensen) ominously name-checks Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher and historian who first coined the now-inescapable phrase “paradigm shift.” But whatever their slight fondness for techno-jargon, authors Michael B. Horn and Heather Staker have written something valuable mainly because they are at pains to define their terms. This is the critical task facing advocates of blended learning, as Fordham itself has chronicled. Furnishing students with laptops and posting lesson plans on Blackboard isn’t blended learning; nor is a totally online experience that students access from home. For clarification, Horn and Staker use refreshingly simple graphics to outline the varying blends—from hybrid approaches shuttling kids between online activities, small-group instruction, and pen-and-paper assignments, to more unfamiliar models that explicitly make online teaching the backbone of coursework even within brick-and-mortar schools. The book doesn’t sidestep the question of what role teachers and facilities will play as more curriculum and tutoring is done remotely; the treatment is thin, but its vision of community schools providing family services, serving nutritious (and even edible) meals, and guiding socialization between students is an intriguing one. The concluding recommendations of reaching out to community stakeholders and phasing changes in slowly are ultimately commonsensical, but Blended has by this point already provided a detailed—and comprehensible—overview of how to introduce technology into the classroom without throwing tradition over the side.
SOURCE: Michael B. Horn and Heather Staker, Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools, Jossey-Bass (November 2014)
