As K–12 blended learning has grown, efforts have popped up across the country to create breakthrough proof points that stretch our collective understanding of what is possible for students.
This is important work, but the system needs more than one-off proof points. The field also likely needs to take the simpler, seemingly more straightforward innovations and create opportunities for them to scale to pave the way for high quality personalized learning options for all students.
As Heather Staker and I have written, the models of blended learning most likely to scale into the core academic subjects at all levels of schooling in the near term are sustaining innovations, in which online learning is essentially an augmentation to the traditional classroom, but there is still a fundamental shift in the learning model from the student’s perspective.
One reason this is not a bad thing is that the performance of a disruptive innovation is often unreliable with significant variability in its infancy. In our observations, this rule has held true with the disruptive models of blended learning. As a result, although scaling Station Rotation and Flipped Classroom models might not be the most exciting thing in the world—nor might it create models in which students have the maximum amount of personalization in and agency and ownership over their learning—in the next several years, the scaling of these models is both an important step forward and likely to be where the action is in mainstream subjects.
Aricle originally appeared on Forbes. Read the full article