I have been rereading “Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning” by E. A. City, R. F. Elmore, S. E. Fiarman and L. Teitel. I took Professor Elmore’s class: “Supporting Teachers for Instructional Improvement” as part of my degree at Harvard Grad School for Education and I am working on trying to bring more of these concepts into my own practice.
Currently one of my focuses in on deploying the integration of Moodle and a clone of Khan Academy that we recently developed. I want to use the Instructional Core model presented in Instructional Rounds to look at how this system might be put into practice in a way that results in real improvement to student learning.
Instructional Rounds asks four questions:
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- How will this affect teachers’ knowledge and skills?
- How will this affect the level or content in the classroom?
- How will this affect the role of the student in the instructional process?
- How will this affect the relationship between the teacher, the student and the content?
These are questions that I believe each teacher and school should ask and as they do they should look for answers that are consistent with their instructional practice and coherent with other initiatives in their building. However, both for my learning, and as potential examples for new initiatives, I’d like to try to answer them based on what I’ve seen with my clients and read about by other users of both Moodle and Khan Academy.
The first question, how will it affect teachers’ knowledge, is probably one of the most difficult so I am going to start with the second:
How could use of Moodle integrated with a Khan Academy clone affect the level or content of math instruction in a classroom?
Khan Academy provides free access to hundreds of math exercises and thousands of math videos. They are fairly well organized and are being mapped against the common core. Nevertheless, Khan Academy resources represent only a small fraction of the overflowing cornucopia of math resources available on the internet.
Moodle is a tool the teacher can used to curate and organize these resources, putting them into topics, adding tasks and assessments, etc.
In my practice sometimes the teachers are doing this themselves and other times I work with organizations such as JFYNetworks that provide curated courses to the teachers.
Thus one answer I have seen is the content in the classrooms is affected in the following ways.
- A wide range of resources from the internet organized to be coherent with the classroom instruction. (The video here shows some examples)
Khan Academy also has a self-paced exercise framework. One of our beta testing teachers commented that her students tended not to have enough practice time to develop and feel mastery over the content; using the Khan Academy’s framework let them start with easy exercises and gain a feeling of mastery that could then extend up to the work they were doing in class.
Thus another way to affect content in the classroom is to:
- Provide resources that support mastery learning.
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Khan Academy recently posted a blog post about a fourth grade class that used Khan Academy for self-paced learning. Their results include all students above grade level, several completing algebra and one completing calculus! Thus another potential effect is:- Expand the content to include higher level math (e.g. algebra in elementary school).
One of the goals of my integration, and of Khan Academy, is that a “flipped” classroom will result in more time for project based learning. This video is Sal Khan sharing his vision of how this would work. I think that integration of the Khan Academy content with a learning management system such as Moodle is important to supporting teachers in implementing this type of learning. This sort of project based learning requires lesson plans, perhaps videos showing how to do the projects and assessments that may include rubrics, essays etc. Moodle supports these. Part of my vision is creating complete project based learning lessons that can be plugged into Moodle to support teachers to efficiently use projects in their classrooms. Thus the goal is this technology will flip the classroom so that:
- Classroom time is used for project based learning that requires higher level thinking, deeper understanding, and collaboration.
Next post I will address the question:
How could use of Moodle integrated with a Khan Academy clone affect the role of the student in the instructional process?