I do some cover work in a private language school here in XXXX and they are interested in me doing some workshops on blended learning. This is a school that has never done any and I gather that the digital literacy of the staff is pretty low. So bearing in mind the wider social/practical/economic ramifications of introducing any such workshops, how best do you think I could proceed? Would you see an overview of several online tools on a practical level right, or an overview of where blended learning could take the school better? I fear that there might be some resistance to using online tools in class as it may imply, or not, more work.
Here is my initial reply:
Interesting challenge you have there. I think that you would get the best results if you find out what has created the ‘need’. Who is behind this? A boss who thinks that it’s the modern thing to do? A teacher who wishes his/her colleagues were more tech savvy so that they could do language work together? A rating criteria called IT integration that the school wants to score better on? I would consider two of those as fairly negative reasons for wanting to go blended while a teacher-driven impetus might be more positive.
After finding out who is behind this, the next step would be to find out what they hope to achieve. I have recently spent a great deal of my time coaching teacher teams in the US (not EFL just general school) and there we tried to steer away from projects stated in terms of ‘We want to get students to use tool X, Y and Z’ and encourage them to state their aims more in terms of the skills they wanted to promote. It could also be something wider than skills. It could be behaviour and attitudes (eg towards learning). Only once the real goal is in place can you start talking about appropriate tools. So the goal could be to get students writing or speaking (or passing exams!) or reading or using language outside of class etc etc.
Next, I would find out what the school sees as its strengths. Is it a caring atmosphere, good exam results, well qualified teachers etc etc? Use the strengths to imagine how they could shine even more in that area. What is stopping them from shining even more in that area? One of the possible solutions may be a more digital way of doing things. For example if one of the strengths is a caring atmosphere then a blended learning approach can be presented as a way of making the course even more flexible for the student, helping them to easily catch up if they have missed a class because everything is online or helping those with special needs because the slower ones can review the materials later and so on. For each area of excellence I am sure that there are digital tools which could be part of a drive to excel even more.
So what I’m saying is that I don’t think an overview of tools would be useful because that is too easily dismissed by the sceptical. What you need is to identify which group is the driving force behind this need, what the ultimate aims are and build on existing strengths. The reason for focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses is to avoid negativity and resistance. People may be sensitive to an expert being brought in to bring them up to scratch but may be much more amenable to someone facilitating them in an area where they are the acknowledged experts but where they could just do with a bit of technical help to go that extra mile.
I’m not sure how this fits into a workshop scenario but I think that if you did your research on drivers, needs and strengths, that you could use the workshop to explore possibilities, fine tune a well-worded aim (pedagogical not technical) and set up a timeline for implementation over the coming weeks or months depending on how ambitious the plan is. It would also help, armed with the info on drivers, needs and strengths, to have a couple of relevant case studies to explore what has been done in other institutions. Many people need this type of example to get over the problem of visualising how it would work in their own situation. I am not sure from what you say whether this is supposed to happen in all in one workshop or over several. But if you could have more than one workshop then follow-up ones could be more tool oriented as the detail of the plan unfolded.
Basically what I am advocating is moving from a focus on the purple circle of the
TPACK diagram to the muddy green centre!
Picture credit: Alan Parkinson on Flickr
