Our blended learning journey started in the fall of 2016. We attended the iNacol Conference in San Antonio, Texas. We attended several sessions about blended learning. One was truly inspiring. A district in California was doing great things with blended learning - not just putting kids on computers to let software teach them, but truly using the model to personalize learning and meet the needs of students. If that meant having night classes for high school students, then that is what they did.

We were truly inspired and started our journey to bring high quality blended learning to Region 11. We spent the 2016-2017 school year doing research, having brainstorming sessions and visiting blended learning schools. The more we saw and read, the more we realized that blended learning was not just a cut and dry model that we could quickly train our teachers on in a few hours.

By the 2017-2018 school year, we had developed our first rendition of the Blended Learning Academy. We wanted to be innovative, meet the teachers needs and use what we knew about PD to make this a great learning experience for our teachers. Our first cohort of teachers came through the academy in the spring of 2018. We tried out a few new things in this academy. First, we included a field trip to a blended learning school as a part of our day 2. How can we expect teachers to do something in their own classroom if they have never seen how it should look. Second, we left about 2 months between day 2 and day 3 of our academy so that we could include a coaching visit for every participant as they began to implement blended learning in their classroom. Both of these innovations were a huge success and we received lots of positive feedback.

After this first academy took off, the word spread. We held a second academy in the fall of 2018 and it was full to capacity. We took what we learned from our first academy and made this round even better. By popular demand, we held a third academy in the spring of 2019. This academy was also full to capacity.

Although it seemed that our blended learning journey was well on its way, we soon found out that there is great need to blended learning support. Many of our participants expressed the need for their principals, assistant principals and counselors to have training and support so they can support the teachers on their campus who are doing blended. They asked and we answered. We developed a Blended Learning Academy for Administrators with the first session in June 2019. When the session opened for enrollment, it filled in a matter of days. A second date was added to address the needs of our region.

Blended learning is a model for that is relatively new in the education world. Blended learning takes the best of face-to-face learning in a classroom and marries it with the best of online learning. The great thing about this model is that it is so flexible that it can really be transformed to meet the needs of any classroom. The most commonly recognized definition of blended learning comes from the Christensen Institute.

We use the definition above as a starting point for our blended learning, but also realized that in order for blended learning to be high quality there is another piece that is necessary. To be successful in using blended learning to personalize the learning, teachers must use data to drive their instruction. If they are not using data then flexibility is being offered for the sake of flexibility and not to truly meet the needs of students. We created the image below to help teachers understand our vision of blended learning.