The focus of this final post in the series is developing online modules. Wha wha wha.....
In my experience, using 'module' elicits negative connotations related to self-paced, self-contained, modular-based lectures. For any public school teacher, does the blood borne pathogens module come to mind? Push play. Answer emails until the video stops talking. Click some buttons. Answer the self-apparent questions at the end. Move on.

I've developed a number of online modules as an instructional designer but never for a blended course. This posed a number of new questions for the design process.

Awhile back, I posted about a PD opportunity that helped me to reimagine what engaging webinars might look like. After testing these strategies out in our Coaching program, I was ready to give it a go for the Methods course. Throughout the semester, there were many times when I wanted to meet with students to discuss important themes arising from their work. Given the constraints of the blended syllabus, this wasn't always possible as sometimes we wouldn't meet face-to-face for multiple weeks. Enter the webinar. To address this need, I planned interactive webinar activities around the following three topics.

Classroom discussion was the focus of the third and final workshop I redesigned for this course. Student voice is at the heart of almost every ELA course, as central to the process of meaning-making within social contexts and through social connections. Typically, methods' assignments address the role of discussion from the perspective of organization (content and structure) and ownership. Research makes it very clear that most classroom interactions follow the I.R.E. model that limits authentic student contributions through the dominance of the teacher's voice and perspectives. Instead, we encourage teachers to embrace more dialogic models of classroom discourse and create opportunities for student-initiated talk. Unfortunately, this approach to teaching discussion through these types of readings and conversations alone often leads to an overly idealized vision of what classroom practice will look like. 

This workshop has become one of my favorites to teach and has evolved into a framing activity for the multilieracies unit (my baby). The goal of this workshop is to open student perspectives to multimodality through analysis of children's picturebooks. Using frameworks from Dawnene Hassett and Frank Serafini, students are guided to consider a variety of ways in which meaning is communicated through reader engagement with the text. 

In the past, I have taught this workshop in a face-to-face setting where students partner up and work through the steps collaboratively. At a later point, we use their findings as a launching point to multimodal composition and thinking like designers. We then transition this understanding from the familiarity of the printed text world to that of the digital text world in order to examine how writers/designers make intentional choices throughout the digital writing process.

Moving to a blended format enabled me to capitalize on two particular shifts for this workshop:

As I thought about what types of practices would be most meaningful for my preservice teachers to explore through authentic engagement at their practicum sites, conferring with student writers was at the top of my list. 

Traditional Course Activity
In previous courses, we would model the process of conferring with writers by using writing samples from students. This helped us to practice the skill of identifying higher order needs and asking guiding questions to elicit reflection on the part of writers. We were able to develop potential strategies and address challenges that arose in the process. However, this experience was always limited because it was missing the most important ingredient--actual students! ​

​Anyone working in a teacher preparation program knows this to be true. University methods courses often fall short of their aims by the very nature of their organizational structure. In most cases, these courses are taken prior to hands-on classroom experience and the learning experiences are mostly bracketed from each other.

The ELA methods course I’ve taught in the past attempts to bridge this divide through a large-scale focal group project. This project involves a great deal of planning as it introduces students to the lesson design process through the case study lens of focusing on a small group of students. Taking place over months in the course, the tasks allow preservice teachers to make direct connections between the concepts and activities we discuss in our courses and the experiences they undergo at their practicum placements. Most importantly, it fosters authentic meaning-making for dimensions of practice that just cannot be replicated (as if anything truly can be) in the University space alone.

​For example, developing culturally relevant pedagogy outside of the presence of living, breathing students is a foolhardy endeavor I’ve undertaken more times than I would like to admit. Because let’s face it—these practices, mindsets, and beliefs are essential to teacher preparation. And still, we are all too often faced with structural arrangements that limit our ability to make true connections between theory and methods, only reinforcing the much lamented divide between postsecondary and K-12 settings.

So last year, I embarked on a plan to disrupt this divide by reimagining “space” within my course. To overcome these challenges, I decided to take a blended approach to redesign the course structure and activities. Similar to the “flipped” phenomenon, I played with the delivery and experience of course goals. In the following blog series, I will highlight the design choices, implementation of activities, and outcomes.  As this is my first true venture into blended course design, I’m excited to share how this model gave me greater insight into student thinking and better facilitated many of the goals my prior courses fell shorter of achieving.