Rocketship Education's next phase: technology in a blended classroom
Palo Alto-based Rocketship Education has attracted national attention in the by few years for its innovative use of applied science and impressive test scores for its largely low-income, Hispanic students.
Now, as other districts and charter schools are starting to emulate the Rocketship model, which relies on estimator-guided instruction equally a key component, the K-5 charter schoolhouse organization is considering leaving it backside, like a first-phase booster, and moving toward a dissimilar a 21st century classroom. Instead of rotating students into a "learning lab" – a large computer room – for about quarter of the mean solar day as information technology does now, several of Rocketship's seven San Jose schools are experimenting with turning their learning lab into 1 large, all-day classroom incorporating both technology and three teachers and non-credentialed instruction administration. Over the form of the day, between 100 and 120 students motion from private estimator-based instruction to small-group lessons to a large-group setting, moving on cue with amoeba-similar fluidity from ane activity to some other – at least when it'due south working smoothly.
Rocketship Mosaic English teacher Judy Lavi discusses a reading passage with several dozen students in the front end of the former learning lab. Photo past John Fensterwald.
On an afternoon earlier this month at Rocketship Mosaic, a two-year-one-time, ii-story school on a postage postage lot a block off the main drag of San Jose's Little Saigon, the 4th and vth graders in their new flexible classroom were doing independent and grouping work. At a whiteboard in one end, with most forty students sitting on a carpet before her, sixth-year English teacher Judy Lavi led a writing exercise, analyzing a passage for Greek and Latin roots, grammar and sentence fluency. Casey Rowe, a fifth-year teacher in his second year at Rocketship, had switched off after guiding the total grouping through an practice preparing for the impending land standardized testing. He was now checking the progress of students working on math or English language problems, at their ain pace, on cheap laptops. At a whiteboard at the opposite end from Lavi, first-yr math teacher Devynn Patterson was working with nine or x students on simple equations, such as x-8=iv.
Shifting from a static rotational schedule of a computer lab to an open classroom marks the next horizon in blended learning, the integration of computer-based and teacher-based instruction. This year, Summit Public Schools is pioneering this model in math a quick crow's flight away from Rocketship Mosaic at its 2 high schools in San Jose. It tore down walls in a wing of its campus and has brought ninth and 10th graders together in a two-hr block, combining algebra, geometry and, for fast-advancing students, Algebra II and across.
Fifth-year teacher Casey Rowe checks in with students who are doing math exercises online. Rocketship uses three software programs that assign lessons based on students' progress.
But uncomplicated schoolhouse students, with shorter attention spans and less focus, pose distinct challenges in an open classroom, which is why Rocketship is cautious about trying the model in earlier grades.
Building on, not rejecting, a figurer lab
Rocketship CEO Preston Smith and Charlie Bufalino, national evolution strategiest for Rocketship, said the pilot is not a rejection of the learning lab concept only a recognition of its limitations. The 100 minutes that students have spent in the learning lab daily have been an essential element of Rocketship'due south strategy. With various degrees of accurateness, the one-half-dozen math and reading programs tailor lessons to students' strengths and weaknesses and rails individual students' progress. They particularly help fill in gaps in learning in areas where repetitive exercises reinforce bones skills and allow other students to accelerate at a faster footstep.
The learning lab also was a financially shrewd model for cash-strapped California schools, which have seen their basic funding cut by about a quarter over the past 5 years. Rotating students from four classes per form into the lab, operated by lower paid, not-credentialed tutors and staff, eliminated the expense of one teacher per course or near $500,000 per school, which Rocketship has used to increase teachers' pay, underwrite construction of additional schools and – this is key – to rent an banana principal charged with teacher training at every school. At a time when most districts were cutting back mentor teaching positions and administrators, Rocketship offered extensive guidance to first- and second-twelvemonth teachers from Teach for America, who comprise about one-half of the teaching staff.
Rocketship CEO Preston Smith and Lynn Liao, who is overseeing the flexible classroom project, share a story at Rocketship Mosaic, one of the airplane pilot schools. Photo by John Fensterwald.
Just there remained a disconnect between what students did in the lab and what teachers taught in the classroom. Despite Rocketship's effort to build a sophisticated data system to feed data to guide instruction, it initially was "a black box to me," said Adam Nadeau, chief of Rocketship Mosaic. "There was no context around what students were getting at the lab."
"The technical infrastructure was good simply not perfect," Bufalino acknowledged. "The organisation was not every bit good as nosotros thought."
Rocketship's scores on the California Standards Tests have been amongst the highest in the state for its demographics of English language learners and low-income students, but, Smith said, "We weren't satisfied where they were at. We weren't delivering on writing and the feedback from middle school is that kids were good in course just less likely to piece of work independently."
At Rocketship, teachers in each grade are specialists, so students rotated not but to the learning lab just also to math and English language language arts teachers. This model didn't permit flexible time for project-based learning, necessary, Smith said, to develop deeper learning skills.
New challenges for teachers
Computer-based learning volition go on as a fundamental element in the flexible classroom, although the time each student spends each twenty-four hour period may vary, based on their needs. And Smith says the new model will be price-neutral. But the new flexibility provides opportunities to personalize learning. Nadeau estimates that no longer having to repeat the same lesson to separate classes iv times each day will free up a tertiary of each teacher's instructional day. First-year teaching can exist isolating, he said. The advantage hither is that new teachers will get to meet didactics modeled.
First-year math teacher Devynn Patterson leads a modest group in some other corner of the room. Photo by John Fensterwald.
"The new construction volition allow main teachers to do well-nigh at starting time and hand off responsibleness gradually to a new teacher," said Lavi, who taught in Oakland before Rocketship. "It will be like bowling with bumpers."
"The freedom to blueprint a schedule to fit needs of kids is great experience for me as a professional," she said. Students are getting "a ton more than small group attention than previously," because, working as a team, the three teachers and a total-time teaching assistant tin maximize the larger groups and target the smaller clusters of students for a literature discussion or tutorial on fractions.
The larger setting adds complexities. Co-planning daily lessons during l minutes of prep time is of import; data analysis, at present the teachers' responsibility, remains critical. Classroom management, keeping students on task with a lot happening around them, can exist daunting for an inexperienced instructor. Rocketship is recruiting fewer first-year teachers for side by side fall, but it will remain a young staff.
Lynn Liao, Rocketship's chief talent officer, who is leading the flexible classroom project, said that there was initially a dip in test results considering of difficulties with implementation – "until we got our anxiety underneath it and set expectations with kids." Merely schools didn't run into beliefs issues that parents and teachers had anticipated, she said, and now Rocketship expects to see benefits of the model.
"One of our hypotheses is that there would be greater teacher collaboration, and that has been a pleasant surprise," she said.
Michael Horn, executive director of Innosight Institute, a San Mateo-based research outfit and an authority on composite learning, commended Rocketship for "taking a huge pace forward" from the stationary lab model whose benefits provide "the depression hanging fruit." Districts have been doing flexible learning for credit recovery and dropout prevention programs in high school, but most districts have found it uncomfortable to go beyond those programs, he said. Rocketship will bear witness if there are key differences in the flexible model at an elementary school level.
Horn said teachers playing off each others' strengths "could lead to an unbundling of roles," with some teachers doing information work and others leading small grouping instruction or taking charge of lesson planning. "I really think it could make teachers' jobs easier, but that remains to be seen."
"Change is difficult and nosotros must be purposeful about information technology," Smith said. Technology will be a great tool only non a silverish bullet. In the end, "it volition be about how nosotros do professional development and support our staff."
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Source: https://edsource.org/2013/rocketship-educations-next-phase-technology-in-a-blended-classroom/31333
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