Designing for Hybrid Learning Design with Equity, Learner Variability, & Belonging in Mind

As we think about developing and sustaining relationships with our students, we need to keep the second most important ingredient of St. Mark’s special sauce in mind: our supportive, caring learning community. From student feedback, we know that one of the things St. Markers missed most this spring was being able to learn and connect with their peers. While we will focus on making social learning part of our courses in Module 2, this lesson is focused on sharing three core principles to guide our planning as we design for community and connection, which is crucial to student success in online and hybrid learning.

1. Equity & Cultural Responsiveness

Equity in education is a commitment to ensuring that every student has what they need to thrive in the school community and be successful learners. To be equitable, schools and educators must recognize and validate the importance of the unique identities, backgrounds, and experiences of students and their families (see, e.g., this VABB approach). As Krashnoff explains in “Culturally Responsive Teaching”:

Providing an equitable educational experience for all children means recognizing and addressing inequitable power structures; recognizing and optimizing the learning [variability] of each child; adapting teaching strategies to meet differing learning needs; and maximizing the strengths that each student brings to the classroom because of the differences in student socioeconomic circumstances, gender, language, culture, and race (2016, p. 21).

Research has shown that culturally responsive practices promote a sense of belonging in all students, particularly those from traditionally underserved groups.

Equity needs to be infused into the design of our hybrid learning and program. Consider these words from Plymouth State University's Open Learning & Teaching Collaborative (Open CoLab), which includes equity as one of the three core values of their hybrid course development framework: "As we prepare for Fall 2020, remember our goal to teach and reach students, regardless of barriers. Your intentional design of an online course with [face-to-face] inflections is a way to offer students the kind of access they require during complicated and complex times" (ACE Framework). Take a few minutes to explore the "Rethink Fairness" section of their Adaptability, Connection, & Equity Framework to consider the difference between "equity" and "equality" as you plan for next year.

Explore one or more of the following resources to help guide your design process:

3 Tips to Make Any Lesson More Culturally Responsive (Zaretta Hammond, Cult of Pedagogy gues blog post)
ABCDs for Diverse & Equitable Schools (Harvard’s RIDES Project)
Checklist for Culturally Responsive Instruction (excerpted from “Closing the Gap: Creating Equity in the Classroom”)
Critical Practices for Anti-bias Education Classroom Culture
Culturally Responsive Teaching: What You Need to Know
Equity vs. Equality: 6 Steps Toward Equity
How to Develop Culturally Responsive Teaching for Distance Learning
Want to Reach All of Your Students? Here’s How to Make Your Teaching More Inclusive

2. Learner Variability

Even a seemingly simple task like “read 3 pages” means something different to every student (and every faculty member) in our classrooms. Take a peek at this short video on Twitter to see the many interpretations of “studying” in this Chinese classroom. This quote that sums up learner variability well:

Advances in neuroscience and education research over the past 40 years have reshaped our understanding of the learning brain. One of the clearest and most important revelations stemming from brain research is that there is no such thing as a “regular student.” Instead, learning is as unique to individuals as their fingerprints or DNA (Hall et. al, 2012, p. 2, emphasis added).

All of our learners are amazingly unique. Each time you interact with one of your students, think about this colorful bulletin board with its explosion of descriptors in mind. Here are three ways to get started with designing for variability in any classroom:

Make sure your learning resources vary in terms of media and modality (not all online text, also incorporate paper materials, video, visuals, audio, etc.)
Build choice & options into learning activities and assessments
Consider ways to tap into the range and diversity of interests and talents of your learners.

Here are two approaches to consider and some resources to explore as you design for variability:

The principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) helps to identify ways to show the information in a variety of ways (the “what” of learning or Representation), provide flexible learning tasks & allow students to “show what they know” in different ways (the “how” of learning or Action & Expression), and offer options that engage students & keep their interest (the “why” of learning or Engagement) of learning to meet the diverse needs of our learners. See this PSU Open CoLab resource, UDL Baselines, for details, examples, guiding questions that will help you integrate UDL principles in your hybrid course design (this resource on UDL in blended learning might also be useful: UDL On Campus). See also these UDL Aligned Strategies shared by CAST, the experts on UDL.

Leveraging differentiated instruction to identify ways to modify or provide choice in the content, process, product of learning as well as the way we structure our hybrid learning experience to design for variability in hybrid learning.

Remember, Sarah Eslick is our on-campus expert on all things academic support. If you'd like help with this, please connect with her to partner on your plans for hybrid learning.

3. Belonging

Human connectedness is crucial to student success in any type of learning environment. Just as we can design-in teacher presence, we can infuse “social presence” (the ability to create “real” connections in a virtual space) into our hybrid courses. In fact, as we anticipate having some sort of social distancing or remote scenarios over the year ahead, the need to purposely develop each student’s sense of connection and belonging takes on even greater significance. Even when our students knew us and each other during remote learning this past spring, we saw how awkward and challenging this can be. As faculty, we need to carefully plan all interactions to model and structure purposeful, respectful social connection so that all students feel accepted, valued, and understood as an important part of our classes, houses, teams, and school community.

Here are some suggestions to get your design process started:

Co-create norms & community expectations with your students
Open all in-person activities (on-campus & in Zoom) with a quick icebreaker or social interaction (see resources in the previous lesson & this Edutopia article: 10 Powerful Community-Building Ideas)
Share & provide opportunities for your student to tell, swap, and respond to stories
Craft student-student “interest interviews” or interest surveys to help students get to know each other (and to help you to learn about your students)
Purposefully pair-up study teams (ideally, no more than 3 to a group) or study buddies & encourage students to connect to support each others’ learning outside of scheduled or synchronous “class time”
Think “Roles & Routines”: Identify well-defined roles and responsibilities for students to rotate through as you develop your classroom routines. "Jobs" help give students a clear sense of purpose and build their social confidence
Identify 1-2 protocols (explicit structured activities that remove the mystery of a school experience so students can relax and focus on collaborative learning) to incorporate into your weekly plan. Here are three resources with protocols to explore:

Learning Protocols & Resources (Expeditionary Learning)
Close Viewing Protocol (Facing History)
Protocols for Culturally Responsive Learning and Increased Student Engagement

Time to Design

Now that you’ve considered the three core principles that should guide your planning, it’s time to design.

Instructions:

Return to Your Hybrid Course Plan Doc: Work collaboratively or solo, based on your role in this course
Complete section 2. Design with Equity, Learner Variability, & Belonging in Mind. Add any resources, notes, questions that might be helpful to you/your team when you start building your hybrid course in Module 2.
Success criteria for this task:

Once you’ve completed these steps, you’re ready to move on to 1.3: Clarify Purpose & Revise Learning Goals.