Implications for the future.

Blended learning has shifted the culture of my classroom to a one where students are expected to take charge of their own learning.  It also give students much more room to make mistakes and misbehave / drift of task.  This has implications for the school's discipline policy as blended learning does not lend itself to locking students behaviour down using a rigid framework of rules.  Instead the concept of Restorative Approaches should be used.  Even if this means time is spent discussing students off task behaviour.  I also share with students why we are teaching in this way rather than a more traditional model.

It also has implications for student / teacher conferences.  These meetings in my opinion should be prepared and run by students themselves.  With structured help students should explain to their parents what they have been doing, the way they have been doing it and why in this way.  Many students have been uncomfortable with the culture of giving feedback on lesson to teachers, many give the answers they think teachers want to hear rather than good quality feedback.  So this need to be looked at for the future.

Parents also need help understand this model of teaching as it is so different from their experience of school.

In the future students will be more and more comfortable with this style of learning.  For 14 to 16 year olds were are moving away from a model of doing 12 subjects at GCSE to only 7 or 8 and using this time for non-assessed elective units which will use some form of blended learning.

Staff training will also be vital so colleagues are able to work in this very different environment.  Some colleagues who have observed me teach in this way are very uncomfortable, especially in the way "off task" behaviour is managed (or not as they see it) in my model of blended learning.