Blended Literacy: What it Means and Why it Matters
In 2019, only 27% of fourth graders in New York City were reading at or above proficiency, and the pandemic has since exacerbated the gap, particularly for students who were already behind and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Traditional teaching methods aren’t demonstrating measurable impact year to year. What if there was a way to use technology to combine personalized learning with content-rich literacy instruction to boost achievement?
This unique combination of learning tools is called blended literacy, and it's at the heart of the Robin Hood Foundation’s Learning + Technology Fund, supported by Endless. The objective of the Fund’s blended literacy strategy is to partner with organizations and schools to determine the potential of combining a personalized and blended approach with content-rich literacy instruction.
While the Fund recognizes that a content-rich approach can be effectively implemented without technology and there are many ways to personalize learning without a content-rich approach, the focus is on demonstrating the yet-untapped potential of bringing the two together.
Some Context: Does Content Really Matter?
Educational researchers have long identified the critical nature of specific content knowledge to making meaning. For example, imagine this sentence in a passage about baseball: “He stole second base and everyone went wild.” Students who are familiar with baseball would interpret a different meaning than those who aren’t, who might imagine the criminal act of stealing with negative repercussions. The background knowledge is essential for understanding. And this has a big impact - students who have a lower reading ability but a higher familiarity with baseball will outperform proficient readers with no background knowledge. This is called the Matthew Effects.
The takeaway is that intentionally building specific content knowledge is critical to building understanding. But with more pressure on educators to equip students with close reading skills (like finding a main idea, analyzing a passage, making inferences, etc.) that will help them on literacy assessments, teachers have put aside building content across a wide range of subjects.
By narrowing the curriculum and neglecting the importance of background knowledge, schools are inadvertently making it harder for their students to excel in any subject, including ELA (English Language Arts).
The point is not that teachers should neglect other aspects of literacy, but that practicing close reading to the exclusion of intentionally building knowledge is futile.
Personalization
Classrooms that embrace personalization strive to give kids more agency in their learning, offering flexible pacing and access to a wide variety of subjects, materials, and tools. Rather than a whole-class discussion on one text, students engage in the materials that interest them most on their own level and timeline. A classroom of 25 students might have 25 unique learning experiences happening at the same time, each one designed to deliver the right content and rigor to help a student achieve their individual goal.
But personalization at scale is challenging - tutors that support the process are out of reach for many students, and schools that have high teacher-to-student ratios do not have the bandwidth for customization at that level.
A Blended Approach
Neither content-rich classrooms nor personalization alone have supported all kids in achieving proficiency. This is why blended learning is so important. Blended learning is the engine that can power personalization at scale. Just as technology enables mass customization in so many sectors to meet the diverse needs of so many users, online learning can allow students to learn any time, in any place, on any path, and at any pace.
To understand what blended literacy might look like in practice, imagine a third-grade English Language Arts class where students are learning about frogs. The unit builds on a previous study in science focused on the environment, using similar vocabulary and concepts, and is a precursor to a social studies unit comparing cultures. Now imagine the classroom is set up for students to cycle through different centers as they learn about frogs. Rather than have all the centers focused on building reading fundamentals, students could also learn about frogs through the lens of social studies and science. Students with limited knowledge of amphibians could watch a set of online videos about frogs, and then construct a Venn diagram to compare different types of frogs and show evidence of their learning. Once they have demonstrated mastery, the students could progress to reading a book about frogs at another station. At the other online station, students learn and practice the fundamentals of reading through online software that utilizes adaptive assessments to provide real-time data for teachers and students to decide on students grouping and lesson planning. A third station features a teacher working with a small group of students on how to effectively close read a non-fiction text about how frogs are perceived in various cultures.
This combination of centers allows students to engage deeply in content related to frogs through various mediums, and personalizes the learning by tracking mastery and utilizing grouping. While traditional reading curriculums still leave millions of kids behind, new ways to engage students in meaningful learning are critical for lessening the gap.
The Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund was established to unlock the potential of technology to transform learning and advance achievement for low-income students in New York City. By working in collaboration with organizations, school leaders, educators, and researchers, they aim to achieve this mission together by providing clear and inspirational tools, resources and models with the power to bridge the literacy gap that prevents so many of our youth from deepening their learning and ultimately setting on a path to opportunity. Learn more about them and their mission on their website.
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