Individualized online instruction is helping transform struggling school

SEATTLEBy Kevin Birnbaum

By the fall of 2011, St. Therese School was clearly in trouble. Enrollment had shrunk to just 124 students, and the school’s future was uncertain.

But the 2012–13 school year saw the school’s enrollment jump more than 35 percent, thanks in part to an infusion of more than half a million dollars from outside donors and a partnership with Seton Education Partners, an organization dedicated to supporting inner-city Catholic schools.

The school has transformed into St. Therese Catholic Academy, a “blended technology” school where students spend part of the school day on laptops receiving online instruction.

Individualized instructionBeyond the enrollment and financial boost for the school, Principal Theresa Hagemann said the new model means her students are getting a better education. “It’s been really transformational,” she said.

Hagemann noted that today’s students have “got to be really tech-savvy.”

“We have to look at how we’re educating our kids to meet the needs of these jobs that they’re going to have in the future that don’t even exist right now,” she said. “We’ve got to keep up with the technology and prepare these kids for what’s going to be out there in the future.”

The blended technology model has several benefits, Hagemann said: Students get more one-on-one and small-group instruction from teachers while other students do exercises online; online instruction can be customized to meet the needs of individual students; and teachers get more feedback about how each student is learning.

As students complete online exercises, the programs evaluate how each student is learning and adapt accordingly.

One online program, Achieve3000, has a database of thousands of articles that teachers can select for students to read, Hagemann said.

“And what’s so unique about it is, with the push of a button, that one article that the teacher wants to use with the class gets transformed into the exact (reading) level of each child in the classroom.”

So higher-level readers are challenged, and lower-level readers experience success rather than getting frustrated and writing themselves off as bad learners.

Data-driven educationThe key to the blended learning model is data, Hagemann said.

The online programs continually send information about each student to a “dashboard” on each teacher’s computer. Teachers can filter the data in many ways and see how individual students are performing in different subjects.

“Our teachers are feeling so good about this,” Hagemann said. “They know so much more about their students and how they’re learning and what they need than they have before. …

“This is truly data-driven instruction,” she said. “This forces teachers to be data-driven because they’re truly taking that daily data and making decisions about how they’re going to teach their kids the very next day. It’s changed the ways teachers are planning.”

Middle-school teacher Theresa Morgan has been teaching for 44 years and admits she’s “not a technology person.”

When she first heard about blended learning, she wondered if she’d be able to make the transition to the tech-heavy teaching model. Now, she can’t imagine ever going back.

“The blended technology model has been great,” she said. “I love it. It really answers a lot of questions I’ve had for years about education, about meeting the needs of students. …

“It just really makes teaching fun because it gives you immediate information that you might otherwise spend months trying to get,” she added.

So far, the blended learning model seems to be paying off academically.

Hagemann set ambitious goals for the school during the first year with the new model — she wanted to see a year and a half of academic growth from her students.

Midyear testing in February showed they were on the right track: more than a year’s worth of improvement in reading, and nearly a year in math.

St. Paul School also moving to blended learning

Another struggling school, St. Paul in Seattle, will make the move to a blended learning model in the 2013–14 school year.

“After the success that we’ve seen at St. Therese with the blended learning model, we wanted to make that same opportunity available to more schools,” said Sue Mecham, interim executive director of the Fulcrum Foundation, which is soliciting grants from individuals and private foundations to fund the project, which will put one laptop in the school for every two students.

Since 2007, St. Paul’s enrollment has dropped by 37 percent, from 209 students to just 131 this school year.

The Fulcrum Foundation regularly provides tuition assistance grants for students and financial assistance for schools in need, Mecham said.

“But in the schools that are really seriously struggling, all that those programs do is kind of maintain the status quo — they don’t really move the needle on the health of the school. …

“We’ve realized that in some schools, we need to do a more transformative change,” she said, “and so we’re working very closely with Superintendent Father (Stephen) Rowan and the Office for Catholic Schools to identify the schools that are considered for these new models.”

There are three goals for the move to a new educational model, Mecham said: increasing enrollment, stabilizing the school’s finances, and delivering an excellent education.

“What happens in the schools where they’ve suffered a severe loss of enrollment is that their budget shrinks, they end up having to cut things that they don’t want to, they have to combine grade levels, and what happens is the quality of the education can suffer,” she said. “So we’re trying to address all three of those things with these new models.”

St. Paul’s principal, Betsy Kromer, told The Progress her staff has been getting help and advice from St. Therese Catholic Academy as they prepare to implement the blended learning model.

May 9, 2013