Welcome to a new series, the ABCs of Pedagogy, cross-posted at the university blog Teche. It is learning and teaching award season at my university and one of the aims of this series is to provide applicants with the scholarly language to describe their teaching and learning practice. This skill goes beyond award applications and may also be useful for the purposes of reflection, conversations about teaching and learning, scholarly activities, and career progression.

Blended synchronous or hybrid flexible teaching (also referred to as ‘hyflex teaching’) is when you simultaneously teach some students in person and others online. For many of us, it is a relatively new phenomenon in the context of COVID-19. This mode of teaching is certainly challenging for both teachers and students! To support the practice of ‘blendsync’, my university blog has published posts and shared resources (including slides from a recent workshop by Mathew Hillier with a shout out to Matt Bower’s pre-pandemic research).

Perhaps you have heard the aphorism “pedagogy before technology” but the rapid shift to online and blended teaching may mean some catching up is required on the pedagogical front. If you are preparing an application for a teaching award this year, it’s likely you will mention the impacts of the pandemic on your teaching and your students’ learning. Luckily, the pedagogical language and conceptual models for blended synchronous teaching are well established.

George Siemens (2005) proposed connectivism as the learning theory for the digital age. It is an extension of constructivism, one of the most influential learning theories in formal education around the world, where learning is understood to happen through social interaction and experience (more on that in the next post in the series C is for Constructivism). In connectivism, students learn in and across networks and work collaboratively to create knowledge in digital formats.

Connectivism emphasises the ability to connect and organise information and adapt to rapidly changing systems. Learning is viewed as ‘actionable knowledge’ (Siemens, 2005) and exists beyond people to reside in technological forms and structures. If your teaching involves teams of learners contributing to shared documents and creating new learning artefacts, then connectivism may be aligned with your practice.

To describe your blended synchronous teaching, there are several scholarly frameworks for thinking about the relationship between pedagogy and technology.

Perhaps the most well-known is Mishra and Koehler’s (2006) TPACK (technological pedagogical and content knowledge) framework.

TPACK highlights that effective digital learning requires teachers to understand technology, pedagogy, and disciplinary knowledges. For example, if a teacher only addresses technological and content knowledge (TCK) domains, this could mean asking students to generate a wiki entry to explain a difficult concept. If Pedagogical Knowledge (PK) is not considered, and the task is not scaffolded, students may struggle.

For more information, see TPACK Explained. 

Building on TPACK, another model for thinking about your blended synchronous teaching pedagogy is Puentedura’s (2010) SAMR (substitution augmentation modification redefinition) framework, which offers four tiers for teaching with technology. SAMR shifts from the use of technology to enhance teaching (or make it possible during a pandemic) to the use of technology to transform teaching and learning.

Think about these levels in relation to your teaching. At the Substitution or Augmentation level, you might be replicating f2f activities for online students by recording or streaming lectures, or using online activities to prompt learning. I expect that as you continued teaching online, and started to teach online and face-to-face simultaneously, you moved into the Modification and Redefinition levels. For example, you might have designed learning activities to combine f2f teaching with features such as online chat, annotations, collaborative documents, polls, simulations and more. Modification changes the nature of a learning or assessment task given the capabilities of technology, and Redefinition uses the affordances of technology for tasks that could be not be undertaken without it.

Read more about SAMR and Bloom’s taxonomy.  

Smyth’s (2011) 3E – Enhance, Extend, Empower framework offers an alternative for describing your technology-enabled teaching practice. If the ideas of student agency and co-creation appeal to you, this may offer a way to describe your practice and philosophy of teaching.

You can find detailed examples of the 3E framework on the Edinburgh Napier University website.

When reflecting on your teaching, questions to consider include:

• How did your teaching practice change as a result of moving online during the pandemic?
• What strategies for teaching will you continue to use now that students are face-to-face as well as online?
• What have you done to build relationships with students and between students?
• How do you create shared learning spaces for face-to-face and online students?
• Are you scaffolding networked learning? How are your students using technology to leverage their collective creativity?

Acknowledgement: In developing this series on the ABCs of Pedagogy, I would like to acknowledge the teaching and scholarship of current and former Macquarie University staff members including Vanessa Fredericks, Marina Harvey, Mathew Hillier, Olga Kozar, Danny Liu, Karina Luzia, Margot McNeil, Anna Rowe, Cathy Rytmeister, Theresa Winchester-Seeto and others.

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054.

Puentedura, R. (2010). SAMR and TPCK: Intro to advanced practice. Retreived from
http://hippasus.com/resources/sweden2010/SAMR_TPCK_IntroToAdvancedPractice.pdf

Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1), 3-10.

All images of theoretical models in this post are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.