Arney - Go blended! : a handbook for blending technology in schools

Liz Arney has done the hard work of taking her deep experience and making it practical and useful to other school designers. Anyone launching or redesigning a school with blended learning should incorporate the lessons of Go Blended!

Stacey Childress, CEO, NewSchools Venture Fund

A practical, must read for any educator who is leveraging technology to meet the instruction needs of all youth.

John E. Deasy, former Superintendent, Los Angeles Unified School District

Principals, teachers, coaches, superintendents, and IT directorsanyone who wants to implement a personalized learning program in a school, district, or charter management organizationtake notice!! Liz Arney's book harvests lessons from the best test kitchens and offers practical approaches that spell success for you and your students.

Don Shalvey, Cofounder, Aspire Public Schools, Deputy Director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Go Blended! is required reading for every teacher, principal, and administrator implementing technology in their classrooms. Read it in book groups; keep it handy on your desk; have a copy on your nightstand. You'll find yourself returning to it over and over for the invaluable lessons it offers and the landmines it will help you avoid.

Joanne Weiss, Education Consultant and Entrepreneur, former Director of the Race to the Top Program and former Chief of Staff to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan

Liz Arney is the original healthy skeptic. She keeps student learning at the heart of every judgment call and writes with spirit and candor about the choices she helped make at Aspire. This is no silver bullet solution but instead a practical road map to using technology to target instruction directly to student needs. Arney is exactly the guide you should have at your side as you travel this new world of instructionexperienced, thoughtful, and crisp in her advice.

Betsy Corcoran, CEO and Cofounder, EdSurge

Cover image: bubaone | iStockphoto

Cover design: Wiley

Author photo: Sumit Kohli

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To Miles and Quincy

When I think about Aspire Public Schools (Aspire), I remember a line from an old song: I'm a little bit country, and I'm a little bit rock and roll. It's probably more accurate to say we're a little bit country, rock and roll, rap, R&B, and popand probably a few other things. When people get to know our school system, no matter what their context, they often see some relevance for their own. In some ways, we look like a medium-sized school district. In other ways, we resemble individual charter schools or traditional schools trying new things for our students, trying to serve them better. Our experience (and our expressed goal to be perceived in this way) made us even more determined to find a way to share what we've learned so far about blended learningan area that holds tremendous promise for students everywhere. We think the lessons we're learning are applicable in a lot of very different schools and school systems. And we're writing with the hope that everyone can make new mistakes, or at least different versions of the ones we've already made.

From the first days of Aspire, our mission statement has called us to be and do more than just serve our students. Although this will always be our first responsibility, our mission also calls us to share successful practices with other educators. We live this piece of our mission in very real ways. We've spun out an EdTech company (Schoolzilla) to make the data tools and practices we've developed at Aspire accessible to other schools. We've trained principals for one of our host districts on our teacher observation rubric and calibration techniques. And when we embarked on our blended learning work, it quickly became clear that this would be another area where we'd find people eager to share with us, learn from one another, and get better together.

When we started this work, we heard a lot about the innovator's dilemma. We still do. I don't think we did a great job of explaining why we thought we had a good chance to avoid that dilemma. Put simply, we think our culture is good defense or at least a strong factor in making that dilemma more manageable. As a result we heard, and continue to hear, some version of the following:

You're doing great on many things so you'll be stuck in your old ways.

You'll fall behind and stop innovating.

As you get bigger and better, you have too much to lose, and you're under too much scrutiny (and accountability as a charter) to try new things.

The culture at Aspire is special, and it definitely is not about being better than everyone else. It never has been. It's about a lot of things, and one of which is never being satisfied with how ready our kids are for college. We can always do more, and we must. The opportunity equation for our students is stacked against the students and communities we serve in lots of stubbornly persistent ways. Plain and simplewe can't ever stop getting better.