Hybrid learning, sometimes referred to as concurrent or hyflex learning, typically involves teaching students face-to-face in the classroom while at the same time teaching online or remote students. The goal is to seamlessly integrate online and face-to-face activities so all students, wherever they are, enjoy one cohesive experience.
To accomplish this, teachers must focus on the student experience throughout the hybrid course, presenting students with engaging material and encouraging them to interact with one another in innovative ways that make them feel empowered. Hybrid teaching doesn’t necessarily require teachers to learn new methods of teaching, but it does require teachers to adapt those methods and use them in new ways. The key to hybrid teaching is to be flexible!
Here are some strategies that are helpful for the hybrid learning model.
Cooperative learning involves breaking the classroom into small groups so students can learn new concepts together and learn from one another while they are doing it. Often students have a common goal to accomplish and will work together to solve a problem or find an answer. At the same time, each student has a specific task to complete or a concept to explain to the group. So, cooperative learning also teaches personal responsibility as well as interdependence. It’s a powerful and effective learning strategy.
Cooperative learning works well in a hybrid teaching environment. It encourages interaction between in-class students and online students that are doing remote learning. Students in the classroom can use a glass board or whiteboard to capture the ideas so everyone, whether online or in the classroom, can see the information.
Fishbowl is a learning strategy for organizing medium to large group discussions to help students comprehend complex texts. At the same time, it develops students’ discussion skills. It’s an especially useful strategy for engaging an entire classroom, which may be composed of students with a wide range of capabilities.
With Fishbowl, students form a circle around a smaller group of students that are placed in the middle (in the fishbowl). This strategy is easily adapted for hybrid learning by having online students be inside the fishbowl, and all students in the physical classroom are in the circle outside the fishbowl – or vice versa!
Modelling is a teaching strategy in which the teacher demonstrates a concept to students and shows students how to do something by breaking it into small steps. Some activities, such as solving math equations, are difficult to adequately express in words. With modelled teaching, the students learn by observing the teacher’s thought processes and then use those thought processes while they practice on other problems. A whiteboard or glass board is an invaluable tool for visually capturing a teacher’s thought processes and showing students how to accomplish a task in the classroom. It’s proving to be even more effective for hybrid instruction and accommodating to different learning styles. Online learning students can see the same thing in real-time as the students in the classroom.
Play-based learning is a popular student learning strategy for younger and older students alike. While engaged in fun activities, students can practice their skills -- social, physical, critical thinking, creative. These activities can be more structured, with the teacher leading them, or students can take the lead. What’s important is that students have fun while they are learning, even virtual students. There are tons of fun activities that can be adapted for the hybrid classroom, and an interactive glass board can serve as the unifying factor for both online and classroom students. There are many fun whiteboard activities for your classroom. For example, Jeopardy or Last Letter First can both be modified to accommodate both groups in the hybrid format.
Prompts are a useful strategy when teaching students new skills. There are different types of prompts an instructor can use such as:
While prompts are useful when teaching students new skills, the teacher should decrease the number of prompts over time so students become fully independent and can perform the skill on their own. Again, for the hybrid model, whiteboards and Clarus glass boards come to the rescue in conveying the teacher’s text or visual prompts to the entire class, whether students are attending online or in the classroom.
