Embracing Flexibility and Freedom with Blended Learning

This is the first in a series of posts that will highlight some of our remarkable teachers and share their perspectives on blended learning. Mary Kate serves as the second-grade teacher at Holy Angels Catholic School. You can contact Mary Kate at .

The return from Christmas break brought feelings of nervous excitement for the teachers at Holy Angels and our staff here at ACE. January is a big month for our Notre Dame ACE Academies–and for many other schools across the nation–because students take the NWEA Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) mid-year assessment. MAP is a widely-respected online assessment that students take three times per year to measure their growth. The test is particularly accurate because it is adaptive, meaning the questions get easier or harder depending on the student’s answers to previous question. At the end, NWEA provides teachers with really specific information about student progress and skills that teachers can use to inform their instruction.

This post is the first in a series about teaching in a blended classroom written by Sean Wolohan, the fifth- and sixth-grade math and science teacher and Blended Learning Coordinator at Holy Angels Catholic School in Indianapolis. If you would like to hear more from Sean, please comment below or email him at . You can also find him on Twitter @sean_wolohan.

Holy Angels Catholic School is the first whole-school blended learning pilot in a Notre Dame ACE Academy. It is an amazing school with wonderful students, loving families, a rich tradition of Catholic education, and committed teachers. But one question we receive over and over again is “Why Holy Angels?” Why now? Why this Notre Dame ACE Academy? And why blended learning?

Warning: I was a Philosophy major, and old habits die hard. Please indulge my philosophical musings before we jump into more actionable information.

At the heart of Christianity lies the belief that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God. This central tenet of our faith should influence all of our actions, but we all know there are some instances in which this principle is easier to uphold than others. 

So now you have met the team behind Higher-Powered Learning (HPL), but you may still be wondering, “what is Higher-Powered Learning?” If you’re reading this post, you probably understand the reference to the “higher power.” We used it in our name to communicate our primary commitment to “the art of leading the young to wholeness, in the image of Jesus Christ” (Blessed Basil Moreau, C.S.C.). 

You may recognize this picture from ACE’s 2016 Annual Appeal Video:

As Fr. Scully says in the video, Nelvin had struggled in Language Arts, and this photo was taken after he recently achieved a perfect score on his spelling test. What the video does not tell you, though, is that Nelvin has progressed through nearly two grade-levels of reading material in a single semester thanks to his amazing ACE teacher, his own hard work, and his school’s new blended-learning program. Want to know more about blended learning? Read on!