Leilani Cauthen 
Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part series.
First of all, hybrid logistics is a trending thing. Hybrid is the new word for schools that deliver live teaching for remote students via online connection, on-campus, or both. Because of the pandemic, schools are working toward transforming for better student experience. Logistics is the word for managing the workflow complexity in the schedule and teaching and learning using technologies.
Hybrid Logistics reimagines the old grade and class structure in favor of a course structure that includes digital workflow management. Hybrid logistics creates independent student progression by rearranging students into fluid memberships composed of large main rooms or “houses,” even multi-grade. They are overseen by a rotation of teachers and paraprofessionals who tend to students as they learn asynchronously. The intersection with teachers is based on pace through normalized pre-set lesson sequences for whole or small group lessons (in-person or virtually). Algorithms determine when to close a cohort in a lesson for a live teaching intersection point, schedule the teacher and classroom space, and trigger a notification to all calendars. Teachers spend their asynchronous time on direct one-on-one instruction and other duties personalizing learning. Students jump to other subjects if they get to a live teaching intersection and the class hasn’t been triggered yet. Hybrid logistics disassembles the whole classroom group and streamlines lecture-style and individual instruction, removing a lot of digital traffic management and classroom management.
It is not a regular workflow with manual spreadsheets and documents of pacing guides, separate schedules, separate l, lesson planning for every teacher using multiple systems. It’s not the independent practices of blending tech and various apps into the learning experience or teachers managing the traffic of simultaneous lecture-and-lead classrooms where some students are socially distanced in the room, and others are video conferencing. Nor is it the same “form” where leaders and teachers struggle to keep the manufacturing-line orientation of grades and classrooms while mutating in too numerous ways for the flexibly present student body and truly personalized paths. It’s a new form that retains live teaching with a more succinct definition of what constitutes teaching.
A Hybrid Logistics Interchange is a software system to automate multi-tiered master schedules, school space use, teachers, and students. The interchange algorithmically interrelates pacing guides, flexible four-level schedule calendars, and lesson paths with specific points marked for live teaching intersection, auto-cohorting, and auto-routing. All other learning is asynchronous, with choices for learning oversight based on student age and whether the student is on-campus or remote. This is a new emerging technology.
The Case for Hybrid Logistics Transformation
What could be done about a traditional schooling system that seems to be a major part of “systemic inequity” because of its ancient structure? It’s not such a leap of faith to consider that inequity programs will not go very far if they don’t address the very structure and methods of teaching and learning that arguably are systematized to create nondiversity. A gloss-over with a new program teaching that there are inequities without truly addressing them with a rework of personalized delivery of schools themselves may even be hypocritical. Since traditional schools are engineered for the non-specific collective, a one-size-fits-all has to be constantly tweaked to be “personalized,” what about instead starting with personalized paths? By backward engineering the whole thing? That would mean not thinking about how humans are typically organized pyramid-like in large organizations, as well as classroom-levels, where teacher over-whole-group-of-students is the original blueprint, but instead thinking with digital structure. Digital “structure” is more of an un-structure, with direct and on-demand paths. Digital is network node-and-line where the end-node is a human-with-computer, but the line goes to any content and any other human anywhere.
What if what was engineered through digital systems was a personal path for every student, at least based on pace at first? Then built-out with more alternate learning off-shoots based on individual needs until eventually, the potentials are awesomely personalized? How could that possibly work to still intersect with teachers without overwhelming complexity so that the teacher had to know all the different path content? How about the social community aspects? What about the youngest students? How are truly personalized paths even possible without the now much-maligned all-online and mostly without teacher models? Aack!
What’s missing is an understanding of the true capacities of tech, which are dramatically underutilized due to the nature of software being built for the existing way schools are structured around bureaucracy or the teacher, but rarely for the student. Workflow logistics are often considered for how teachers intersect.
Of course, digital is not a human replacement. It should, however, be allowed to achieve its role of isolating and elevating human instruction, particularly 1:1 direct instruction, but how?
The way out is the way through. A software model architecture, meaning a compilation of systems and digital lesson pieces and courseware, put together so that they intentionally invert the roles of teachers, is leading through digital systems. Teaching is isolated into those moments of helping students understand a concept and social-emotional inspirational moments.
Tech has replaced many human functions already with grading systems, reporting, testing, and more, but teachers considered these to be drudgery. Its incursion into the construct has largely been administrative. Yet when it comes to the purveyance of knowledge, “Whoa,” saith the educator, “Stop right there. All eyes on me as the teacher, please. I selected the bits and pieces to learn against the standards and wrote the lesson. I’ll tell you what to read next, show images, ask questions, and deliver through the modulation of my voice the emphasis on the things to know while shepherding all of the class’s attention. I will do all the issuance of every assignment and receive every response from every one of my students. I will check more than a dozen digital dashboards a day and try to do a few things to personalize some learning. I will manage all the traffic for all my students and somehow pay enough attention to every student so that every single one achieves.” The ancient art of teaching is replete with tremendous significance about how it is done, and no outsider may question it. Individual subjects are whole universes of methodology to master.
Besides, teaching is specialized performance art and requires being a skilled disciplinarian over whole groups.
- Libsyn – Podcast: A Conversation About Hybrid Logistics
- Romper – Everything Parents Need to Know About Alternative Schools
- edCircuit – LeiLani Cauthen Column Articles
EdCircuit Staff