Hi everyone,

It's so nice to be in a group with you all! Who wants to submit the assignment this Sunday? I'm down to submit if you all think you'll be ready to submit like...Sunday afternoon/evening (not anywhere near 11:59pm please). Comment if you're okay with that or if you can stay up later to be the one to submit!

But in any case, let's also comment when we're finished annotating so that the person submitting knows when people are finished.

edit I emailed Anita saying that it would be good if she submitted!

Though I have a hard time imagining how one teacher can support so many grade levels, but I like this concept where students can still interact closely with people their age. I think too much personalization can isolate students, but keeping students together by year allows them to still form close relationships with people their age. This is especially important if students want to hang out with friends at school (Horn & Staker 144). But now I'm wondering if this expectation to have friends your age is something that can/should be changed to allow for more age diversity within friend groups.

This whole paper has talked about educators' and administrators' goals. However, "when teams design school without regard to the students' perspective, they face resistance at every turn from the very people they are trying to serve" (Horn & Staker 137). Does the solution necessitate student participation in the the process of remodeling the education system?

This kind of reminds me of politics where a bipartisan system has persisted for decades because there are two different but not incorrect ideologies. I wonder if education is subject to the same standstill.

This is an impractical, but very real pressure that teachers face that I never really thought about. But even the examples in Blended generally bring up examples of schools that have seen rapid turnaround in their results. For example, RAND saw improvement in its blended learning model within 2 years (Horn & Staker 80). Rocketship's lab rotation model took 3 years to show results (Horn & Staker 42). It demonstrates that one concept where novel ideas have it "rougher" than existing ones, since the novel ones have to prove themselves as undoubtedly better than the ones they are replacing.

Students grouped by age level may force students of different skill levels together, but also provides an objective way to group students. Will transitioning to a more subjective way of grouping introduce potential means to discriminate or perpetuate existing disparities in education?