Why Distance Learning?

# Why Distance Learning — Dr. Mark Deschaine, Part 2
# Clean Transcript
# *Timestamps approximate throughout — minor cuts have been applied*

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**[INTRO]**

[00:00:00] Seth: Hello everyone, and welcome to Why Distance Learning, the podcast for education leaders and practitioners who are making real decisions about how virtual learning gets designed, adopted, and sustained. I'm Seth Fleischauer, founder and president of Banyan Global Learning, and my cohosts are Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration.

If you haven't heard Part 1 of this conversation with Dr. Mark Deschaine, go back and listen — this picks up where that one left off. Mark is a Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Mississippi, editor of the Journal of Contemporary Research in Education, and a Research Fellow at Michigan Virtual, with a practitioner career that spans special education teacher, teacher consultant, and building-level principal. This is Part 2.

Today we explore the vocabulary we use to describe differentiated instruction — individualizing, differentiating, personalizing, building presence. These terms are sometimes used interchangeably but, but Mark along with his collaborators Mary Francis Rice and Raymond Rose (friend of the podcast), argue that they are actually four distinct frames with different theoretical bases, different policy anchors, and different implications for what we actually build.

This episode is brought to you by CILC, the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, connecting students to real experts through live virtual field trips and experiences — visit cilc.org to learn more. And by Banyan Global Learning, which connects K-12 classrooms with global peers and expert facilitators through live, thematic international exchange programs — find them at banyangloballearning.com.

And now here's our conversation with Dr. Mark Deschaine.

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[00:01.239] Seth: Mark, welcome back to the podcast.

[00:03.126] Mark Deschaine: Thank you very much.

[00:05.379] Seth: So I wanted to tease something out that we have seen in your research that I think is really interesting. You and Mary Francis Rice and Raymond Rose have argued that individualization, differentiation, personalization, and building presence are four distinct frames. I think it's interesting because we talk about distance learning as one of the places where those concepts can be further explored — because of the medium, because of the way that the asynchronous timing works, and time and space — we're able to create something that is more individualized, differentiated, personalized. But a lot of times those words are used interchangeably. You don't use them interchangeably. So can you walk us through each one? What does conflating them actually cost someone if we're not seeing them as different things?

[01:01.524] Mark Deschaine: Yeah, well that was written in context of students with disabilities. So let's start there. One of the biggest things we do in education when you have a student with disabilities is you have to provide a free and appropriate public education — FAPE — in the least restrictive environment. And what that requires is that you take their PLAAFP — their present level of academic achievement and functional performance — and you identify appropriate goals and objectives. Those goals and objectives could be behavioral, academic, language, social, a whole slew of things. And essentially those create what are called the IEP, the Individualized Education Plan. Special Ed 101, real quick.

So when you start talking about an individualized plan, you're talking about one individual. You're looking at the path, the supports, the pace, anything that they need to do in order to meet those goals and objectives. But if you then start looking at the other three pieces — you don't have a differentiated educational plan, or a personalized educational plan. You have an individualized plan. So individual means to that one person. You could have a whole lot of classrooms with a lot of students with disabilities all having an IEP, but you could put them together and have similar kinds of needs. And in that general ed classroom, you could have some differentiation going on. Because you have these individuals with similar learning needs, you're going to differentiate for them. For example, they might need assistive technology. Is assistive technology going to be used for everybody? Probably not. So the instructional mode, materials, methodologies — I think a lot of times could be differentiated.

Then you have personalization. Now, this is where it gets really fun in my mind, because personalization has a lot to do with voice and choice. In a lot of ways, it's very heutagogical. You have a learner who is advocating for their own needs. Some people call it agency. So when you start personalizing, it's like — okay, I'm doing all of this really fun stuff, but I already know this. It's kind of like when a high schooler decides they've already understood this content and they're going to test out of that class. That's a personalized way of looking at things from my perspective.

And then this whole idea of building presence — what is it that the human element has going on? How does the person, both mentally and physically present — if you've got a kid that's zoning out, they're probably not mentally present, but they're very physically present. So all of those things, and they had corresponding theorists going with them — it's just a different way to think of things.

I take my — here we go with the rabbit hole, Seth — I take my doctoral students and I ask them to think in four major areas. One of them is the theoretical conceptual. You have all of these different theorists that you really like a lot. But you don't necessarily take them all the way they were written. You take bits and pieces, and that'll form your own conceptual framework. People look at it differently. They disagree with me — that's fine. That's a nice thing about my job. I can pontificate about things that I think are correct, and if you agree with me, great. If not, get another chair for your dissertation. But this idea of this theoretical conceptual frame is something that I don't think we do enough in education, especially our teachers — because that requires an awful lot of proactive thought. An awful lot of sitting down and thinking about what is it that I think about. How do I present myself as an instructor? How do I look at the different theoretical pieces that are going on?

It's very difficult to be a reflective practitioner — Donald Schön — when you are under the gun with your pacing guide, your scope and sequence charts, statewide testing, calendar, and all that other stuff. So that theoretical piece is very important because it's very different for everybody. How I view the world is not necessarily how you view the world. So my doctoral students have to talk about what is their viewpoint. Are they using a microscope? Are they using a telescope? Well, it depends.

So that theoretical piece is huge. The second piece is what I kind of just talked about earlier — the legal piece. What are the legal, legislative, policy rules, requirements, regulations, handbooks? What are the things that we typically have to do within education in order to keep ourselves in compliance, keep ourselves out of court, make sure that we're meeting all of the categorical funding requirements? And that if we're audited by whomever, we're going to be able to say, yeah, we're doing it properly.

Then you've got the empirical piece, which a lot of your questions are related to — what do other folks think? What have they found? Now one of the things that really gets me upset — and I'm stealing this from a former colleague of mine, Barb Clacko from Central Michigan University, she's an emeritus professor — she says a lot of folks like to say "research says." That's wrong. Research doesn't say anything. Researchers do. Otherwise, you're engaging in anthropomorphism. Disney made a gazillion dollars with this idea of ascribing human qualities to non-human elements or objects. But a lot of what we have to do as a good consumer of research is figure out how compatible is their viewpoint and vision of the world with ours.

I taught my students last night — we went to Cabell's database of journals and I said, put in your research topic. They come up with six, seven different journals. And I said, which one would you probably be predisposed to looking at? You've got to go to the aims and scope. Different journals have different things they want to situate their narrative with. So when you've asked me which one of these is best — yes. It depends. It all depends on how compatible your theoretical orientation is, whether you're staying in compliance with the law, and whether you have good empirical backing to make your decisions.

And then the fourth piece is — okay, how are you going to practically implement this in all of your programs? In this case, we're talking about distance education, online learning.

[09:12.897] Allyson: I also want to shout out CMU because they are a content provider at CILC — they have a wonderful museum education and museum studies program. But I also am wondering — just thinking about theory and practice, the concept and theory, the guidelines and parameters, what's come before and what can you learn from the old masters — is that something like design thinking? Is that a pedagogy where it's about design from the practitioner?

[10:19.304] Mark Deschaine: If it's intentional, yeah, most definitely.

[10:22.199] Allyson: I was just wondering — Daniel Pink keeps coming up in my mind as you were speaking. Is there a certain type of framework that you look to, to be able to help all four exist together in the balance in which they should?

[10:56.746] Mark Deschaine: Well, in my multiple realities as a former administrator and as someone who prepares future administrators and future doctoral students, all four are important.

[11:11.127] Seth: What I heard was systems thinking for decision making in the classroom. You've got these four different pieces — theory and what you think about as ideals, mixed with actual legal requirements, mixed with what you may have learned not just empirically from researchers, but from sharing with your colleagues. All of that is a system of decision making for implementation, which then gets put through this lens of — from the teacher perspective — you're differentiating for individuals so that their experience is individualized, but they are adding their own agency to make it personalized. And ideally leading to presence through engagement from feeling that there's actual connection between what they want to learn and what they're learning. And all of that gets put through this system of decision making that probably feels to any given teacher pretty intuitive, but is probably based on some beliefs that may or may not have actually been articulated. Do you find that people have these ideas in there somewhere, even if they haven't been able to speak to them explicitly?

[12:47.870] Mark Deschaine: Yeah, I think a lot of people put that into the practical quadrant. They do their thing because they think it's efficacious. They do their thing because they appreciate it, they enjoy it, it's their jam. That doesn't necessarily — I think a lot of teachers are in that zone. Give me the textbook, tell me what I have to do, tell me when the test is, and I'm off.

How many of our teachers actually think about the theoretical conceptual piece? I started out that little rant by saying I don't think enough educators do that, because it takes a lot of time and self-reflection. But if you're not doing effective professional learning for your staff — yourself, whatever — and you're not thinking from a theoretical conceptual framework, how are you going to make things connect from a cognitive perspective?

In the same way, the only time I think a lot of our educators, our frontline folks, get in the legal realm is when they have to do something related to discipline, student handbook, code of conduct, maybe sit in on an IEP. But I don't think they really recognize the fact that every time an administrator signs their name off on an IEP, they're creating a legal document and a check for services that obligates the district to do something.

A lot of our teachers, when we talk about empiricism — No Child Left Behind said we had to have empirically based and pedagogically sound materials and methodologies. But what's that problem? So much of what we do in education and social sciences cannot give as much empiricism as they want, because we don't do experimental design. If anything, we do quasi-experimental. And what makes it even more challenging is taking a quantitative perspective — standardized tests — they don't tell the story. They don't give our learners or our teachers agency. That's much more qualitative.

[15:15.001] Seth: So you talked last time about decentralizing. Is that the answer? Does this become decentralized to the point of literal individuals? And if so — you talked about No Child Left Behind, that was a federal effort to try to get a handle on what we saw as declining capabilities of our students in comparison to the rest of the world. If you are individualizing things, how do you control for quality? And how do you even measure for quality if everybody is pursuing different things?

[15:55.575] Mark Deschaine: Are you talking about formal or informal individualization?

[15:59.384] Seth: Yes.

[16:00.631] Allyson: Both, yes.

[16:00.279] Mark Deschaine: Good answer. Okay, so if you wanted to look at it from a formal perspective, that cat's already out of the bag. There are systems that are losing tens of thousands of students to homeschooling. To me, that is the epitome of individualization. Think about what that is doing to traditional school systems. The loss of students isn't just a loss of revenue. What does that mean for all of the staff on hand?

[16:54.883] Seth: Yeah, here in Portland they're about to release a plan to close ten to twenty schools in the district in the next year because of loss of enrollment.

[17:00.779] Mark Deschaine: Yeah.

[17:04.562] Mark Deschaine: And then you have forced school district consolidation. A lot of people don't understand, especially in some of our smaller, more rural districts — the school system might be the biggest generator of economic growth and development in that region. Think about what a school system hires. It's not just the teachers. You have your instructional staff, your speech therapists and psychologists, all of the instructional support people like that. But also you have parapros and secretaries and custodians, you have food service workers, your transportation people. Those people tend to reside in the community where they work. A lot of times it's your teaching staff that actually drive in and drive out. So if you're going to have a disintegration, destruction, decentralization of traditional learning, there are collateral damages — I'll use that term — to local districts. Did we talk about this last time?

[18:20.267] Allyson: Very lightly — we spoke about the idea of like the ripple effect.

[18:24.778] Mark Deschaine: Did I tell you about one of our doctoral students at Central that did her dissertation on the impact of the community when the state came in and did a takeover?

[18:39.081] Allyson: No, not during our conversation.

[18:39.222] Seth: No, go for it.

[18:39.854] Mark Deschaine: It had some pretty deleterious impact, because a lot of those supports and things I just mentioned all of a sudden were gone. Where do those people find employment? That got so much traction — she was asked to sit in front of, I believe, the House and Senate Education Committees in Michigan to talk about her study. And that's the kind of thing I really want our doctoral students to do and our community members to do. Our teachers. I want them to think critically about what's going on in their programs and to be able to advocate.

[19:21.099 *(approx)*] Allyson: That's interesting. I've also heard recently about online schooling and virtual academies that were grown within districts that now are requiring all of their teachers to come on site as opposed to work remotely as well. Just thinking about that idea of reflection and practice — how does that change what you came into? How does that build?

[20:02.987] Seth: And Mark, are you essentially saying in response to my question that it doesn't matter that it's harder to standardize? Maybe that's the point. The market is speaking. It has to be more individualized in order to avoid these deleterious effects from impacting any given community, because we need our schools. Is that essentially what you're saying — make school more like homeschool in order to avoid these destructive forces?

[20:32.232] Mark Deschaine: No. I'm just giving snapshots of reality that I've witnessed. I'm not advocating for anything. You want to know what the advocation is? It's going to come down to what the states are going to do. And there are going to be certain states that, with the decentralization from the federal government back to the states, you're going to have people move from state to state based on the services and programs that they offer — that they desire. In the same way a lot of people are voting with their feet to move from a traditional school to a charter school to an online school to a home school to a micro school.

The whole piece about this decentralization is the controlling factors that used to be there — compliance, rules, regulations, laws, funding. When those are gone, what's to keep people in traditional? Because those mechanisms that were designed to support traditional structures are then going to be farmed out to something else.

[21:49.852] Allyson: So that's why I keep coming back to this framework — maybe not the best word for it — but the idea of your Five Cs, the idea of organizing and being able to think about how do you share collective knowledge. How does that curating of content work? What does that look like in practice for a virtual school or even a homeschool or an online experience? How is the distance learning portion of whatever you might be doing — whether it's traditional, whether it's hybrid, but specifically when we look at the online, virtual, homeschool environment — how is that not a big part of it? And how do we prepare our educators and administrators to see the benefits of that?

[23:12.080] Mark Deschaine: It's hard to think outside of your container when you're five years away from retirement in a traditional system. There's a lot of reality there. If you think about how long we've had these traditional infrastructures in place — in some communities, once that's been disbanded, what does that do for the supports that are offered?

Now we can talk about the Five Cs later, because that has some really interesting rabbit holes I've been going down through this whole idea of agentagogy — this whole idea of communal constructivism through homes is just incredible. But let me try to finish this idea first. Let's go back to the special ed thing. Do you know what a continuum of services is?

[24:21.049] Seth: I would assume it's a string of people that are providing services that should be coordinating with each other and probably aren't.

[24:29.363] Allyson: And are supposed to be there to support you.

[24:29.712] Mark Deschaine: It is a continuum — a series of supports, programs and placements. You could have a student with disabilities who doesn't require anything, because just because you have a disability does not necessarily mean you're needing an IEP. We have students with disabilities that require a 504 — which is a Civil Rights Act law that provides access — but a 504 plan is different than an IEP. So you can start with general ed with nothing, all the way down to residential placement and programming. That's a continuum — from what people would want to say is an absolute least restrictive, and I disagree with that, to a most restrictive.

For some students, based on their learning needs, a residential program — and I'm going to get in trouble with a lot of my colleagues on this — might be the least restrictive environment for them, because they have certain behavioral, medical kinds of needs. Lou Brown years ago said, I don't care how challenged you are through your disability, you have a right to be in society, and full inclusion is the only way. Least restrictive environment is full inclusion with everybody, and we figure out how to provide supports that way. So you've got this whole amorphous construct.

But let's go back to reality. In Michigan, the legislators intentionally made it so that a lot of programs and services for kids who were much more impaired — they would get their services through intermediate school district programming. So if you had a huge tax base, let's say Flint when the GM plants were there, you could have a pretty sizable pot of money for students with severe disabilities. But if you happen to live in the Upper Peninsula, where you don't have a huge tax base — a disability that would give you an opportunity in Flint to attend a really cool program may not exist in other parts of the state. How is that equitable? What that really is is a continuum of service gap. Some people have a whole lot based on where they live and learn. Other people don't.

Let's move that to this whole idea of distance learning. There are certain states that have online programs that the state endorses and supports financially. Other states don't. What does that mean for a learner who wants to access that kind of program?

[28:09.771] Allyson: Right. And that's something that comes up a lot on this podcast too — the conversation about access. Where is the internet highway? And even once you get the highway and you get access to the device, the question we always talk about is continued usage. How do you — once you get there — keep driving on the highway?

[29:08.992] Mark Deschaine: If you have continued usage, that tells me you have high demand. And if you have high demand, that assumes people are buying what you're providing. And if you live in an area that doesn't have that service and you really need it, how are you going to access it? Well, we're seeing a lot of people moving. Look at the redistricting that's going to happen with the United States House of Representatives. Certain states are picking up enormous numbers of new representatives. Other states are losing them. Where are the states getting most of the increase in population? It's the SREB regions — the Southern Regional Education Board regions, of which Mississippi is part.

[30:04.314] Seth: And you think that's motivated by school structures more than economy? It feels like school might be a factor, but people go where the jobs are, right?

[30:10.270] Mark Deschaine: Both. School structures and alternatives and those kinds of opportunities are very much driven by the economy. Look at the budget surplus that Tennessee has — Tennessee could have walked away from the federal requirements and done it all on their own a couple years ago. They don't need that money. But look at a state like Mississippi or Arkansas. We're very much dependent on a lot of monies coming back and flowing through the feds to us. Yet we still aspire to be what? Much like the folks in our region. So even though you have a larger region, you still have pockets of — I don't want to say haves and have-nots, but wealth and not so wealthy — and that drives a lot of times what opportunities look like. It's kind of like Christmas time when I was working and my wife was home with the kids, things were a little more lean — Christmas presents were different, they were much more basic. Guess what, kids? You got two pairs of jeans this year. And a couple of years later, as I got up the pay scale — you also get a Tonka truck. And that's in a lot of ways how I see states. And even within states, then you have counties, and within those counties you have districts.

[31:53.178] Seth: So you're talking about a virtuous cycle between thriving education and a thriving economy — that these things work together to reinforce each other. And the same thing in the other direction. If those things are not thriving — much like we have a pretty stagnant economy here in Portland, the schools are constricting. Not just because people are moving to homeschool, but because young families aren't moving here because the job opportunities aren't here and the housing prices are too high.

[32:26.598] Mark Deschaine: And tax base and cost of living. Yeah, yeah.

[32:30.037] Allyson: Yeah, similar to here in Philly. But there are also those outliers where you can say, well, here's the line, and then you're in this area where you're able to find that kind of balance.

[32:45.356] Tami: Yeah, I know a couple of people that have looked at states that have school choice. Depending on how much money they can get back to their family, they will choose to live there. They'll move three or four states away — I get more out of it here, why wouldn't I live here?

[33:09.177 *(approx)*] Seth: So you're talking about a virtuous cycle —

[33:12.768 *(approx)*] Mark Deschaine: Well, Seth, let me respond to your insight there. Where is most of education moving now? The federal government moved the Department of Education — most of it — to the Department of Labor. And if you look at how a lot of states are really looking at education, they're looking at it as a tool for workforce development and economic growth. Schools need to exist so that we have workers able to meet the requirements of the new technologies coming our way. I went to a high school, and I had my carotid looked at by an eleventh grader. And I say to that — get ready — because your 11th and 12th graders are going to soon be part of a community college system. That's going to disrupt traditional. Why am I saying that? Because they're doing it in Canada, they're doing it in Germany. There's nothing sacrosanct about how we structure our learning. It can be changed. Look at heutagogy. Does the community have the resilience to put up with a lot of the changes and challenges that come with new and novel?

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**[OUTRO — recorded separately]**

That was Part 2 of our conversation with Dr. Mark Deschaine.

The four-frames distinction has immediate relevance when you set it against the structural forces Mark's been describing — schools closing, families voting with their feet, and states handing out educational savings accounts. When learners can go anywhere, you have to know what you actually mean when you say "we individualize our instruction," and how that's different from what else is out there. The four-quadrant check — theoretical, legal, empirical, practical — is also important, because decisions that feel intuitive often haven't been stress-tested against all four, and the ones that haven't tend to be the ones that fall apart under pressure.

In Part 3, Mark gets into the Five Cs of digital curation as an organizational knowledge management tool, what No Child Left Behind's failure tells us about quantitative versus qualitative measures of learning quality, and agentagogy — his framework for learning with agentic AI, including the specific role of productive struggle. Thanks as always to our editor, Lucas Salazar, and thank you for listening to Why Distance Learning, and we'll see you next time.