digital learning

For more than two years, administrators at Purcell Marian High School in Cincinnati have been navigating the competing pressures of new and old.

They decided the shift to blended learning could help them meet the varying needs of an increasingly diverse student body, and help their students meet a state requirement to pass four years of high school math courses. They also knew that they couldn’t knock down all the walls in their 87-year-old building or upend the traditions that had drawn students to seek a Catholic education in the first place.

In this 2012 file photo, students at Miami’s Belen Jesuit Preparatory School Pads during a Spanish class.

“We couldn’t just gut the school and start over as an all-blended learning school,” Jeanine Flick, the school’s academic dean, told a crowded session at an Orlando conference for thousands of Catholic educators.

Instead, in 2013 the school began a gradual, subject-by-subject shift from paper textbooks to electronic ones, and from instruction led entirely by teachers to what principal Veronica Murphy described as a more “student-centered” approach, in which students work through material based on what they have mastered. It began converting one of its newer buildings into an open-plan “blended learning center.”

While Catholic educators, much like their public-school counterparts, have been exploring blended learning for a few years, it’s now becoming widespread, and was one of the hottest topics at the National Catholic Educational Association’s annual convention last week. Sessions were often packed with teachers and administrators looking to draw lessons from schools like Purcell Marian that have already made the shift and are starting to draw lessons from it.

They’ve faced many of the same the same hurdles as public schools, and some unique ones. For one thing, they often lack public funding to pay for students’ devices or the technology that connects them.