Empathy is critical for making progress toward racial equity because it affects whether individuals or organizations take any action and if so, what kind of action they take. There are at least four ways to respond to racism: join in and add to the injury, ignore it and mind your own business, experience sympathy and bake cookies for the victim, or experience empathic outrage and take measures to promote equal justice. The personal values of individual employees and the core values of the organization are two factors that affect which actions are undertaken.

Personalized learning is tailoring learning for each student’s strengths, needs and interests — including enabling student voice and choice in what, how, when and where they learn — to provide flexibility and supports to ensure mastery of the highest standards possible.

What blended learning offers is a rational approach, focused on redesigning instructional models first, then applying technology, not as the driver, but as the enabler for high-quality learning experiences that allow a teacher to personalize learning and manage an optimized learning enterprise in the classroom.

Horn and Staker’s blended learning definition asks the blended modality to enable the student to have increased control over time, place, path and pace. The difference between solely using technology in addition to teacher-centered instructional models and understanding the fundamental shift using blended learning implementations toward transformed, student-centered instructional models is getting clearer.