Photo by Cozy Memories on Flickr.

A new charter school in Ward 8 is engaging young children through “blended learning,” which mixes traditional classroom methods and technology.

Critics have charged that blended learning is simply a sneaky way of reducing teacher headcounts and thus easing stretched budgets.

But at Ingenuity Prep, which opened this year in the Bellevue neighborhood of Southeast DC, it’s a way of allowing teachers the time and flexibility to focus on small groups of students and give them individualized attention. It also permits students to progress at their own rate by using digital tools.

Two committed teachers, Aaron Cuny and Will Stoetzer, left their jobs at DC Bilingual, a DC charter school on Columbia Road NW, to found Ingenuity. Right now the school offers only PK-3 through kindergarten, but the goal is to grow through 8th grade by 2021. Of the school’s 107 students, 95% are African-American and 92% receive free or reduced-price meals.

“We opened this school in a part of the city that’s been deprived of great schools,” says Cuny, Ingenuity’s principal. “We found parents really hungry for that.”

The two young co-founders had no trouble filling places at the school, which they advertised by handing out flyers at neighborhood supermarkets and bus stops. But they’re also mindful that, as Cuny says, “We are newcomers to this community. We are guests and visitors, in a way.”

A visit to Ingenuity reveals an amazing sight, and more importantly an amazing sound: quiet. Lines of children quietly move from one classroom to another, clusters of children quietly focus on lessons at individual computer workstations, groups of children quietly gather on mats on the floor around a teacher, eagerly raising their hands during a discussion of character and emotions.

Ingenuity Prep uses a “rotational model” of blended learning, whereby children go from workstation to workstation within a single classroom. Anyone used to the hubbub that usually accompanies large numbers of young children will be astonished at the order with which these rotations are accomplished.

Although the school is just starting out, it’s possible to identify several keys to its success thus far.

Teacher support:

Each classroom at Ingenuity is staffed with four levels of teachers: master, lead, associate, and resident. Master teachers tend to have 5 to 8 years of teaching experience, while lead teachers usually have 2 to 4 years, although factors like expertise and content knowledge are also important.

Associate teachers are full-time first-year teachers, and come to Ingenuity through a partnership with DC Teaching Fellows. Resident teachers, who come through the Urban Teacher Center, are also in their first year, but they work only three-quarters time and also complete additional classwork and training programs.

Cuny says that new teachers at Ingenuity will always have the benefit of working with mentors with more experience. And the mentoring system allows the school to create a “career pipeline” that will enable teachers to gain more responsibility the longer they stay in the job. In contrast to most school systems where upward mobility means becoming an administrator, senior teachers at Ingenuity will be able to remain in the classroom.

Technology, used intelligently:

Ingenuity relies on technology not for its shiny bells and whistles, but rather for its potential to personalize learning and differentiate curricula for each student. “Blended learning is part of our model — it’s not an end in itself,” says Cuny.

Ingenuity’s student-teacher ratio is 8 to 1, with a class size of 24 children in PK-3 and PK-4 and 30 in kindergarten classes. In comparison, blended learning pioneer Rocketship has a student-teacher ratio of 37 to 1, according to a recent article in Education Week. (Rocketship plans to open as many as 8 charter schools in DC by 2019.)

“Our kids get small group instruction all day long,” says master teacher Charlotte Hansen. “The kind of personal care and personalization our students are getting is very different from anything I’ve been able to offer my students in my other classrooms.”

Starting from scratch:

From their very first day of school, Ingenuity’s preschoolers and kindergarteners start learning how to rotate from workstation to workstation in the orderly manner that visitors marvel at. The number of students is small, and the Ingenuity team goes to great lengths to involve families, both of which lead to what Aaron Cuny calls “great quality control.”

Although Cuny says you can “onboard” children to blended learning methods at any age, the process seems likely to become more difficult as students get older. “The earlier you work with kids the better,” he says.

And the school itself is spanking new. Cuny felt strongly that the best way to build the “exemplary school” he was striving for was to build an “exemplary culture” from the ground up. “Start small and start at the beginning,” he says.

Emphasis on character:

Ingenuity is not only about math and reading. A third pillar of the curriculum is what some educators call emotional intelligence. Ingenuity students devote 90 minutes every day to what the school’s leaders refer to as “civic leadership” or “character.”

“We know that our kids need great math and literacy skills,” says Cuny, “but we also know that there’s a whole range of other skills and competencies that they need.”

Charlotte Hansen, the master teacher, says, “So often in my past years in education, I might want to teach about bullying or low self-confidence or gender identity. But there just wasn’t time. Here, if I notice something like that, I can send the civic leadership teacher an e-mail. She can then spend time role-playing, working on that issue. That really does make us special.”

While Ingenuity does indeed seem special, the open question is how its methods will fare in the future with older, less malleable children and a larger student body. It’s hard to imagine groups of tweens and adolescents rotating from workstation to workstation in quite the same cooperative way as Ingenuity’s 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds. But perhaps, if those students get their educational start at Ingenuity, it just might be possible.