If you haven't read Brian Bennett's excellent post on "How NOT to Start a Flipped Class", then go there now and read it first. It hit me pretty hard as I was a big failure in point number one of his post, and if you want to get more of that, jump to the last paragraph. I wanted to hit another couple of mistakes that I've made doing Flipclass this and last year so that others might not make the same error.
Mistake #4 (I'll keep Brian's numbering, it was great!) Don't think you have to flip everything, every day, for every class. I believe strongly in the pedagogy behind flipclass, I've presented on it a few times since class started and think I'm pretty passionate about it. But as a high school teacher with 4 different preps, two of them brand new to me, my unyielding adherence to the model is hurting me, and likely then my students. It's hard enough to keep up with coming up with new activities for one class that you've taught for 12 years. To do it for 2 brand new preps that I haven't taught in almost a decade is leaving me at a loss (mostly for sleep). Those November blues that are common for a lot of teachers are already hitting me. I didn't even mention the videos, but trying to make 2-3 videos a week for 2 separate classes is just about impossible.
You'd think I would have learned my lesson from doing it for Chemistry last year, but I'm pretty hard headed apparently.
Mistake #5 This one is pretty obvious and I'm a little embarrassed to even put it here. You have to ask questions and do formative assessments after every single video. I have found myself in a cycle this year of hopping right into an activity that had to do with the lesson, a lab, some practice, etc, all without answering the questions that I make them write in their WSQs. This is me slipping into old ways of assuming if it was covered, it was learned. That isn't good teaching, flipped or not.
Mistake #6 Not reflecting on a daily basis. In his post, Brian chastised himself for not doing long term reflecting, but doing an awesome job of daily reflection with his journal. I, as usual, am in awe of him and others like Crystal Kirch who blog consistently about what is working and not working. I love to write and really to blog, but I just can't seem to squeeze out the time to do this daily. I really need to though, because that daily reflection is what makes my practice in teaching so much better. I don't want to wait for the end of the year or the semester to change things for the better, I need to do it now.
I would add one caveat to all of this. Don't beat yourself up for the mistakes, just recognize them and fix it....that is good teaching flipping or not.
Back to my mistake in SBG.I have been a wishy-washy supporter of SBG since mid way through last year. I ran my 2nd semester classes that way and while I had some reservations, I continued it this year. Some of my reservations come with my particular way of implementing it, but it some ways I just felt like I was locked into it and couldn't give the flexibility I needed. For instance, this year, I've been doing WSQs for all of my classes, but a lot of students weren't watching the videos and doing what needed there. I can enforce the in class work in class, but the outside videos weren't getting watched. The SBG part of me says, oh well, that will be reflected in their grade on that standard. But the fact of the matter is that I'm new to this school, its students, and their need for a little underpinning. So I changed it up and am doing a biweekly progress grade (biweekly as we are on alternate day block). To be honest, first results there aren't good either so far, and I may adjust that as well.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Space
I see a lot of folks on Twitter talking a lot about learning spaces and how much they affect the environment. Part of me wants to disagree with that, mostly because I'm one of those relational sort of guys, who believes that it is the relationships that matter, that the physical context isn't as important.
And then the 16 year old in me that planned on being an architect pops up to disagree, remind me of how I always hate the fact that schools, churches and other buildings have become these bland boxes. We spend millions to make sure a stadium looks impressive to lure recruits and fans, but a school?!? From the stucco boxes of Florida where I grew up to the brick boxes of Tennessee where I teach now, there is a lot of blandness. One thing I loathed at my last school (which I loved in many ways!) was how dark it seemed in the hallways, that sort of institutional hallway that has never seen a spot of sunlight, brightened only by the lifeless glare of fluorescence.
I teach in a beautiful school right now, one with such a ridiculous amount of natural light that it is almost hard to see the smartboards in the afternoon because of the sunlight, even with the blinds. That's a good problem to have of course. The view 20 feet from my classroom is below, so I have no room to complain now of course. And yes, that is the Sunsphere, but it looks a lot nicer than in the Simpsons episode where they chant "Knoxville, Knoxville..."
Our school looks amazing from the outside too, but what was one of the selling factors for me is the inside. And I'm not even going to talk about our main building, which has ridiculous amounts of historic character in every nook and cranny, and I mean that in the good way, not as a euphemism for destroyed and decrepit.
But in the depot, as my building is called, we have this simply amazing upstairs space that I wish I had the foresight to have taken photos of, a long 3 open connected classrooms, all with a smart board, and all of the technological goodies. That's awesome enough since it gets used all the time, as regular classrooms as well as for some unique classes like our 76 student STEM class (3 teachers).
What worked so well for me this week though was our "App rooms". You know how in colleges and libraries you have these small rooms that you could fit a table and 4-6 people easily, sort of private study rooms. That's what our app rooms are for, all 7 of them. I had my APES kids making videos of cycles of matter, split them up into 7 teams and upstairs to the app rooms we went. Each group had their own private space that was still academic in nature, but they could plan, brainstorm and record with just their group (and their teacher skulking around).
In my own room I'm locked in since my "classroom" is the Chemistry lab, with tables that ain't moving no matter what and chairs that move no matter what. I'd love to have some beanbags, comfy chairs, different sized tables etc. But the fact that there is still flexibility to be found and that is actually accessible and not taken up by whatever normal craziness goes on in a school on a day to day basis is great.
It really made my week and made me again think of the context, the environment, as well as the relationships.
And then the 16 year old in me that planned on being an architect pops up to disagree, remind me of how I always hate the fact that schools, churches and other buildings have become these bland boxes. We spend millions to make sure a stadium looks impressive to lure recruits and fans, but a school?!? From the stucco boxes of Florida where I grew up to the brick boxes of Tennessee where I teach now, there is a lot of blandness. One thing I loathed at my last school (which I loved in many ways!) was how dark it seemed in the hallways, that sort of institutional hallway that has never seen a spot of sunlight, brightened only by the lifeless glare of fluorescence.
I teach in a beautiful school right now, one with such a ridiculous amount of natural light that it is almost hard to see the smartboards in the afternoon because of the sunlight, even with the blinds. That's a good problem to have of course. The view 20 feet from my classroom is below, so I have no room to complain now of course. And yes, that is the Sunsphere, but it looks a lot nicer than in the Simpsons episode where they chant "Knoxville, Knoxville..."
But in the depot, as my building is called, we have this simply amazing upstairs space that I wish I had the foresight to have taken photos of, a long 3 open connected classrooms, all with a smart board, and all of the technological goodies. That's awesome enough since it gets used all the time, as regular classrooms as well as for some unique classes like our 76 student STEM class (3 teachers).
What worked so well for me this week though was our "App rooms". You know how in colleges and libraries you have these small rooms that you could fit a table and 4-6 people easily, sort of private study rooms. That's what our app rooms are for, all 7 of them. I had my APES kids making videos of cycles of matter, split them up into 7 teams and upstairs to the app rooms we went. Each group had their own private space that was still academic in nature, but they could plan, brainstorm and record with just their group (and their teacher skulking around).
In my own room I'm locked in since my "classroom" is the Chemistry lab, with tables that ain't moving no matter what and chairs that move no matter what. I'd love to have some beanbags, comfy chairs, different sized tables etc. But the fact that there is still flexibility to be found and that is actually accessible and not taken up by whatever normal craziness goes on in a school on a day to day basis is great.
It really made my week and made me again think of the context, the environment, as well as the relationships.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Confessions for the newbies
Hopefully no one takes offense at the title, if so, I apologize, I am only slightly past the newbie stage in this process of flipping myself and am happy to journey with a lot of more experienced people.
I'm going to summarize a few thoughts that were brought up by the panelists at tonight's 25th #flipclass chat, particularly with reference to advice for first time flippers. None of these thoughts are mine alone, but are from the panel and the twitter community, I just can't remember enough specifics to attribute properly right now. Almost every single week on #flipclass chat, someone asks for help on how to get started, or is interested but not sure where to go or is just plum afraid to give it a go.
Karl brought up the point that there needs to be a lot of research that goes into the idea behind flipping your classroom. I'll be perfectly honest, I did some of this, but not nearly enough. The summer before last I had been toying around with ideas of Whole Class Inquiry, POGIL, PBL, etc, just knowing that I wasn't very satisfied with being a straight up lecture teacher. I think I was fairly effective at that, but I knew I wasn't reaching enough of the kids and definitely not all of them!
I poked around online and saw the videos from Sams and Bergmann that I had run across a year or so before and it really intrigued me. After watching their explanations at learning4mastery and their other sites, I mentally jumped right in. I started asking my tech buddies and the tech coordinator at our school about screencapture, tested many out and bought the bullet for Camtasia. I bought a bamboo pen and tablet, a webcam, etc, and started recording.
Note that I didn't say much about my intense research into the pedagogy of flipped classrooms. I knew two basic things. My old way wasn't working and that Sams and Bergmann had more time in their rooms each day to help students.
Yeah, as Danny Glover and Mel Gibson would say, "pretty thin"...
You know what though, that was enough at the beginning. A month or two later as I was up to my ears in producing videos, I looked at my class every day and was like, wow, I'm sitting down with each student, and whoa, we have a lot of time for activities that I always wanted to do. It was awesome.
As my principal and a couple of others asked me about it and I explained it, I felt more and more passionate about the every kid every day part of it. I knew for a fact that I had a lot more time each day. And I knew that my kids were not nearly as frustrated working chemistry problems because when they stumbled, I picked them up...right then.
So I'm going to sound like a hypocrite because I said in the panel tonight to be sure you know why you are doing the flip before you do it. I still believe that, I think that as we enumerated tonight, if you just think it is about videos, it will fail, if you just link to Khan and then keep giving out your old worksheets, it will fail.
But I will say that if you know you need a change, that as Aaron Sams said in the flipped classroom podcast a couple of months ago, the flip is a great bridge. Flipping is something I'm passionate about, but it didn't stop there for me, it was a gateway drug into a variety of new and I think better teaching strategies: standards based grading, mastery, self paced, more inquiry, incorporating a whole range of cool technologies.
And I think that is also part of good teaching, being willing to change not because you were terrible before, but because you could be better, because the kids deserve better.
Don't let good enough be the enemy of the great, especially not in your classroom!
I'm going to summarize a few thoughts that were brought up by the panelists at tonight's 25th #flipclass chat, particularly with reference to advice for first time flippers. None of these thoughts are mine alone, but are from the panel and the twitter community, I just can't remember enough specifics to attribute properly right now. Almost every single week on #flipclass chat, someone asks for help on how to get started, or is interested but not sure where to go or is just plum afraid to give it a go.
Karl brought up the point that there needs to be a lot of research that goes into the idea behind flipping your classroom. I'll be perfectly honest, I did some of this, but not nearly enough. The summer before last I had been toying around with ideas of Whole Class Inquiry, POGIL, PBL, etc, just knowing that I wasn't very satisfied with being a straight up lecture teacher. I think I was fairly effective at that, but I knew I wasn't reaching enough of the kids and definitely not all of them!
I poked around online and saw the videos from Sams and Bergmann that I had run across a year or so before and it really intrigued me. After watching their explanations at learning4mastery and their other sites, I mentally jumped right in. I started asking my tech buddies and the tech coordinator at our school about screencapture, tested many out and bought the bullet for Camtasia. I bought a bamboo pen and tablet, a webcam, etc, and started recording.
Note that I didn't say much about my intense research into the pedagogy of flipped classrooms. I knew two basic things. My old way wasn't working and that Sams and Bergmann had more time in their rooms each day to help students.
Yeah, as Danny Glover and Mel Gibson would say, "pretty thin"...
You know what though, that was enough at the beginning. A month or two later as I was up to my ears in producing videos, I looked at my class every day and was like, wow, I'm sitting down with each student, and whoa, we have a lot of time for activities that I always wanted to do. It was awesome.
As my principal and a couple of others asked me about it and I explained it, I felt more and more passionate about the every kid every day part of it. I knew for a fact that I had a lot more time each day. And I knew that my kids were not nearly as frustrated working chemistry problems because when they stumbled, I picked them up...right then.
So I'm going to sound like a hypocrite because I said in the panel tonight to be sure you know why you are doing the flip before you do it. I still believe that, I think that as we enumerated tonight, if you just think it is about videos, it will fail, if you just link to Khan and then keep giving out your old worksheets, it will fail.
But I will say that if you know you need a change, that as Aaron Sams said in the flipped classroom podcast a couple of months ago, the flip is a great bridge. Flipping is something I'm passionate about, but it didn't stop there for me, it was a gateway drug into a variety of new and I think better teaching strategies: standards based grading, mastery, self paced, more inquiry, incorporating a whole range of cool technologies.
And I think that is also part of good teaching, being willing to change not because you were terrible before, but because you could be better, because the kids deserve better.
Don't let good enough be the enemy of the great, especially not in your classroom!
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Out of the chute
So this year is a big step for me. I left a school with people I loved, students I loved, and where my reputation preceded me with students that didn't even know me. Even though I was a little burnt out when I left, my time there was the most formative of my 12 years of teaching as far as becoming a better teacher.
At my new school, I'm a newbie. I went in the cafeteria today and had to figure things out. I'm occasionally not sure where the stairs are and I have yet to get a key to get in my room, as opposed to having a janitor's set worth at my old school. Almost everything is different here for me, I'm the new guy, I have no reputation to fall back on and it's no longer a guarantee that I'm the one trying really weird stuff. I have 4 preps, 1 of which I've never taught before and is an AP class, and another that I taught so long ago I think it was 3 iterations of curriculum ago.
All of that said, I love it. Cutting myself loose from the sure thing and instant respect at my old school has made me really know that I have to get after it each and every day. On every other day I don't start teaching until 11am because of plan, but I'm there at 7am in any case, and I work frenetically that whole time.
I'm at a school that has 1:1 technology and we use it every single day. The only paper I've taken up has been signed syllabi and even half of those were sent in digitally. I'm working with students every day to fully utilize the tech we've been gifted with. For the past two days our network has struggled under the load of doubling the student population from last year. So in one of my classes today we had no access at all. No big deal, I made a few copies, but rather than them writing on them, they took pics, converted to pdf and wrote on that the same way we've been doing for the past week. We've done new stuff that I borrowed, stuff that we made up and some things that were decided on the fly. It's exhilarating!
I have some issues, some just with trying to generate my video content for two new classes while trying to wrap the curriculum into my head at the same time. But wow, it is nice to get out of the chute and start to limber up the creativity. I can't wait to get around the first bend and really hit my stride!
At my new school, I'm a newbie. I went in the cafeteria today and had to figure things out. I'm occasionally not sure where the stairs are and I have yet to get a key to get in my room, as opposed to having a janitor's set worth at my old school. Almost everything is different here for me, I'm the new guy, I have no reputation to fall back on and it's no longer a guarantee that I'm the one trying really weird stuff. I have 4 preps, 1 of which I've never taught before and is an AP class, and another that I taught so long ago I think it was 3 iterations of curriculum ago.
All of that said, I love it. Cutting myself loose from the sure thing and instant respect at my old school has made me really know that I have to get after it each and every day. On every other day I don't start teaching until 11am because of plan, but I'm there at 7am in any case, and I work frenetically that whole time.
I'm at a school that has 1:1 technology and we use it every single day. The only paper I've taken up has been signed syllabi and even half of those were sent in digitally. I'm working with students every day to fully utilize the tech we've been gifted with. For the past two days our network has struggled under the load of doubling the student population from last year. So in one of my classes today we had no access at all. No big deal, I made a few copies, but rather than them writing on them, they took pics, converted to pdf and wrote on that the same way we've been doing for the past week. We've done new stuff that I borrowed, stuff that we made up and some things that were decided on the fly. It's exhilarating!
I have some issues, some just with trying to generate my video content for two new classes while trying to wrap the curriculum into my head at the same time. But wow, it is nice to get out of the chute and start to limber up the creativity. I can't wait to get around the first bend and really hit my stride!
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Questioning (by students)
After the success and transformation that researching flipping and associated things last summer, I decided I was going to spend part of this summer trying to shore up a few other deficiencies in my teaching style. I've dabbled a bit with inquiry the past few years and wanted to head a lot more down that road. As I was looking for some books to enlighten me (I know, books...we all learn in different ways, books are it for me!) I came upon a couple of good ones that I really feel will further transform my classroom the next couple of years.
The first was a book called Making Thinking Visible that I'll post about later in the week, it was great and my wife agrees, so it must be true.
The second really amazing book is Make Just One Change , with a subtitle of Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions. It really hit me on the head with a gaping hole in my teaching.
I'm no teaching rookie, this will be my 13th year, and my 12th year of teaching Chemistry which is the bulk of my day. A year or two ago, it came into my head that despite what my students and others may have thought, that I was not that amazing a teacher. My kids love me, but we've all know a teacher at the school that the students love who isn't a good teacher. One of my great fears is being that guy, hence the trying to improve a lot the past couple of years.
The subtitle pretty much explains the idea behind the book. It revolves around the QFT or Question Formulation Technique, which as presented is a pretty straighforward and some might say restrictive way to teach students to ask questions. The essential path way is:
The first was a book called Making Thinking Visible that I'll post about later in the week, it was great and my wife agrees, so it must be true.
The second really amazing book is Make Just One Change , with a subtitle of Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions. It really hit me on the head with a gaping hole in my teaching.I'm no teaching rookie, this will be my 13th year, and my 12th year of teaching Chemistry which is the bulk of my day. A year or two ago, it came into my head that despite what my students and others may have thought, that I was not that amazing a teacher. My kids love me, but we've all know a teacher at the school that the students love who isn't a good teacher. One of my great fears is being that guy, hence the trying to improve a lot the past couple of years.
The subtitle pretty much explains the idea behind the book. It revolves around the QFT or Question Formulation Technique, which as presented is a pretty straighforward and some might say restrictive way to teach students to ask questions. The essential path way is:
- Produce your own questions
- Improve your questions
- Prioritize your questions
Behind each of these is a fairly strict method, for instance, for producing, there are four rules:
- Ask as many questions as you can
- Do no stop to discuss, judge, or answer the questions
- Write down every question exactly as it is stated
- Change any statement into a question.
Let me say right now that I abhor restrictiveness and anything that smacks of a program in general. To me a great flaw in education is that we find what works in one school and try to adopt it wholesale in another school, to mediocre at best and horrific at worst results. So as I'm reading through the book and thinking about my classroom I'm chafing a little because the authors keep emphasizing how at least at the beginning you need to hew to the rules.
As I got further in though and thought more I remembered that students tend to excel best when they have a ton of freedom within a structure (one could make that argument about people in general I suppose). I began to see how doing this for 45 minutes once at the beginning of the year to get them used to the structure and guidelines could have an amazing effect.
Fits in really well with a lot of philosophical constructs we use in education today like inquiry and flipped classrooms, but the focus is really on fostering independence and evaluation skills in students. It doesn't just say, hey, have students ask their own questions, that would be good. In fact, that is the smallest part of this. Instead, the bulk of the book is on developing evaluation skills and discernment to sharpen their questions to the best possible questions.
I realize that I talk a lot about wanting students to learn process as much as the right answers, but I have remarkably few things in place to support, encourage, and even demand that. I think this method will make a big difference. I'm sure my anti-programmatic self will rebel against a few parts of it, and am sure my kids will too. But for anyone interested in making a small but significant change that doesn't upset all of their apple carts, this is a great resource that teachers should check out!
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Homework or not
You know, as I watch the Olympics and see athletes getting in trouble for saying dumb stuff on Twitter, I'm like, seriously, don't go on Twitter, or at least maybe not during the pinnacle moment of your career.
Then as I'm waiting for #flipclass chat to start up, I see a lot of folks that I follow and respect on Twitter commenting on homework. Really, I started to get a little heated and really wanted to comment, but since it was specifically in #sschat and I don't teach ss (though I do have a degree in History, maybe that counts) I hesitated.
After a few minutes the benefits of age and experience kicked in for me and I recognized what I always do, which is that if I feel that sort of visceral reaction, I should back up and examine my own thought processes and convictions.
You see, one of my great beliefs in life is that we diminish things when we make everything a solely two sided issue, a false dichotomy. I will grant you that there are a few things where you are on one side or the other, and that one can make the argument that one side is plainly evil. But let's be honest, most things are a bit more nuanced than that.
I think that is especially true in education. I don't think I'm ever a worse teacher than when I get some philosophical idea lodged somewhere and believe that I must act it out in every class every day. I'm a fan of PBL, of flipped classrooms, of inquiry based learning and am beginning to do some tentative explorations of modeling for my classroom. But the second you tell me that I have to pick one of those teams and stick with them no matter what, every day or I'm a heretic, then I tune it out. In fact, it generally makes me want to go the other way (it did with PBL for a while).
There was a comment about the hubris of a teacher assuming that they control a kid's time outside of school. I think there is no small amount of hubris in one teacher telling another what is best for his kids in his classroom.
Example: I've taught AP for the past 4 years, and will teach a different AP class this year. If I assign my students no homework, I am actively doing them a disservice, their chance to do well on the test is pretty minimal then.
This obviously is an extreme example, but the idea that all homework is evil is rather extreme also. Let me lay my cards on the table. I essentially agree that I want my kids to have lives outside of school. The assignments that I give to be done outside of my classroom are pretty minimal. In fact, for the past 5 years, most of my students did very little work outside of class, maybe on the order of an hour a week (excepting my AP students).
So at heart, I agree that we shouldn't have students up til 1am every night doing work for me.
What I don't agree with though is that by assigning 10 pages of reading or a 15 minute video that I am draining the souls of my students. I don't say this blithely or without thinking. I have 3 young boys myself, and I want them to enjoy themselves when we are home at night together, so I hope they don't get overloaded with homework.
Another comment said that teachers doing work at home isn't the same thing, that we do it because we want to excel and improve.
Yes...complete the analogy...
True, one could argue that the work teachers do isn't required, but I've been at schools where your plan period was called a duty period, and so the only time you ever had to grade anything was outside of school, essentially required.
To sum it up since I'm taking my wife to work in her room in the middle of the summer two weeks before school starts, I can get behind the idea that we shouldn't burden students with boring, meaningless homework assignments just to get grades or whatever. I agree that assignments should be relevant and that in many cases can be made optional.
But I don't believe that assigning homework makes you a bad teacher or a dementor of student spirits. My best teachers were ones that gave tough, challenging assignments, to be completed at home usually. Under the new regime I guess they'd be behind the times and maybe even evil...I refuse to buy into that.
Then as I'm waiting for #flipclass chat to start up, I see a lot of folks that I follow and respect on Twitter commenting on homework. Really, I started to get a little heated and really wanted to comment, but since it was specifically in #sschat and I don't teach ss (though I do have a degree in History, maybe that counts) I hesitated.
After a few minutes the benefits of age and experience kicked in for me and I recognized what I always do, which is that if I feel that sort of visceral reaction, I should back up and examine my own thought processes and convictions.
You see, one of my great beliefs in life is that we diminish things when we make everything a solely two sided issue, a false dichotomy. I will grant you that there are a few things where you are on one side or the other, and that one can make the argument that one side is plainly evil. But let's be honest, most things are a bit more nuanced than that.
I think that is especially true in education. I don't think I'm ever a worse teacher than when I get some philosophical idea lodged somewhere and believe that I must act it out in every class every day. I'm a fan of PBL, of flipped classrooms, of inquiry based learning and am beginning to do some tentative explorations of modeling for my classroom. But the second you tell me that I have to pick one of those teams and stick with them no matter what, every day or I'm a heretic, then I tune it out. In fact, it generally makes me want to go the other way (it did with PBL for a while).
There was a comment about the hubris of a teacher assuming that they control a kid's time outside of school. I think there is no small amount of hubris in one teacher telling another what is best for his kids in his classroom.
Example: I've taught AP for the past 4 years, and will teach a different AP class this year. If I assign my students no homework, I am actively doing them a disservice, their chance to do well on the test is pretty minimal then.
This obviously is an extreme example, but the idea that all homework is evil is rather extreme also. Let me lay my cards on the table. I essentially agree that I want my kids to have lives outside of school. The assignments that I give to be done outside of my classroom are pretty minimal. In fact, for the past 5 years, most of my students did very little work outside of class, maybe on the order of an hour a week (excepting my AP students).
So at heart, I agree that we shouldn't have students up til 1am every night doing work for me.
What I don't agree with though is that by assigning 10 pages of reading or a 15 minute video that I am draining the souls of my students. I don't say this blithely or without thinking. I have 3 young boys myself, and I want them to enjoy themselves when we are home at night together, so I hope they don't get overloaded with homework.
Another comment said that teachers doing work at home isn't the same thing, that we do it because we want to excel and improve.
Yes...complete the analogy...
True, one could argue that the work teachers do isn't required, but I've been at schools where your plan period was called a duty period, and so the only time you ever had to grade anything was outside of school, essentially required.
To sum it up since I'm taking my wife to work in her room in the middle of the summer two weeks before school starts, I can get behind the idea that we shouldn't burden students with boring, meaningless homework assignments just to get grades or whatever. I agree that assignments should be relevant and that in many cases can be made optional.
But I don't believe that assigning homework makes you a bad teacher or a dementor of student spirits. My best teachers were ones that gave tough, challenging assignments, to be completed at home usually. Under the new regime I guess they'd be behind the times and maybe even evil...I refuse to buy into that.
Friday, July 20, 2012
The Bridge
So it was probably around this time last summer that I decided I was going to flip my class for last school year. To any prospective flippers that read this, it wasn't easy, partially due to my own quirks.
When I decided to follow the Sams/Bergmann model of flip and prerecord my lectures (the pre-vodcasting model) I spent two-3 days researching the proper program to record with, eventually landing on Camtasia. I bought a flip cam and lots of stuff specifically for the videos. I spent probably 200 hours or so making videos last fall, all for my Chem I classes. To be honest, they aren't very great videos, though I think they helped a lot of kids, especially as I was at a school with some attendance issues last year.
Still, my jumping into the flipped classroom and the movement has been probably the most beneficial thing I've done in my career as an educator, far more so than any class I took, any PD I've ever been to, or any meeting I've endured.
I was listening to the podcasts for the Flipped Learning Network last week and heard Aaron Sams very accurately depict just why that is. He described the flipped classroom as a bridge between standard teacher centered models of the classroom and the student centered model. That might seem like a bad thing for the "movement" that one of the progenitors of the idea says that it is not really the end goal. But it was such a revelation for me, really hit me.
A couple of years ago at my old school we implemented a program where every single teacher in the school had to do a PBL project, preferably a week or more in length. There was panic, frustration and I can pretty safely say as one of the people who checked up on them, that the projects and the idea didn't work as well as it could have. Wasn't really the administration's fault, we had several days of PD on it, so it wasn't like they just threw it at us and said do it.
Here's the thing though, PBL is a very student centered model (or can be) and it is a giant leap for teachers to go from teacher centered to student centered. I'm getting pretty interested in the modeling movement for teaching science, but it is a big leap too, as were my ill fated attempts at inquiry stuff in the past few years.
This then is what flipclass has done for me, it has allowed me to try out something that was at once radical and very different, but at the same time still had enough of the old elements to keep me comfortable while I make the transition to a student centered classroom. I felt like I still had "covered" all of the material while having much more time to do a lot more things in class, to sit down with students and help them through everything, to experiment with standards based grading and google forms submission of work, things that I probably wouldn't have tried without flipclass.
I'm not done with flipclass by any means, I'm pretty sure it will be the main paradigm of my class for a long time. But that is because it is the foundation for so many other things that are about the kids, about finding ways to help them learn, not just record, to prepare them, not for a test, but to be thinkers and doers. Ultimately that is the point, not to have videos or do homework in class or whatever the critics think flip is about, but it is about getting to the point where I can spend time with every kid every day, where I can make sure they are truly learning, not through some stock assessment or some fist to five 2 second thing, but through conversing and relationships.
Happy to be on the bridge!
When I decided to follow the Sams/Bergmann model of flip and prerecord my lectures (the pre-vodcasting model) I spent two-3 days researching the proper program to record with, eventually landing on Camtasia. I bought a flip cam and lots of stuff specifically for the videos. I spent probably 200 hours or so making videos last fall, all for my Chem I classes. To be honest, they aren't very great videos, though I think they helped a lot of kids, especially as I was at a school with some attendance issues last year.
Still, my jumping into the flipped classroom and the movement has been probably the most beneficial thing I've done in my career as an educator, far more so than any class I took, any PD I've ever been to, or any meeting I've endured.
I was listening to the podcasts for the Flipped Learning Network last week and heard Aaron Sams very accurately depict just why that is. He described the flipped classroom as a bridge between standard teacher centered models of the classroom and the student centered model. That might seem like a bad thing for the "movement" that one of the progenitors of the idea says that it is not really the end goal. But it was such a revelation for me, really hit me.
A couple of years ago at my old school we implemented a program where every single teacher in the school had to do a PBL project, preferably a week or more in length. There was panic, frustration and I can pretty safely say as one of the people who checked up on them, that the projects and the idea didn't work as well as it could have. Wasn't really the administration's fault, we had several days of PD on it, so it wasn't like they just threw it at us and said do it.
Here's the thing though, PBL is a very student centered model (or can be) and it is a giant leap for teachers to go from teacher centered to student centered. I'm getting pretty interested in the modeling movement for teaching science, but it is a big leap too, as were my ill fated attempts at inquiry stuff in the past few years.
This then is what flipclass has done for me, it has allowed me to try out something that was at once radical and very different, but at the same time still had enough of the old elements to keep me comfortable while I make the transition to a student centered classroom. I felt like I still had "covered" all of the material while having much more time to do a lot more things in class, to sit down with students and help them through everything, to experiment with standards based grading and google forms submission of work, things that I probably wouldn't have tried without flipclass.
I'm not done with flipclass by any means, I'm pretty sure it will be the main paradigm of my class for a long time. But that is because it is the foundation for so many other things that are about the kids, about finding ways to help them learn, not just record, to prepare them, not for a test, but to be thinkers and doers. Ultimately that is the point, not to have videos or do homework in class or whatever the critics think flip is about, but it is about getting to the point where I can spend time with every kid every day, where I can make sure they are truly learning, not through some stock assessment or some fist to five 2 second thing, but through conversing and relationships.
Happy to be on the bridge!
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