Artisanal Teaching

Was joking a few weeks ago with @guster4lovers about maybe we should call the variety of methods of which the "flip" just seems to be the glomming on word artisanal teaching.  Since that day, the thought has really stuck in my mind very strongly.

There is hardly a person in education, whether a pro-charter reformer, or a staunch public school supporter who doesn't feel that something is broken.  There are disagreements at the fundamental level as to what that is, money, teachers, etc.  But one thing that a lot of folks would agree on is that the way schools currently run is based on an old model.  (Yes, there are folks that advocate a return to 19th century methods as well, I will ignore that!)

Particularly in public schools, but having taught in private, it isn't a whole lot different there, the de facto set up is the factory model.  I.e., we can dispense the most learning to the most students by working in the same efficient ways in every school, in every place, for all students.  Everyone starts at the same time, goes for the same amount of hours, takes mostly the same classes, entirely dependent on age level (which, wow, is a post for another day).

This model considers students to be replaceable parts in a well oiled machine.  This is another reason that we have this weird obsession with using business models in education, as though there were a product to produce.

Students are not commodities, they are not products.  When you commoditize them, you dehumanize them.

This sent me back to the word that I almost hate to use because the word artisan has a "hipster" sort of flair that I pretty assiduously avoid.  Plus, my use of it makes it sound like there is still a product to be created, which is probably a fair argument.

I think the difference though is that in the artisan mindset, each product is theoretically created, not produced.  There is art and craft involved.  If you've ever worked in a factory, which I have, there is no art and craft, there is deadline, there is amount produced, there is workflow.  At one point I could cap 12 gallon bottles, box them, tape the boxes and stack them in 28 seconds.  And then do it again, and again, and again.

I have days like that teaching too, where I feel like I'm doing the same lessons, that each class is another class, but those are bad days.

On most days, I think about the personality of each class, (yes, whole classes have personalities!), and especially of the students within it.  Some students barely need me to stop, check in with them, check their work, pat them on the back and move on.  Some want to ask me a hundred questions.  Some want to talk to me about a video game or a movie before I can refocus them.  When I am an artist, I don't try to force them to all act the same, to all learn the same.  Last semester I had 3 classes, all of the exact same subject, at wildly different points, and within the classes, individual students are groups were at different points.

I love it...

This is an odd secret to reveal on a blog, especially since I teach science, and not just any science, but one governed by rules, Chemistry.  But I still consider myself as someone who teaches more by art than by science.  Oh, I have data out the wazoo, spreadsheets, item analysis, average # of students that missed whatever question.  Generating numbers isn't difficult.  Even using the numbers isn't that hard.

But to get a student to visualize a VSEPR model, not to memorize it, but actually visualize it, that takes art, not science.  It takes continued attention to the ingredients that go into the art, solid content, enthusiasm, some high tech methods, and a sprinkle of benevolent sarcasm.  I have literally read books on how you should teach science and other subjects, and they generally want me to buy into their method, as though dough in San Francisco is the same as dough in New York.  That's not true for bread and it is exponentially more not true for people!

A naysayer (say, myself 10 years ago) would say, that's nice hippie, but we have thousands of kids to educate, or a teacher might say, yeah, but I have 30 kids in each class.

I do too.  The fact that I have 3 children doesn't mean that I can't love them as much as if I had only one. Yes, it is tough to give the same one on one attention, but it is doable.  Don't get me wrong, I love class sizes of 20, but that's not the world we live in in public ed.  Leverage your resources to make it work, investigate, try new things out.  See what works for others and adapt, or try it out and feel free to discard it.

Try a new palette, use some new ingredients, be an artisanal teacher this semester, not another worker on the line.

Pursuit

I am going to merge some of my religious views into this, as they are part of what informs this.  If that offends, I suppose that is the nature of our society, I won't apologize, but will give the heads up ahead of time.

We were talking today and in #flipclass today about what do you do for those students that just won't try, that no matter how charming and winsome you are, no matter how stinking interesting the material is, or how amazingly open sandbox the project they are to be working on is....that no matter what, they just don't work, they just sit there.

On my commute home with my lovely bride, I had one of my on the way home rants about a couple of my students who refuse to take responsibility.  I'll sit down next to them, help them out for 10 minutes in the middle of class and then they take 20 minutes to work one problem, because they need to hit the snack machine or check their messages...whatever.  There is very little in life that drives me more nuts than not taking responsibility... Or, to the other point, they "take responsibility", admitting that they aren't working/haven't worked, and taking pride in it.

I think every teacher everywhere has those students....some of it is the nature of just people, some of it is teenagers in my case, etc.

As teachers, what happens of course is that you only have so much time in a class period, and additionally, only so much emotional reserves.  Naturally, we want to help those that want help, those that seem more deserving, that have done their end and yet need some help.  It's natural to help the kid with their hand up.  Part of it is probably the subconscious desire to see that someone got the stuff we were teaching...that's always a boost.  As opposed to the student who never gets it, who never even tries to get it.... Spending an inordinate amount of time on the 2% while the other 98% might need help and actually cares just seems illogical.

But here's my issue, I'm a follower of Jesus, a pretty good teacher regardless of your views of Christianity.  And He pursued....leave the 99 to go after the one...

As with much of actual Christian theology, it turns the logical, the practical upside down, refutes the logic of the world.

We try to pull in CEOs and efficiency experts into schools (and other arenas) with the idea that we can focus on the big things, straighten out the whole system.  There are vast arrays of massive national and state initiatives, from Common Core, PARCC, NGSS, Race to the Top, etc, that are the next iteration of NCLB.

But programs won't help anymore than religious law helps.  What works is relationships, what works is a teacher, doggedly pursuing that student that gets left by the wayside.

That takes love, which no matter how good Common Core is, it doesn't have.  It takes doing the illogical...not the rational, "research-based" method and sitting down with that student over and over and over.  Pursue them as though you love them...because if we don't, why are we teaching?  To help the best and the brightest? They need help too, and there are thoughts in here about that too.  But think for the next day or week or month or school year about who needs you, not about who wants you, who needs the education, not just who wants it.

Students that want it often get it....but often those who need it, don't.

There are tons of reasons for this...social, economic, etc etc...but when it comes down to it, I hope to pursue those who need it.  I don't want to just help those who want to excel to excel, but to inspire those who don't even know they need to excel to do so.  I'm not very good at it yet, but I'm thinking about it all the time, trying harder and harder every day, reminding myself when I don't, to pursue, to run after...to go after the one...

Know Thy Students

I had my first formal observation of the new year on Friday and I think it went pretty well.  My principal and I sat down and had a discussion about the lesson, the principal prompting, but me doing the bulk of the talking (as I do a lot).

As we talked about the area that I felt went really well, I went to grouping.  This is an astonishing change for me as I was the guy in high school and even as I started teaching that hated groups.  They are terrible for the "smart" kids since they feel like they have to do all the work. Forcing students into groups almost invariable sets up some conflicts with teenagers, the kid they don't want to work with and won't, etc.

Or so I thought.  As I moved a little bit up in the teaching realm at my last school, I had to think more about the grouping thing as I was expected to evaluate teachers on it (on of the things on the evaluation rubric).

Now I am full on in favor of grouping, not just the standard heterogeneous A student, C student, F student, but all kinds of groups.  We work in group basically every single day in my room now and the groups change probably once a week or so.  Sometimes they are homogeneous, which contrary to what a lot of folks thinks, works amazingly well, even for the kids who are struggling.  Sometimes they are gender balanced and sometimes not.  I don't pick them at random, but at this point, I know my kids well, have experimented and put them in scenarios where I think they will flourish.

That is sort of the point that I think gets missed in all of our talk about methods and student centered.  Student centered is a goal worth aspiring to, but I don't think it can work well if you don't know your students very well.  You have to know who learns in what way, who will get it with direct support and who wants to be left alone to puzzle something out.  If you rely on a "system", no matter how valid it is, without the relationship aspect, it all falls apart.

My principal told me she was amazed that the groups all worked together and actually worked to make sure they learned.  That when there was cross group activity, it wasn't to chat, but rather to figure out something another group learned and they didn't. Again, that comes with having trust in your students, and knowing the ways and scenarios that they will do best in.

The other side of course is that without some structure, having good relationships has to support learning and growth.  Seems like that is a post for another day.

Revitalized

Feels weird to title the post that way, since I am super tired physically right now, up way to late to even think of writing a blog post.

But...

We had our Magnet Open House tonight at my school, where we recruit 8th graders and tell them why they should apply at the STEM Academy instead of going to their home school or one of the other Magnets.  So I spent most of the night talking to a couple dozen parents and prospective students, selling our school, and myself as a teacher in the school.

Sounds awful right? It's the sort of thing that teachers, most of the time including myself , hate to do, especially on a Monday night the week before exams from 6-8pm.

I was great though for 3 pretty solid reasons:

1. Explaining what I do in the classroom and what makes our school unique as well isn't me spinning a yarn, it was just the truth, and I realized again tonight as I talked about it, how lucky I am to be at the school I am, teaching the kids that I teach.  When you see the excitement reflected in their faces, or when you say that you believe in having the kids create more than sit and listen and the parents and the kids get visibly enthused, it excites you as a teacher again.
2. For some reason I 'm not very clear on, I had 5-6 parents of my current students there.  I'm not sure why as I thought it was all about the new ones, but I am very glad they came. I'll elaborate a bit more below.
3. My teaching buddy from my last school showed up tonight (his son goes to our school).  That alone was enough to make my night.  I love my new colleagues, but teaching with a friend that you know would help you hide a corpse is a much different thing. (that's a joke..., the corpse part, not the friend part....ah well, nm).  

To elaborate on #2, I, like some of my #flipclass colleagues have felt a bit hammered down by the negativity about it of late.  Like my good twitter friend @bennettscience , I took a few days off of twitter.  Coupling that with getting sick last week about the same time as the negativity hit and missing two days of school was devastating.  At the end of last week I was just beat down, physically, emotionally, and other allys.  I was having these feelings that all of the talk about my classroom, the newspaper article and such was all just smoke and mirrors, that I really wasn't lighting the world on fire, or even striking a match.

Well, I'm probably not lighting the world on fire in any case, but the parents I talked to tonight really lifted me  back up.  Let me just briefly note that I teach Chemistry, often a reviled class, and while I teach it at a STEM centered school, we are thought to have some parents with really, really high expectations.

But I had 5 or so parents just tell me how much their kids loved my class.  That in and of itself is an accomplishment when you are used to telling people you teach Chem and watching them recoil like you are contagious or something.

What was really awesome though was two parents who spent 10 full minutes telling me how they appreciated the one on one nature of the #flipclass, how it has really been amazing for their daughter.  The mom went on to tell me how she raves about #flipclass to all of her friends who have kids in other schools.  She said she directs them to my videos, but knows that it is about what goes on in class.  There was a bit about how kids in a lot of other chem classes that don't work like mine are literally crying in frustration, but that her daughter never does, because she knows if she doesn't get it that I will be there for her and not only able to help but wanting to help.

Not much to say after that, other than to make sure I send that parent an email and thank them for the much needed boost at this time of the year!

A Connected Classroom

I had some requests over the past week to talk a little bit about how I use technology in my classroom.  For some background, I teach at a 1:1 iPad public high school in Knoxville, TN (L&N STEM Academy).  Every student and teacher has an iPad, every teacher additionally totes a MacBook Pro, mostly because we don't have set classrooms and thus desktops don't work well for us.  I think we have  4 computer labs besides this (not positive), most of them Mac, one PC.

The iPad is I think something of a controversy in some circles.  It has the faddish cache of being the hot new thing that will revolutionize education, which naturally just raises some hackles.  There is the closed system part of it which rubs a lot of people the wrong way philosophically.  And they are not cheap by any stretch, and so a lot of folks would argue that you could do the same things cheaper.  That is possible, and there are definitely limitations that bug me sometimes, but not as much as I once thought.  Once in a while we have to bust out the Airs to do something that requires Flash, but 99% of the time, the iPads are an enormous boon.

Let me do a quick rundown of how a typical day in one of my Chem classes might work and how we would use the technology.  Students come in and I have their daily seating assignments up on the Smartboard, so they look at that and sit (I actually teach in the lab, which is great for grouping, but terrible for other flexibility.)  I give them a brief rundown of the day just to reiterate what they already know because most mornings, I've sent them an alert on Edmodo to remind them what is up.  Their iPads ding wherever they are, they log in, see what is going on and maybe do some las minute prep if need be.

So once they are situated, I typically have them pull up the sheet for whatever activity we are doing from Edmodo (or occasionally I email it directly to them.  Here is the first thing that I love a tablet for:

• Almost no paper use.  Since they can write on the iPad, whether with finger or stylus, I don't hand out much of anything.  There are a few paper periodic tables around so that they don't have to flip back and forth in apps when using them, but other than that, they work directly on the ipad.  I know they could type in a Chromebook or something, but there is something about writing it out that is pretty necessary for me in my class.

To do this, they can use a variety of apps, but my favorite is one called Notability, which allows them to import and to export to a ton of place, allows them a variety of paper backgrounds, and even lets them record audio if they wish as they are writing.  It's not a screencapture app (later on those), but it is invaluable.

This is going to sound like a minor thing, but the ability to change the color of your writing utensil on the fly is amazing, and makes it soooo much easier to pick things out on the page (errr....screen).

Saying that Notability allows for import/export brings me to my personal rule #1 with most apps:

• Apps need to have Dropbox/Gdrive/Evernote integration and the ability to email products.  Since there is no real built in file management in iOS, we need some way to save things other than the photo roll (which works in a pinch, but is inelegant).  To all educational app makers out there for iOS, if you leave this off, even if I love your product, I can't really use it if we can't manage the files on the iPad, and loading them to your proprietary site is not a substitute.  These are the student's files, they need to have them. (ThreeRing is a great example of an app that I would use the heck out of, but the lack of this and upload from the iPad makes it a deal killer)
• This of course would mean that you need to have Dropbox/Gdrive, etc on your iPad, indispensable, I can't believe when students or teachers at our school don't have it.

That;s the boring stuff though, the real heart of where the iPad (or I suppose any tablet, I can't make that call) shines is in immediate content creation.

We've used iMotion HD to make stop motion videos of processes:

(Yes, there are errors, but you get the idea)

My kids have made a lot of screencasts of stuff this year, though I hate that we have to use the free stuff that doesn't let you download it in most cases.  But good free programs are Screenchomp, ShowMe, Educreations.   I use Explain Everything because even though it is a paid app, it has the import/export that I insist on.

CamScanner is another app that is absolutely vital, especially if you have kids whiteboard (or blackboard with neon!) as it lets them actually capture their results.  It keystones it to straighten it up, brightens if needed and then you can export as jpg or pdf.  (I use it every single day, kids often)

I'd also note that just having a camera with them in the device they do everything with leads to some very cool stuff.  This is from labs just submitted yesterday.  This is in addition to all of the pics they have to take showing the process of just about everything they do.  They got the image from google earth and then annotated it with where they took their soil samples.

As I said, they take pics of just about everything they do throughout the year, and then they pull them into Pages and integrate them right in to whatever project or assignment they are doing.  This would be possible with a laptop, but more manageable without, and could definitely be done with cameras, but then there is a lot of file shuffle required.

I didn't even really get into the fact that I use Google Forms for most of my assessments and they take these on their iPads.  This is great because last year, when I was not in a 1:1 environment we had to try to pass phones around or sneak in to the computer lab.  This could be done on anything, not just a tablet of course.

These are some of the non subject specific ways we use the iPads every single day.  I tried to focus on student use and not the uses like me using the Apple TV to transmit to the screen while I roam around the room and all of that goodness.  Hopefully this gives some insight and I look forward to questions!

Good Teaching

Sometimes reading twitter can make me feel like I'm being attacked.  In reality that is foolish, though it does occasionally, happen.  I have to remember ideas from gaming, where you know that a lot of people say a lot of things to you or about you or your philosophies that they would be unlikely to say in person, or at least not in the same ways.  I once believed it was because of anonymity, but I think it is the distance thing.  If I offend someone 2k miles away that I am unlikely to encounter or work for or with, it seems to have less repercussion than if I offend someone across the hall or in another school in my own county.

Being a proponent of the "flipped classroom" model of late brings out a lot of criticism on Twitter.  There are a lot of reasons for that, and no model or philosophy of teaching should be denied criticism, we need that, and I am certainly critical of my own methods on a daily basis.

What irks me occasionally is that folks seem to get upset about the flipclass model not being anything new and that it is being presented as new, or especially that the goals are just "good teaching" and shouldn't be under the mantle of "flipped classrooms".

Someone tell me what "good teaching" is. It's one of those things that we all recognize, but is notoriously hard to quantify or put down firm rules for, which is one of the reason why modern movements of evaluating teachers tend to be so controversial I think.  I could lay out some things that I believe are good teaching like student centered, higher-order, students creating, etc.  Lots of folks would agree with many of my bullet points, but a lot wouldn't.  

Good teaching isn't a formula, a step by step process, and it doesn't look the same in every classroom, in every school, in every district.  Just because I have something that works for my classes this year doesn't mean that it will be good teaching even next year, and it definitely doesn't mean that it will be good at a different school, or a different grade level.  Yes, there are principles that can carry over, the pedagogical ideas of student centered learning being at the center, but at the same time, I believe that methods vary widely and wildly.

I see folks that claim that their own favorite vehicle is the absolute best, that they would never switch.  I'm wary of that.  I believe pretty strongly in the flip model I'm using right now, but I won't be upset if I find something new in 5 years (or tomorrow) that I think helps my kids more.  Guess what folks, there are very good, old school lecture teachers, whose kids learn a lot.  There are a lot of constructivist teachers whose students have a lot of fun and are interested, but may not "learn" a lot either.  I have seen a lot of that in my career.

Back to the flipclass hate....

Yes, there are questions to be asked. If you are in a #flipclass chat, or talk to people in the community, we ask those questions.  I haven't met anyone in the community yet who feels they have a lock on "the one way" to teach.  It works for them and their kids.  It has also inspired them all to branch out and find other ways to teach, other methods to bring the knowledge to their kids.  

Before you attempt to run it down as the latest fad though, go look at some folks who represent what is going on, observe some classes, or at least actually talk to people who do it.  

Does it threaten you personally, does it make education worse, is it hijacking your own pet hobby horse?  Listen, if you believe that it is inferior to your own model, fair enough, but does that mean it doesn't work for other kids?  A lot of us believe that there are different ways to reach different kids, but everyone seems to think you have to teach one "correct" way.  If I use modeling, does that mean that my neighbor teacher who doesn't is terrible?  Am I better because I use the flipped model?  The answer is no of course.

These are just vehicles, searching for the way that works in our situation, for our students, at our school.  If you believe that your way always works, you must have not had the experience of different environments.  I've taught for 13 years in schools of 4600 and schools of 300, public and private, affluent and not.  Some things stay the same (the base content, my love of the students) and some things don't, in fact, a lot don't.  When I went back into public ed in a low SOSE school, I had to adapt.  And I kept adapting....and guess what, I'm still adapting.  I don't think flipclass is the end goal, but as discussed in other posts, it is where I'm at now, and it is driving a renaissance of thought about my pedagogy for me and for a lot of other teachers.  That alone makes it worthwhile in my book.

Is it good teaching?  I think so, but I think more to the point, it has help me to do good teaching.  I think I've always been a decent teacher, but flipclass has spurred me on to be a better teacher, one striving to be the best, for myself personally and professionally, but more vitally, for my students.

So the next time someone throws out the term good teaching, I just want them to stop and consider their own baggage and definitions of that term, and realize that we don't all use the same suitcase to carry our teaching tools!

Feedback

So in an effort to be more reflective and really figure out how my flipped class is working for my kids, I had them do a google form for feedback that included some quick response questions and some place for more free form feedback as well.  My questions were:

• How has the "flipped" classroom model worked for you so far this year? (Hate it, struggling, OK, Very well)
• What part has worked or been a struggle for your? (Free response)
• What changes in the classroom do you feel would be helpful on a day to day basis? (free response)
• What changes do you need to make to help you in this class on a day to day basis? (free response)
• Other comments

I had a couple of other questions about my biweekly grade, which is mainly there as a participation type grade that they begged for after 4 weeks.

We did this at the end of the first 9 weeks, which I think is a fair point.  In the first 3 weeks they hate flipclass because it is not what they are used to.  We are at the 25% point now, enough time to make big changes if needed, but far enough in to get a fair sample.

Out of 123 students the breakdown for the "flipped" question is:

• Hate it 7/123  (5.69%)
• Struggling 14/123 (11.38%)
• OK 58/123     (47.15%)
• Very Well  44/123 (35.77%)

I was pretty encouraged since I think any time you get about 80% buy in or at least non resistance that is a plus.  Even some of the hate it responses were not totally negative as what they really hated were things that were not totally integral to the flip class process.  This response to the what changes would help was illustrative:

• A full lecture in class with personal help. Less use of edmodo at home. Having different ways to remember the difficult things easily, like rhymes or something.

What I found ironic here of course was that the whole point of flipping is to give more personal help, there just isn't the time to do both full on lecture and all of the personal help.

A few of the positive responses were:

• "Even though I have a 'C' in this class, I always look forward to coming here. I definitely have to work in this class, but it doesn't feel like the work is too much. I've been in advanced classes for years, but this class is the only one that equally feels challenging and doable. This is also the only one where the teacher doesn't expect some stupidly ridiculous amounts of extra work in order to prove that we know how to do the exact same thing that was on the board two days ago. I guess I'm saying that the amount of work is more reasonable and realistic than most any of the advanced classes that I've ever had.  I don't really have anything negative to say about this class. The way you teach is very inspiring and I really wish other teachers would at least try to set up a teaching style that is at least similar to yours."
• I like the fact that you can pause or go back because I know that during traditional lectures, I can't always get everything I need down in order to stay on top of what's being said to me because they're going to fast. I also like it because if there's a concept said that takes a minute for me to really grasp, I can pause it instead of having to hurry and write stuff down without hardly even thinking about it; I can mull it over without feeling rushed.
• I like the more openness of the classroom and how it prepares us for a college atmosphere in a way of being more independent and junk like that.

This was my first really formal attempt to get feedback other than just a conversation in class and I really enjoyed it.  It highlighted a lot of flaws in my teaching this year that I knew I needed to fix and brought up some other things to examine as well.

• Ton of requests for more discussion of the video topics in class.  I will admit that while I intend to do a Q&A session at the beginning of teach class I often get sidetracked or just jump right in to whatever fun activity we are doing.  I have felt this lack all year long and this gives me the right kick in the pants to really refocus.
• Organization for the students- A lot of requests for calendar/scheduling. I use edmodo, which does a lot of this, but since I post videos well in advance (for Chemsitry at least) they sometimes aren't sure which one we are doing on a given day.  I plan on syncing a google calendar with them to assist in that.
• Groups- Always a bane.  I have systems in place for groups and tend to switch up the groups on an almost daily or lesson basis.  I actually like the kids to choose their own groups, but I don't want the outliers to get left out, which is typically they case there.  But a request that was a good one is to allow them to stay in a group for a more static time.  That's absolutely valid and will start soon.

All in all, it was a good experience and will definitely bring about some needed changes in the classroom.  At the same time, it lets me know that the fundamentals of my system are working and helping students learn and build more of an independent learner habit.