Tag Archives: collaboration

The Power of Peers

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In the past week I have been fortunate enough to have three different peers from other schools visit me and my classroom reminding me of the power and value of making connections and fostering collaboration. Last Thursday, Sharon Geyer (@sharongeyer68), from the Pomfret School visited during the Flipped Classroom Open House day to sit in on the microbiology course I teach with a colleague using the flipped model. Today, Mark de Kanter from Westminster School and John Adams (@jwadams25) from the Dublin School visited to see the flipped classroom in action and talk about ways that we are incorporating technology into the curriculum.

The conversations about teaching and the sharing that occurred during each of their visits were, without a doubt, the high points for the days. While I certainly enjoy and value the collaboration and discussions I have on a daily basis with my colleagues at Loomis Chaffee, it is always eye-opening to exchange ideas with colleagues from other schools and different educational settings. I have always benefitted and learned something new when I reach out to fellow teachers and engage in thoughtful conversations about pedagogy and the craft of teaching. Teaching can be an isolating profession if you allow yourself to remain in your “comfort zone” and do not actively seek out new ideas.

As much of a pain in the neck as it can be to take time off and visit a colleague in a different school, I firmly believe that it can be one of the most valuable professional development exercises. Watching a peer in action, asking them about how they structure and run their classrooms and sharing ideas leads to a level of self-reflection that is critical if we are to improve as educators. We frequently ask our students to try new things, take risks and reflect on their own learning. If we are expecting these things from our students, we ought to model the behavior ourselves.

So, if it has been a while since you either invited a colleague into your classroom or visited a colleague in his/her classroom, I encourage you to venture out of your “comfort zone” and engage in some low risk professional development. I promise you that it will be worth your time.

As always, I welcome your comments or feedback.

Friday Four – September 28

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Pondering the Big Ideas

Today has been a busy day filled with discussions and reflection on some of the big issues facing education these days. I spent the day at the Westminster Teaching Symposium where the theme for the conference was “Building 21st Century Skills.” This week’s “Friday Four” includes some links to articles and blogs that I ran across this past week that look at some of these larger themes in education.

  • Pat Bassett, the NAIS president, delivered the keynote speech this morning at Westminster addressing what he sees as the skills and values the 21st century will demand and reward. His blog has some thought-provoking pieces that all educators should read and consider.
  • Are we stifling creativity in our students by controlling and limiting their freedom?   “As Children’s Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity“
  • Is cheating a problem? A recent NYT article certainly made me ponder the role educators may be playing in the growing problem.
  • We are in the process of trying to implement a new evaluation/affirmation process for veteran faculty members which made this recent article from the educationnext website of particular interest to me.

As always, I welcome and encourage your comments and suggestions.

Friday Four – September 14, 2012

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Connect, Learn and Grow

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the NYTimes Schools for Tomorrow Conference yesterday and listened to a whole host of inspiring speakers. The theme for the conference was “Building a Better Teacher.” I thought it would be appropriate to include some items from the conference in this week’s missive.

  •  This first item is actually the conference itself. All of the panels were streamed live and can be watched now on the conference website. The sessions that I found particularly interesting were:
    • How do we measure teacher performance?
    • How can we better support teachers to deliver better instruction?
    • Keynote from Aneesh Chopra (@aneeshchopra), the former Chief Technology Officer for the United States.
  • Looking for a way to ramp up your Google searching skills? Why not take advantage of a MOOC (a massive  open online course). Daniel Russel, the uber tech leader from Google who spoke at the NYT conference, offered a course on Power Searching with Google this summer which had over 150,000 people register and take the course. He is running the course again starting on September 24. You can register for the course here. I have registered for the course myself so perhaps we can form a study group!
  • At one point in the conference, the audience was polled about what they thought was the most pressing issue with regard to supporting teachers to deliver better instruction. The overwhelming “favorite” was ongoing professional development and the importance of being a connected educator. As I listened to the panel, thought about the response and tweeted out some ideas to the Twitter hashtag for the conference (#NYTedtech); I was reminded of how significant Twitter is in my ongoing PD and ability to connect with fellow educators. For those of you who have read my Friday Fours in the past, you know that I am a big fan of Twitter as a way to connect with fellow educators and share ideas. If you are not a Twitter user, I would encourage you to at least go to tweetchat.com and follow a hashtag for 10 minutes and see if you learn something new. There are hashtags for any and all interests. Here is a link to a page listing the education related hashtags that are commonly used. (Thanks to Jerry Blumengarten a.k.a. “cybraryman” for the list) You just may be surprised with how easy it is to get free PD whenever you want.
  • My last find this week is actually a piece published this week in the NYT by LC alum Steven Strogatz (@stevenstrogatz). He is a Mathematics professor at Cornell and is “wicked smart” to use a phrase my students are fond of. He has the ability to make math accessible to those of us who are not mathematicians, no easy task if you ask me! Not quite related to the theme of the first three finds of the week but a great find nonetheless.

As always, I welcome your comments or suggestions.

Friday 4 – Summer Homework

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 Friday Four 5/25/2012

We are rapidly approaching the end of the current school year which means that summer vacation is right around the corner. For me, summer is when I have time to work on new ideas for my classes. I do not have papers to correct, meetings to attend or any of the other distractions that make focusing on bigger projects virtually impossible during the school year. I am confident that many of you also use at least part of the summer break to ponder, explore and develop new ideas for your own classrooms. With that spirit in mind, this week’s Friday 4 includes several items that I hope will inspire you to expand your repertoire as a teacher. Once the craziness of the spring subsides and you are in summer “big picture” mode, revisit one of the links from this post and develop a new lesson or update a current one to include a new idea or twist.

Enjoy the remaining days/weeks of your school year and don’t forget to do your homework over the summer. Your students are counting on you!

 

Flipping Feedback

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A colleague and I have been flipping our Microbiology and Molecular Biology courses at the Loomis Chaffee School for the past two years and cannot imagine going back to a more “traditional” model. There have certainly been challenges along the way and adjustments that we have had to make, but by and large, the “experiment” has been a successful one. We spent a good deal of time on the front end explaining the rationale and pedagogical implications of the flipped model to our students and seek their feedback quite regularly about their learning and the learning environment we have created. I have written previously about specific aspects in our flipped classroom, posts of which can be found here, here and here.

I suggested/volunteered my colleague (she would say I volunteered her!) to do a presentation at an upcoming faculty in-service day about the flipped classroom in an effort to get the word out to our colleagues. I will be busy doing presentations on the use of Google docs, the use of clickers and Twitter for teachers so I “encouraged” her to lead the session on the flipped classroom. She wanted to include some data from the current students as well as some comments from them in the presentations so we created a google docs survey to get some feedback from the students. We use video lectures as our main content delivery method and try and limit our videos to 15 minutes in length. You can find most of them at our YouTube channel LC Microbiology. We are on spring break now so not all of the students have filled out the form but here are the “highlights” and a link to the entire survey in case you are interested in the results so far.

  • The majority of students spend about 30 minutes watching and taking notes on a 15 minute video lesson.
  • About one-half of the students will watch the video more than once before coming to class.
  • Approximately 70% of the students will re-watch a video lecture prior to an in class assessment as review.
Here are a couple of the comments that students wrote in response to “what are the pros/advantages of the flipped classroom?”

“We are able to focus more on the lab work because of the flipped classroom and I believe it is a huge advantage for our bio class.”

“I can listen to one section of the lesson over and over. For example, I struggled with the buffer lessons at the beginning of the term, and I must have watched the video lesson in that section 8 times. Before long though, I understood buffers, and I never fell behind in the class.”

“Simple: I get to do more fun stuff in class.
Of course, there’s a bit more to it than that. My experience with science textbooks (and even textbooks in general) is that they are A) physically cumbersome and B) contain a few elements of pertinent information buried beneath clutter that, while interesting, has little to do with the course and dilutes the information that I actually need to know. Not only that, but teachers often find ways of teaching material that is more effective than the textbook, which means that the textbook is of little use as a resource because I learned the material in a different manner.”

Here are a few responses to what are the cons/disadvantages of the flipped classroom?”

“The con is that the homework is always important, so I can’t just skip it. I’m definately one of those kids that doesn’t do the homework if I don’t have to, but the video lessons are vital to the class the next day and I can never blow them off.”

“Sometimes, there is not enough time in class/too many things on the agenda to answer all of the questions/go through the video lecture thoroughly enough.”

“When I watch the videos outside of class, I write down questions and highlight confusing ideas, but learning the material off a computer is much different then learning material in class. I often struggle to know what I don’t know.” 

The students made some suggestions for ways in which we could improve the model mainly focused on making sure we dedicate some time in class to going over material that was confusing from the video lectures. We have not been as good at reviewing content from the videos as we could be as we try and squeeze every possible minute out of our schedule either having the students working in the lab or wrestling with problems related to the topic at hand. The feedback has been valuable to us as teachers and will hopefully encourage out colleagues to learn more about the flipped classroom and perhaps even give it a try.

I will post a follow-up with thoughts and feedback from the faculty in-service day. Please do not hesitate to add your comments, thoughts or suggestions to the discussion.

First Friday Four of 2012

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Friday Four – January 6, 2012

 

It is only 6 days in to 2012, but I am pretty proud of myself. I have not written 2011 on any document requiring a date thus far! Small victory to be certain, but hey, by this time I usually have committed the faux pas at least a half a dozen times. I have an eclectic mix of items for you this week. Some of the items I ran across as I was perusing the seemingly endless list of “Best of 2011” blog posts. I try and at least do a cursory review of these blogs since there is always one or two nuggets that I will have missed during the year. So here are four of my finds this week for your enjoyment.

  1. From the Innovative Educator, a listing of 100 video sites every educator should bookmark. This list includes professional development video sites as well as discipline specific content sites. I guarantee you will find at least one site you can use.
  2. Many of you already know that I am an Alfie Kohn fan so you will not be surprised by this next piece. This piece appeared in the English Journal in the fall of 2010 and looks at how to create nonreaders.
  3. This next piece is a blog post from a somewhat outspoken educator who I do not always agree with….hence why I read his pieces regularly! He challenges teachers to stop asking questions they already know the answers to.
  4. For my humanities colleagues, here is a thought provoking piece describing a 21st century English class. How do we stack up?

As always, I welcome you comments or feedback.

 

 

The Evolution of an Assignment

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In the past couple of years I have done a great deal of thinking and reading about the topic of homework and wrestling with the design of homework in my classes, particularly in light of what I have learned about how people learn from attending several Learning and the Brain conferences. I have also become a huge fan and user of a “flipped classroom” model which necessitates rethinking the role and purpose of homework entirely. As a result of my new knowledge and new pedagogical approach, most of the assignments I have used in the past have undergone significant change and hardly resemble what they looked like even two years ago. I wanted to share one example with the hope that my experience may encourage others to rethink how they are using homework.

I currently team teach a Molecular Biology course at the Loomis Chaffee School that is a two term course for seniors and juniors who have already taken biology and chemistry and are looking to continue their study of biology at an advanced level. Since the students are coming from very different chemistry backgrounds, in the first couple of weeks of the course, we review basic acid/base chemistry, weak acid equilibria and then apply these concepts to the study of amino acids and proteins. In the past we have given the students a problem set to work on during this first unit that includes problems on all of the basic concepts and several that require some extension and transfer to new situations. The students were encouraged to work collaboratively on the problems and frequently small groups of them did get together and helped each other to understand and solve the problems. Ultimately, each student was required to hand in his/her own set of solutions to the questions. Here is where the problem came in…we really had no way knowing for sure who had truly mastered the concepts and who had not. A high grade on the problem set was not a good indicator of mastery since we had little way of knowing anything about the path each student took to his/her answers. Did they solve them on their own with no outside assistance? Did they work with a peer who did most of the “heavy lifting?” If they got a problem wrong, can we figure out where they are stuck conceptually and help them see their mistake? Not likely.

The next year, we tried a different approach with the same problem set to try and gain more insight into where the students were getting stuck and to better monitor who was doing the work and who was “along for the ride” when it came to actually solving the problems. We had the students work in small groups on the problem set in class where we could go around and listen in and assist when needed. This was certainly better because it allowed us a chance to clear up misconceptions before they became “permanent” and guaranteed that the students would spend at least the amount of class time we dedicated to working on the problems. While this format was “better”, it was far from perfect. We still had no way to make sure that all of the students were mastering the concepts along the way since we did not collect and correct their work until the end.

This year we tried a third approach that has gotten us closer to our goal of knowing that each student has mastered the concepts and at the same time allowed us to monitor the path to mastery so that we could clear up misconceptions early and provide feedback often. Here is what we did: We looked at all of the problems on the problem set and first scaffolded them so that the problems were ordered by difficulty level and built better on one another. We had to rewrite several and scrap other ones we have used in the past. We then divided the students up into groups of 3 and instead of giving each group the entire problem set to work on, we handed the problems out one at a time on slips of paper. Each group only received one copy of the problem. They were instructed to work together on it and let us know when they thought that they had solved it. In order to get the next problem, one person from the group (selected randomly by the teacher!) had to explain the group’s answer. If the answer was incorrect or the selected person could not adequately explain how they had gotten to their answer, they had to go back and make sure of their answer and make sure that everybody understood it since the second attempt might have to be explained by a different person. Once the group had the right answer and could adequately explain it, they were given the next problem to work on. As the groups were working, we circulated around and were able to answer questions or clear up any misconceptions. As a result of this approach, the groups were frequently working on different problems and at different paces. Because we were asking different students to answer for the group each time, there was a built in mechanism to encourage collaboration and mastery from every member of the group. We also were able to hear from each and every student at some point and have a better sense of which students are struggling to master the material.

I have to point out that this approach takes significant class time and would not be nearly as easy for us to do if we were not also using a flipped model for instruction. We rarely use class time for content delivery, instead the students watch short video lessons we have prepared to introduce them to the content for “homework.” As a result, we can structure our class time as I have described above and learn much more about how the students approach the concepts and how they wrestle with coming to mastery.

While it is not perfect, it is definitely different. We have been pleased with many aspects of the change and are looking at all of our assignments and asking if there are ways in which we can improve them and how we can better use them to reach our goals for the students. Please feel free to post your thoughts or comments. I would love to hear what others out there are doing with respect to homework in their classes.

Post Westminster Symposium Thoughts

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I attended and presented at the Westminster Teaching Symposium yesterday (10/21) and have a few thoughts and observations that I would like to share that may inspire others to action. First off, a great big shout out to Tim Quinn and his colleagues at Westminster School who put together a wonderful day of presentations under the title “The Many Ways of Assessing Student Learning.” The symposium was billed as a chance for teachers to learn from other teachers and did not include a keynote speaker or “hired gun” from outside; a wise choice in my humble opinion. Over the years, the best professional development seminars/workshops/conferences that I have attended were all teacher focused and teacher led.

I presented on the use of student response systems (“clickers”) as a formative assessment tool and attended two additional sessions during the day. Jeff Schwartz led a session on the challenges of assessing the new media that we are asking students to produce such as videos and blogs, and John Corrigan (@JohnRCorrigan) presented on the Harkness Discussion and its role in student assessment. The engaging and thoughtful discussions that took place in all three sessions was both encouraging and not at all surprising. Good teachers are always looking for new ideas and are never quite satisfied with the way they are currently doing things. Here is where the challenge comes in.

Quality professional development is critical to a teacher’s ongoing growth; and if asked, most teachers, especially veteran teachers, are yearning for more opportunities than our school’s typically provide. Clearly, Westminster gets it and has established the Westminster Teaching Initiative in response to its faculty’s desire for more professional development. “The Westminster Teaching Initiative was formed in 2010 in order enhance teaching and learning at Westminster School by encouraging collaboration and dialog among faculty members and departments about curriculum and pedagogy.” I am fortunate enough to work at Loomis Chaffee where we have established the Kravis Center for Excellence in Teaching, an on campus resource for faculty professional development. Both of our school’s have realized the value and importance of professional development as an on-going and constant need for our faculties. What was surprising to me was the number of colleagues from other schools who did not have a similar entity at their schools. I had several people come up to me and ask if they could visit my school and see what we were doing in our Center with respect to on-going teacher training and professional development. I was reminded of an article written by Alexis Wiggins about her experiences in several different independent schools and how disappointed she was in the lack of collaboration she found in one of them.

I would encourage all teachers who are yearning for more quality professional development to step up and become leaders in their schools. Attending conferences and workshops is good, but is really only the first step. If you do not have an on-campus vehicle for on-going professional development like those at Westminster or Loomis Chaffee, start your own PLN (personal learning network) of committed colleagues who agree to meet regularly and discuss the craft and challenges of teaching. If this seems too daunting, sign up for Twitter and join the conversations that are occurring each and every day between educators around the country and globe about education. I was surprised when I asked how many people were on Twitter at the symposium and only a few hands went up. If you are unsure how to get started with Twitter, check out this link for a nice overview from a fellow educator. I can be found on Twitter at @smacclintic.

Professional development is not an option. Teaching can be a very isolating profession unless we seek out and create opportunities to share ideas and help one another to improve. I welcome your comments and look forward to sharing with you again soon!

 

My first lecture…of the year.

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Initially it did not dawn on me, but this past Tuesday (10/4) I actually delivered content to my class in lecture format (direct instruction) for the first time this year. I had gone over a month without using direct instruction to deliver content to my students. How did I manage to go so long without lecturing?  I use a flipped classroom model for instruction and must say that I would never go back to a “traditional” model.

For those not familiar with the flipped classroom model, I would encourage you to read this piece by Aaron Sams (@chemicalsams) who is one of the model’s pioneers. Another good description of the flipped classroom by Bill Tucker can be found here.

There is a whole world of teachers out there using versions of a flipped classroom that I have learned from, collaborated with and continue to engage with on a regular basis. If you are a Twitter user, I encourage you to follow the hashtag #flipclass for a lively discussion of the flipped classroom model.

I have been using a flipped classroom model for over a year now and can offer the following observations about how it has impacted the classroom, my students and the learning that goes on in my classroom:

  • Class time is way more interactive and student centered than it ever used to be in my classroom. The students are not being exposed to new content in class, rather they are wrestling with the application of new material and benefitting from significantly more collaboration with each other.
  • I have a much better understanding of how students are approaching higher order tasks since they are engaged in more of them in class where I can ask questions about their thought processes and uncover misconceptions. In the past, the students were doing much of this intellectual “heavy lifting” at home on their own so I could not observe them and help guide them if need be.
  • The students have reported that they like being in control of the pace of delivery of the “content” of the course. We use video lectures (LCMicrobiology on YouTube) for content delivery so the students can pause and rewind the videos as often as they need before moving on. Each student is different in his/her ability to integrate new information so the videos allow them to control the pace.
  • The students show up in class more ready to “work” since they know that they will not be able to just sit back passively and listen to me deliver a lesson. Far fewer students show up to class unprepared once they realize how much more valuable class time is for their learning.
  • I am able to engage with each and every one of the students far more frequently during class time since I am not stranded at the front of the room lecturing.
I have plenty more that I would like to share about my experience with the flipped classroom but will save it for another post since I am not a fan of blog posts that are too long!
I would love to hear your thoughts or feedback and encourage you to share your experiences by commenting on this post.

Friday Four + 1 for 9/30

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Critical Thinking, Collaboration and Engagement

Here are this week’s Friday Four (+1) interesting articles/blog posts/web resources I ran across that you might find interesting.

  1. Nice blog post from a colleague who attended a Professional Development conference by The Critical Thinking Consortium.
  2. The case for collaboration and connected networks on the Connected Principals Blog. I have been wanting to create a PLN for folks at LC….now may be the time to get it going….who wants in? Let me know.
  3. Ten Steps to Better Student Engagement. Piece on the Edutopia website that provides practical tips for teachers of all disciplines.
  4. Scripted Creation Isn’t Creation, It’s Assembly. Blog post by 21st Century Educator for anybody who uses student projects in their classes.
  5. Getting Specific about Critical Thinking. Nice piece on the Education Week website that explores what it means to teach “critical thinking” in the classroom.