Tag Archives: flipped classroom

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!

 

Friday Four 5/18

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Cool Tools for Teachers

As I scanned the list of interesting items that I have run across this week in preparation for this week’s missive, I quickly noticed that quite a few of them included some neat “tools” that people might not know about. Hopefully, you will take the time to try one or all of these and find something that you can use.

The first few items are from one of my favorite bloggers, Richard Byrne, who writes the Free Technology for Teachers blog. I subscribe to his blog in my Google Reader and follow him on Twitter (@rmbyrne) so I run across his gems frequently. If you are not a reader of his blog, I strongly encourage you to check it out.

  • Seven great note-taking tools for teachers is a recent post of Richard’s that describes his favorites.
  • Did you know that you can do a Google search from right within your Google Docs? You can even include a citation or image with the click of your mouse. For students working on papers, this is a fantastic tool that I plan on showing my students right away.
  • Have you ever wanted to have a video conference with a group of students or wanted to invite a guest into your classroom? Sure you could use Skype of create a Google+ hangout, but both require all users to have a Skype account or a Google account. With Meetings.io, you can create a “meeting room” and simple share the URL with up to 5 people who can join your video conference without having to have an account.
  • I ran across a new app for the iPad called Nearpod that might be of interest to those of you who want to incorporate interactive multimedia into your lessons. I have downloaded the app (free) and will be field testing it soon. I will post my thoughts on its use as soon as I get a chance to kick the tires a bit. If I am lucky, I will get my capital request for a set of classroom iPads approved so that some of the Loomis Chaffee teachers can try it out next fall.
I have a few additional blog posts that I found interesting that I will include this week even though it will put me in violation of my self-imposed rule of only sharing four items in any one Friday 4 post.
  • One of the people in my PLN that I enjoy engaging with on Twitter is Brian Bennett (@bennettscience). He is a science teacher who uses a flipped-classroom model and is a leader among the online community of teachers using a flipped classroom. He recently wrote about Redesigning Learning in a Flipped Classroom. His thoughts and the comments on his blog post are a great read for those of you interested in the concept.
  • Here is a link to an article that I liked about the Joy of Not Knowing. What better way to model life long learning than to admit you do not know something and then engage in the process of discovery of new knowledge.
Enjoy!

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.

Friday Four 1/20

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 Friday Four, Jan 20, 2012

For those of you who may have missed last week’s Friday Four, I apologize. I was in the middle of a 12 day bout with a fever and was off the grid for a few days. I contemplated posting a mid-week Friday Four, but decided that I would would wait until Friday to get back on the horse. So, here are a few items I have run across that you might find interesting/intriguing. Enjoy!

  1. This week, Apple announced its release of iBooks 2 and a textbooks section of the store where you can purchase entire digital textbooks for $14.99. They already have a few of the major publishers on board and are looking to add others. I downloaded the biology book and have started playing with it; it is pretty cool. Who knows whether this will take off or not and be a game changer, but I would love to see the ability to have all of my textbooks on my iPad for a FRACTION of the cost of traditional textbooks. Here is an article about the release from the Washington Post. A quick search will pull up plenty of commentary on the announcement.
  2. Continuing the Apple/iPad theme, here is a blog post from one of the techie types I follow with his recommendation for the very first app you should download if you are a new iPad owner/user.
  3. Here is a great series of programs that appeared on American Radio Works that addressed the issue of lectures and how incredibly inefficient and pedagogically bad they are. While the addresses deal with the college level, the issues are certainly germane to the high school level. Worth a listen.
  4. Here is a link to part 1 of a series of blog posts by Grant Wiggins on the concept of “transfer” and how we can do a better job of helping students be able to transfer knowledge and skills better. This has been a part of many of the conversations we have been having recently about homework so I though it might be of interest to a few of you.
Bonus: Jan 30 is World Flipped Class Open House day. A colleague and I will be opening up our classroom for visitors and welcome anybody who would like to come by and see what we are doing.

 

 

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.

Friday Four Dec 2, 2011

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Friday Four 12/2

Here are a few of the interesting/intriguing/thought provoking items I ran across this week that you might find interesting/intriguing/thought provoking as well. Enjoy. Please do not hesitate to pass along items you run across that I might be able to include in my weekly missive.

  1. More on the flipped classroom model of instruction. Regular readers of my Friday Four will know that I am a big believer in the “flipped” model and use it in my classes as much as possible.
  2. Here is a link to the first in a series of posts by Grant Wiggins presenting the results of a study of student academic experience. The results and Grant’s analysis are well worth the read. LC veterans will recognize a reference to former faculty member, Duane Estes in the first paragraph.
  3. Here is a Time Magazine post entitled “The Protege Effect: Why teaching someone else is the best way to learn” that discusses some of the recent research around the topic.
  4. A blog post on Edutopia website making the case for “Making the Most Out of Teacher Collaboration.” Good advice for new and veteran teachers alike.
BONUS: Could not resist passing along this gem that was passed along to me by a colleague. If you have had a long hard week and need a good gut-busting laugh, check out these 56 best/worst student similes.

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.