Posts Tagged ‘Flipped Classroom’
My new life (or until divorce) partner, The Flipped Classroom. Affectionately known as Flippy.
Flippy. The Flipped Classroom. For six months we have been carrying on a torrid affair, but Flippy is fast becoming an essential part of my year 12 classroom.
I am loving using the flipped classroom in my year 11/12 classroom. I’ve dabbled in it with my juniors, but I find my seniors far more receptive to the work at home required, which is good because, you know, working at home is kinda necessary for the HSC English course. Just saying.
Before I go into chapter and verse about my developing relationship with the flip and our mutual enjoyment of long walks on the beach and feather boas, I’ll give you a very brief and probably partly bogus run down of what it is.
From my understanding it has largely come out of the USA where their increasing class sizes (40+ students is usual) has led to a situation where teachers are totally unable to get one on one time with their students to help them in the classroom. As always, necessity breeds invention, and so the flip was born. Teachers sought to move the up front in front of the whole class stuff out of their precious face to face time so they could spend that time helping the students one on one and in small groups.
My understanding of the flipped classroom is the method of moving traditional classroom activities (like lectures, demonstrations, note taking, etc.) to homework and moving traditional homework activities (like practising, composing, essay/imaginative writing, etc.) to the classroom. This is usually done through technology, often through videoing of content (videoing lectures, screencasting demonstrations, etc.), bringing what used to need to be done in the classroom into the students’ home.
When you think about it, this makes perfect sense! Much of those traditional classroom activities are using lower order thinking skills like remembering, identifying, summarising and understanding, while a lot of what we’ve asked students to do for homework involves higher order thinking skills like applying, analysing, evaluating and creating. Surely this is where they need the assistance of the teacher and their peers.
Let me give you a quick run down of the way I’ve found my students approach traditional homework:
Student sits down to complete homework. After cleaning their work space, making three cups of tea, eating a packet of Tim Tams and checking Facebook eight times, the student finally, meaningfully, retrieves their books from their bag.
STUDENT: English homework. Right. Ms Dunning went through this in class today and now I have to write an extended response. What the hell is an extended response? Growing increasingly agitated Whatever, I’ll go through my notes.
Student opens their English book. They flick through the pages as frustration and indignation spread across their face. The flipping through pages becomes increasingly fast and aggressive.
STUDENT: I don’t get it! I just can’t do it! I don’t know how to write an extended response. I don’t know how to do anything. Tears forming. I’m so stupid! I’m an idiot and I can’t do anything. I’m going to fail my whole HSC and then I’ll end up homeless.
The next day. The English classroom. MS DUNNING is expectantly moving around the class collecting homework. She is excited to read their take on what they learned in the last few lessons. As she moves, her mood deteriorates and she seems increasingly deflated. She gets to STUDENT.
MS DUNNING (To STUDENT): Homework? I’m pumped for yours. You had really good ideas in that discussion!
STUDENT: I don’t have it.
MS DUNNING: What do you mean? Why not?
STUDENT: I just didn’t understand. I just don’t get it. It’s stupid.Scene fades as MS DUNNING appears crestfallen knowing more and more lessons will now be spent writing.
This was the story of my life. No more! I flipped out on those year 11/12s so hard! Oh yeah!
I started with a poetry unit on Bruce Dawe in term 2 of this year. The kids seemed to quite like it and we didn’t go through a single poem line by line in class, which was great! The best moment came when I started using an activity from Crystal Kirch. That’s right folks, my year 11 Standard English students participated in a literary discussion of Bruce Dawe’s ‘Enter Without So Much As Knocking’. And I mean participated! They had ideas and opinions and actually expressed them, even somewhat coherently at times! Life was swell and all because of three little letters: WSQ. (Pink is my favourite colour, what of it?)
What is a WSQ? I hear you whisper. Well,
- W: Write notes. While watching videos or participating in online context, students must take notes. When we’re annotating a poem or a passage I have them write notes on their copy of the poem. Otherwise, dot point notes are ideal.
- S: Summarise. Once they’ve finished the online content, they are to write a summary of it. This is in full sentences and should give a good idea of the major points in the content.
- Q: Question. Arguably the most important (and easily my favourite) part. Students must write down a question/questions about the content. For my class, I have them write a minimum of two questions. At least one of their questions must be a discussion question (something we can use as a discussion starter in class). They can also have genuine questions, but not things they can easily find out themselves like word definitions. I encourage ‘why’ questions because it’s English after all!
Flash forward six months and I’m ever increasing my flip. I got a youtube channel: You can totally visit, you know, if you want. And I’ve found the video programs that work for me. Watch this space for a post on video programs (And please, when it takes me a billion years to post again, get on my arse on twitter @pollydunning to make me do it!). My year 12s love it and have really embraced it, especially this term as they’ve moved into year 12 and the HSC course. I’ve improved my homework completion rates exponentially! 80% of my students complete their flipped homework on time and I only have one student still not completing at all. My classroom discussions have totally changed. My students take ownership over the content, they learn it at their own pace as they are able to pause and rewind videos, look up information on their computer and ask any questions on edmodo before the lesson. All this means that they come in to the classroom feeling like a bit of an expert and their confidence in expressing their ideas is testament to this.
So as my new lover, Flippy, and I stroll off into the sunset together I want to assure you that I know flipping is no silver bullet to all education issues. In fact, like any partner, Flippy comes with their own issues. They’re hard work, they need me to be organised, they’re not always emotionally (or technologically) available, etc. But I love Flippy for their faults as well as their values and, as Flippy and I enter our life’s next chapter, I know that, if only through the use of extended metaphor, we’ll be okay. And hey, there’s always divorce!
BTW, If you want to read some blogs by people much cleverer and far less irritatingly into extended metaphors than me about flipping:
Using Flipped Classroom Strategies to Run Edmodo Training
So earlier this year I found Edmodo through my ridiculously good looking PLN. My goal for the year was to use more technology in my teaching so I had tried out using a wiki with my year 11 class. Both they and I found it extremely confusing and not really suited to what we wanted! Meh, at least I tried!
So we started on Edmodo and really liked using it! So much that I had other teachers asking me to show them how to use it because their students used it in my class and had asked them to use it too. After a few explanations of the basics, I decided to put an item in the whole staff meeting and take 15 minutes to quickly show staff the basics on how to use it. This was definitely due to my laziness as I was over explaining the same thing over and over! Little did I know, it would absolutely take off and I would end up running training at the Executive Conference and at a number of committee meetings throughout the last two terms.
Now, if anyone thinks teaching teenagers is difficult, try teaching their teachers! Teachers are some of the worst students I’ve ever seen (myself often included!)! Again, my lack of patience got the better of me and I got mighty tired of re-explaining things 5 times each workshop to those who weren’t listening, were struggling to keep up, were doing their own thing first. I was over having questions randomly yelled out at me and feeling like I was getting no-where in hour workshops!
As always, necessity breeds invention, and I started thinking about how I could work smarter instead of harder to get staff proficient in edmodo, which is what they wanted! So, I decided to use flipped classroom strategies that I had found through Crystal Kirch’s awesome blog (http://flippingwithkirch.blogspot.com.au/) and that had been fairly successful in my year 11 class. I thought that if I could create screencast videos of less than 15 minutes each showing the real basics and only one or two things at a time, staff, like students, could train themselves at their own pace and be able to re-watch videos to gain a better understanding.
I used sophia.org to create the videos. It is an amazingly easy way to create videos that is easily understandable even for technologically challenged people like myself! It can create and host whole lessons including pdfs, screencast videos, text, images etc., as well as groups of lessons.
I’ve created four videos so far and emailed them to all staff along with creating an Edmodo training video for staff.
The awesome thing about it is that it took me all of 1 and a half hours to create the four videos and staff are able to request videos for me to do or ask me questions on Edmodo without us both having to be available and in the same room together. Also, when I get asked about the stuff covered in the videos I can just direct them to the site.
Creating these training videos has saved me and other staff a lot of time and, in a profession where time is very short while work keeps piling up, I think creating videos for staff training is the way to go for me!
My Edmodo training lessons can be found through the following link:
http://www.sophia.org/ncapahs-edmodo-tutorial-1-signing-up-and-homepage–tutorial
Musings of Ms Dunning 