Last week we had our 5th and 6th snow day of the school year. The previous Friday, I had given a test study guide and pledged to my students they would take a unit test two days after we resumed school. So on Wednesday I made myself available over 30 minutes for topic review, specific questions, etc. Then on Thursday I gave a test of about 20 closed-ended questions (multiple-choice, matching, ordering) about the Articles of Confederation and US Constitution.
You can see the ugly results below. The overall average score is about 70%!! I felt like an accomplice to a crime, or worse. Some students failed because they had not been preparing well all unit long -- no surprises there. But when over a dozen students had aced all the video quizzes and they still earned scores like 77% or 68% ... something's really wrong. As I graded tests on the last day before February Vacation, the Kubler-Ross stages of grief/depression began to wash over me....
"No, it can't be this bad!" -- "Maybe this was just my weakest class, or it was first period...."
"Dammit, what's wrong with them?!" -- "I'm a horrible teacher!!"
"If only I give them a chance for test corrections" -- "If I had tried a little more on Wednesday"
"Oh god this was a terrible idea and I'm full of terrible ideas and the world is terrible and ..."
Flipping with videos is not a cure-all. I was foolish to believe that, even with two 'bonus' days home from school, a grand majority of my students could independently teach themselves with online videos. Flipping is about what you can do in the classroom; it's not just about the videos. I needed to relearn my own lesson. Several of the topics on this test (federalism, checks-and-balances, powers of the president) I had not addressed or explored in the classroom, because of the snow days. About 20 students never took a re-quiz about those topics and/or the earlier assessment about compromises in the Constitution: the Three-Fifths, Great Compromise, etc. So basically I already knew they needed intervention/re-teaching on those topics.
There is a grand lesson here that I can't articulate right now. Can you help me in the comments?