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If they Need2Know it, then I'm gonna quiz it!

1/19/2018

2 Comments

 
          Recently I realized that I'm probably the only teacher who does flipping quizzes like I do. Many colleagues use EdPuzzle or some similar online application to check students' understanding of the video lessons. I will address my feelings on that in a later blog post. 
           My current system has evolved over 5 years, but its DNA traces back to Bergmann & Sams' first book's chapter on accountability. You need to know what students know before they get to the high-order stuff. In a chemistry class, that means they need proficiency on lab safety before they can appropriately perform a science lab experiment; in a history class, they need proficient knowledge before they have the historical context/skill to successfully research, engage in simulation activities, read primary sources, etc.
          Anyway, here is what I do:

First, I assign the video lesson
  • It's due 2 or 3 school days from now.
  • Students get a handout [below] that is basically identical to what I post in our LMS (Schoology) where the video link can be found. All the learning objectives are listed there along with note-taking advice, because that is our year-long academic skill.
  • They are called "Need2Know" tasks because these are the essential bits of historical information I want students to retain for future objectives, activities, and learning.
  • I expect them to take notes before the quiz, but I will not formally grade the notes because those could just be copied from a friend....
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In the days before the quiz, I field students' questions by email, during study hall, before school, etc. At some point I also print copies of the quiz and place them inside each students' tabbed manila folder. If students need a modified version, then that's what I insert instead.... They will never see each other's quiz sheets, so my students don't even know their assessment was different!]

​2-3 days later: They take the quiz
  • If students brought notes (95% of them do!), they immediately put them inside their desk and clear off the desktop. 
  • When everyone has arrived, I let them retrieve the notes and 'get in the zone' for 30-45 seconds. Yes they are kind of cramming, but this rewards everybody for producing and bringing notes. (If I had let them do this immediately after arriving, then students would get a different amount of time with their notes, and I don't think that is fair.) Meanwhile, I insert the quiz folders into each student's desk -- they are always turned around 'backwards' so the desk opening faces the front of the classroom. :)
  • Within less than a minute, everybody has swapped their notes into the desk, removed the quiz sheet from the folder, and stood the folder upright as a Fortress of Solitude to hide their work from their neighbors. They are filling the boxes as well as they are able with 1 or 2-sentence responses. I believe the process of writing this information helps to cement the facts into their memory for future retrieval and understanding.
  • They already know the quiz questions because I listed them next to the video link and on the printed assignment sheet. The quiz sheet might be formatted with boxes and lines to organize their output, but there are no tricks & no mysteries in Mr. Swan's class.
  • I guess-timate the amount of time needed, and peek over the shoulders of the last 3 or 4 kids. You can tell who legitimately needs a bit more time to finish writing, and who just plain forgot. Within about 15 minutes we are done.

Same day: I check everybody's quiz while the students....
  • This is a new development in the 2017-18 school year. I used to be proud of myself for taking the quizzes home, scoring them, and returning those grades the next day. That's still too late!! Immediate feedback has huge benefits. If any students need to review & retake, they need to know before leaving my classroom today.
  • I do not pass back the quiz response sheets, for several reasons. 1) I don't feel the need to write comments on each student's quiz, so I can read through them more quickly!  2) It's one less sheet of paper to get lost, improperly filed, etc. [I keep them for my own records until the end of the grading term.]  3) Students might notice the multiple versions, which can lead to uncomfortable & unfair conversations / disclosures.  4) On a similar theme, I can differentiate for the length/depth of responses, without students seeing two different sheets and asking "Why didn't I get credit for the same answer this kid wrote?" The fact is that his 3-sentence answer might be the best he ever wrote, but for her it would be an underachievement. I teach a wide range of students, so the bar for proficiency must be adjusted sometimes. This assessment system lets me do so!
  • So, I'm at my desk for about 20 minutes*, skimming through all the quiz sheets and occasionally calling up a student to decipher their own handwriting....
  • MEANWHILE, students spend class time to engage in the new material in some independent way: make a short comic strip to summarize a sub-topic, or produce a propaganda poster that might have appeared at the time, etc. These are low-stakes assignments that will not grade. If there were 1 or 2 students who weren't ready for today's quiz, then instead they will work on the video lesson during class time -- in the library, with one of the two wifi-enabled tablets in my room, or perhaps on their own cell phone.
* If you feel that this makes me evil, disengaged, lazy, or whatever, then I am sorry but we can still be friends, right?.

How I handle retakes:
  • They only need to re-try the objective(s) they missed on the first attempt.
  • On this example quiz, let's say that a student wrote only two items for question #1, wrote rock-solid answers about Bunker Hill and the Olive Branch Petition, but had an unclear response about Common Sense: "It was published by Thomas Paine in 1776" is accurate but does not show the understanding I'm looking for....
  • After I read his quiz sheet, I turned to his assignment sheet and notes (which he'd placed into the folder after the quiz) and I circled those learning objectives: #1 and #5. 
  • He leaves my classroom with a clear assignment: review the video and/or your notes about Loyalists and Common Sense.
  • At the next possible opportunity (a student-centered activity tomorrow, a study hall period, a few minutes before homeroom....), he will retry those answers without access to notes. Usually I give a new copy of the quiz sheet, for him to write in a corner of the room; sometimes for convenience I will quiz the student orally.
  • RARELY, a student is still unprepared with incomplete or inaccurate responses. Now it's time for a one-to-one conversation about study skills and/or the academic topic.
  • USUALLY the retake ends with a successful result, and verbal encouragement from me.
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How does the grading work for these assessments?
  • ​You can see the headlines below. I am not playing a numbers game. This is a mastery assessment so I expect 100% proficiency. I'm not going to count some questions more than others, or calculate partial credit for getting 1 out of 2 results of Bunker Hill.
  • Also, I need a super-quick scoring system to return everyone's quiz within 20 minutes!
  • These Need2Know quizzes are the smallest element of the term grade: 3% or 4% per quiz (a total of ~25-30%). 
  • A few students complain about the 50% score for just 1 question wrong .... I respond "Yes, you only have 1 item to fix and then it's a B grade"
  • Any student who bombed the quiz at first can also get an 85%, but he must work a lot harder to get there than the child with only 1 misunderstanding. That seems fair to me.
  • On the "Rising Tensions Part 4" quiz example I used earlier:
​                65 students aced it on quiz day [100%]
                14 students had to fix at least 1 question [85%]
                3 students needed a second retake attempt [85%]

                2 (out of 84) never did that retake, so their 50% score was stuck in the gradebook.
  • I don't feel good about those 50% scores, but since that quiz (November 6th) I have worked more closely with both students and they are significantly improving.​
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Sooooooo whaddya think?  You made it this far in the blog post, so you must still be interested. Like I said at the start, this system has evolved over time and probably will again... maybe with your input!
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Here's why I will never tackle a student onto the gym floor

8/26/2017

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"What problem(s) did flipping solve for you?"
[topic for the week of August 30]

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I am slightly cheating this week, because most of this response will appear soon on the FLGlobal Initiative blog. I wrote this more like a report, less like a reflection.... but I'm also in the midst of start-of-the-year & end-of-the-summer turmoils, so my next reflective blog piece needs a different topic! [More like last August's mea culpa]

UPDATE (2 hours later): Okay, never mind. It seems lame to just copy and paste one blog post into another. Instead I will write a much shorter response here about another problem that The Flip helped solve for me: calming my conscience.
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          I teach a very heterogeneous student population in a widely diverse suburban community. I have actually had a kid who lives in a mansion sitting next to someone residing in a homeless shelter. Some students are gifted, worldly-wise, and all ready for high school ... others read at a 3rd-grade level. They are all my students. I need a class structure, grading system, and curriculum that can make all these children grow and learn. That is extremely difficult, and I struggled in vain for about ten years. 
          Sometimes I knew that I was going too slow, holding back dozens of kids with my pacing, and watering down expectations ... just to make sure that nobody failed. I was an ELA teacher, and we read books at half the speed that many could have handled. While I tried to differentiate writing skills, I could not figure out a good way for direct instruction. Workstations, interactive lectures, lengthy handout packets, buying new books, staying after school....I tried them all. My systems worked okay, eventually, kind of, I guess.
          Other times, I'm sure that I went too fast. If you missed a certain 20-minute portion of the class lecture, well that was too bad for you! "Get notes from a friend" because we're moving on to the Super-Cool Project, which my higher-achieving kids often enjoyed but left others in the dust. You can see it in their face on Presentation Day, or while working in a 'cooperative learning group': a glazed-eye combo of panic and apathy.
          At the "moving-on" (AKA graduation) ceremony in June, each student walks alone across the gymnasium half-court to collect a certificate of completion (AKA diploma ... remember, this is 8th grade). I can vividly remember watching about a dozen kids each year stride in front of my row, and I'm thinking "I did nothing for you. I just passed you along, but you gained nothing."  I always resisted the urge to tackle him or her onto the gym floor, shout "NOOOOO!! We're not done yet! Come back upstairs to room 203 right now!" That would probably not work well for me.

​          Anyway, I never feel that way anymore during the 'moving on'/graduation ceremony. Even the challenging girl I wrote about last month -- she made some progress early in the year, even though circumstances declined by June. Flipping for mastery has removed barriers and blame like
  • my after-school availability
  • the pace of my class
  • speed of my lecturing
  • appearance of note-taking sheets
  • clarity of the textbook
  • level of quality/cooperation of peers 
You can watch and re-watch my direct-instruction video lessons until you "get it." Then hopefully we have time to build on that understanding with interactions and Super-Cool Projects. If not, that's too bad and hopefully we'll get there next time. But now I know that you know what you really need to know, ya know?

UPDATE 2: Well, this turned out longer than I expected, but it only took about 30 minutes to write on this Saturday afternoon. Best of all, it helped to re-visit the story of my pre-flipping life, while I sit surrounded by lists of things-to-do like videos to record. Today I have reminded myself why I bother.  Thank you, #flipblogs!!
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Finally, I flipping figured out how to use Bloom's!!

8/3/2017

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        I believe in Bloom's Taxonomy, despite some critical skepticism out there which I don't consider compelling. The general concept certainly seems relevant for history classes: you need to know some facts (like when & why "The New Colossus" was written) before you can make analytical or judgmental claims (like whether or not that poem expresses the message of the Statue of Liberty).
​        History matters, people.
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         However, I just figured out exactly how to connect the concept with my flipping practice -- how to consistently 'climb the ladder' for each curriculum unit.  It's a long post, but let me try to walk you through an example from Unit 1 of the year.
         I expect that all students will be able to contrast several areas of daily life in the 1750s with daily life in the 2010s. That’s part of our “America Before the Revolution” unit. If I asked them to respond in the first week of school, their answers would be generally on-target: “People didn’t have cars so they had to walk everywhere … They were dirty … Colonists wore dresses and suits and hats…” These statements are true but not well-informed, and missing some key elements of colonial life that help explain the Revolutionary period.

         In terms of Bloom’s Taxonomy, this objective asks students to ANALYZE the daily life of a historical period – to distinguish multiple aspects of 1750s life and note differences with their life today (which can rely on their prior knowledge). Why can’t they do this analysis right away? Because we skipped some steps.
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However, this will not be effective unless students have some basic knowledge about specific details of ‘lifestyles in the past’, or else how will they recognize them in the primary sources? Also, they need to know enough about aspects of 1750s life so they can accurately contrast it with the present-day
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      These understandings can be expanded and made more memorable with discussions and class activities. The last one in particular is a deep concept that can be understood in shallow or deep ways. They should be internally maintained (in the students’ brain) to improve fluency with the APPLY objectives. We should formally assess the accuracy and depth students’ understanding, to ensure it is proficient to move forward. These mastery assessments can and should be retaken until proficiency is achieved.
         The italicized vocabulary is the most basic level of understanding. Some students might already know these terms. They are essential terms that will appear in later activities, sources, etc. in this unit and perhaps some later ones too. These terms could be externally maintained (on a word wall, a reference sheet, etc.) or we might expect them to be internal (memorized). We could place these on the lowest Bloom’s Taxonomy level:
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Now let’s view these levels in a different way: left-to-right in the order students will experience them.
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        After experiencing this process for several days, some students are ready for the top of the Bloom’s Taxonomy ‘pyramid’: CREATE and EVALUATE.  Others will need more time to correct their misunderstandings at the ANALYZE level, and they should revise their responses for accuracy, detail, appropriateness, or another major area.
         The creators and evaluators can spend 1 or 2 class periods on a self-selected task.  These are more independent, more unique, more “fun” for students. The quality is almost guaranteed to be high, because they have already successfully analyzed and understood the topic. We’re not throwing them into the deep end to make a skit or build a model about something they barely understand. These projects might be a continuation of an earlier class activity, such as writing a possible next-day diary entry of the primary source we looked at in class, or a based-on-real-life skit/comic conversation that includes historical details in a humorous way.
         It’s tempting to leap ahead into this exploratory zone, because it’s more fun and engaging and kids seem to be learning. However, if we skip the UNDERSTAND, APPLY, ANALYZE steps (and the two levels of assessment along the way), then we have set up many students to fail. Even the best and brightest will not get as much out of these cool projects, or they will get exhausted and needlessly frustrated by researching details. The teacher is also likely to get irritated and bothered by questions during the workshop time, or sifting through a stack of projects with widely-varying quality.

Effective flipping for social studies should follow the Bloom’s Taxonomy levels by:
  • giving multiple convenient opportunities for students to gain essential “low-order” understandings (usually from video lessons)
  • expanding & clarifying those understandings with in-class discussions & brief activities (ex. short comic, tweetstorm) that students are prepared to join
  • opening up class time to practice skills by applying them in structured and informally-assessed activities AND learn more from primary or secondary sources by applying prior knowledge to find examples, counter-arguments, etc.
  • giving multiple opportunities to analyze the issue at a deep level, which all prior activities and lessons have been connected to and preparing for!
  • offering proficient students some class time to explore even more deeply by creating and/or evaluating the issue in some way

Thoughts? Complaints? Adulation? Rotten tomatoes?
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A flipping rewarding experience from last year

7/14/2017

1 Comment

 
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         The past school year was really hard for me, so it took a while for me to recall a specific flipping rewarding experience. The scars are still too raw.
         However, I can tell you about Tracey (not her real name of course). I first met Tracey as a 6th grader, when I was substitute-teaching for a colleague. She attended class only about half the time, and during her rare attendance Tracey was usually crafting little mice out of clay. Then she had whispered conversations between the clay mice on her desk. I am not kidding. (Yes, Tracey has an IEP and she is in a special-education program. I'm not sure it was the right one for her, but that's a separate topic.)
         The mice were gone but the struggles clearly remained for Tracey at the start of 8th grade. She was rarely prepared and comfortable enough to be a student, for various neurological and emotional reasons. When she was ready, though, this girl could rock it out! And when she felt ready and stable, at home or during a support class, she could watch one of my videos and absorb the whole thing in one sitting. It's the best version of cloning myself with videos: I was always there when she needed me.
         Tracey usually didn't take my formative assessments (quick quizzes of understanding from each video lesson), but she did answer my summative assessments, which require higher-order thinking about details from several videos and class activities. That's where I found proof that Tracey really met proficiency of the major unit standards ... in her own way.  All students had the option to type or handwrite their responses, and Tracey specifically asked me whether she could use GoogleDocs. I said sure. Then she asked "can I add a GIF?" and of course I agreed, but felt nervous: Was that a good idea? Oh, I forgot to mention that Tracey was obsessed with two things: Pokemon and cats.

Click the screenshot sample below to read Tracey's entire response (complete with animated GIFs!)
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I am absolutely certain that Tracey would never have gained this much information and understanding in a traditional model (class lectures, textbook assignments, etc.) or from another innovative style (PBL, group inquiry, etc.).  She produced four similar items, including one that showed some less-than-proficient comprehension about the Tea Party. But we talked about that misconception afterward, and she replaced a couple GIFs and sentences to fix those errors.

Unfortunately, some events in December-January seriously derailed Tracey's mental health. She was never as academically productive in 2017 as she had been the first months of the school year, and I will worry about this girl for years. They moved out of the district, and I can only wish the best for her in high school and beyond.  Still, she helped me learn another powerful dimension of the potential for flipped learning ... and animated cat GIFs!

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Trying something new for flipped mastery (part 2)

4/3/2017

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[This is a follow-up to a recent blog post from March 30]
      I declare this experiment a success!  I feel much closer to mastering mastery in my instruction.
       Last Wednesday, I gave the formative assessment  and scored it during class (while students explored a set of Jackdaws about the Lewis & Clark Expedition). Students got a brief message whether they passed the quiz or needed to retake it ASAP.  
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You can see a copy of the quiz at bottom of this post. Most students spent 8-10 minutes on it.
        The pie chart shows that a large majority (over 75%) gave proficient answers to all the quiz questions.  I think that's pretty good!!  A few of those students only needed to improve their understanding of one item, like defining "manifest destiny" or clarifying how the U.S. gained Texas and the Mexican Cession.  
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Retakes occurred during class on Thursday or Friday.  Every student ended up showing proficiency on this quiz, including kids who were absent on the quiz day.  Even students with learning disabilities passed this quiz, according to their IEP-appropriate modifications/accommodations.  For example, two students wrote most of their quiz answers on paper but needed more time; they both finished their quiz by answering orally with me later during class.
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When I returned the quizzes, I also gave copies of the grade chart in my earlier blog post.  Students learned they had 4 days (until Monday April 3) to answer the question How did the US expand west of the Mississippi River? I expect students to do this sort of work in their Schoology account but I announced that I would accept handwritten responses as well -- as long as I get them on-time!
     Most students submitted their pieces on Sunday (of course).  They were quite simple to grade because I was just looking for inclusion of manifest destiny (for B+) and some sophisticated analysis (for A).
        Above you can see that nearly half the class earned an "A" for their responses. I got some terrific pieces which compared US growth to Alexander the Great's conquests, or connected the "Make America Great Again" slogan with manifest destiny's appeal, or described significant differences between violent and peaceful acts of expansion. These were not "easy A's"!  
        About two-thirds of students earned A or B+ for attempting one of the "go-beyond" options.  Fifteen (the red wedge of the pie chart) either did not try to include manifest destiny OR just mentioned the definition vaguely without connecting it to the big idea of territory expansion.
        Eleven students ended up with a C grade, because they showed proficiency of the essential details but did not submit a response to the question:
  • 3 claimed that they wrote a response but forgot to submit it. Maybe true, maybe not. All three are typically strong students who would probably have done well.  They must keep the "C" for this item (a fairly small element of the trimester report card grade), and hopefully learn a good lesson about meeting deadlines.
  • 4 told me they forgot about the assignment completely. Bummer.  Again, there's a valuable lesson to be learned about deadlines and responsibility.
  • 4 other students didn't have a real explanation, but these are kids who struggled to pass that quiz in the first place. Two needed to retake the quiz on Friday, and one was absent most of last week.  The "C" grade fairly accurately shows their limited-but-proficient understanding of this topic. The fourth kid looked really sick during 1st period and probably felt gross all weekend, so I may arrange an extension for him.
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Trying something new for flipped mastery (part 1)

3/30/2017

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      When we were training to be teachers, the instructors gave us formal templates for lesson plans.  We dutifully filled in the sections for "Procedure" and "Hook" or "Set Induction," and maybe even included the relevant state standards.  Nowadays, my lesson planning looks like these scrawlings in a notebook, many pages getting written around 6 AM while I chomp on breakfast. 

       However, those scribblings led me to a new idea for implementing flipped mastery.
       I've been struggling for years with grading strategies for the formative assessments of understanding for the flipped video lessons; I call them "Need2Know quizzes" and I want students to retake them as needed, to at least gain proficiency of basic facts, terms, events, etc. 100%, 85%, 60%, 50% ... these are all numbers, and they're mainly arbitrary.
       Last week I kind of got called out in front of class by a girl in the back row: "I think these videos and quizzes and things are just about having to memorize stuff. And I watch them and remember it for the quiz the night before, but then it just goes out of my head." Other students were making the nonverbal hand gesture of agreement, so I knew this was a legitimate issue.  In my mind (and in my notebook scribbles), the Need2Know details have relevance for bigger questions, topics, skills, etc. ... but many students did not see the connection.  
What if the formative could be more directly linked to the summative?  That's how I arrived at the chart below:
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        The italicized question is this week's learning objective.  Wednesday they took the quiz, which I scored while they did an independent activity about the Lewis & Clark Expedition.  I returned the quiz with this chart on a sheet, and a circled letter grade.  Most students showed solid understanding, and I circled the C; some were confused about the meaning of manifest destiny, or they didn't accurately identify how the U.S. gained areas like Texas, Oregon, and California, so right now they have a D.  These grades are not permanent!
         To 'climb the ladder', the proficient students can begin work on their response (
1 or 2 paragraphs) right now. Some will take the time to aim for a higher grade by incorporating manifest destiny (which I have proof that they understand), and some will do what historians do: connect / compare / contrast to improve the story.  The "D" students had homework Wednesday night: revisit the video and improve their understanding.  Today they should be able to retry the quiz, which climbs them to a "C" grade.  That's the same grade as their peers earned yesterday. Is that fair? Well, the re-takers have less time before Monday to work on their response to the question.  Some might need more than one re-attempt, and it's technically possible that a student never proceeds beyond "D" if they don't gain proficiency of this topic. Sad but true.
         Monday is the deadline (unless I give extension to account for student absence). Your grade will depend on how much understanding you showed before Monday's class.  There must be a deadline. Those dates can be somewhat arbitrary too, but I can't juggle dozens of units and questions and assignments.  You might argue that "Retakes are not a part of the real world." I will dispute that directly another time (driving tests? SATs? marriage??), but I must agree that "Deadlines are a part of the real world":  April 15 is Tax Day, holiday shopping must get done before Xmas, and I have to plan lessons before class.  Even if that means getting up before 6AM to make sure they're done, and even if they look like the scrawlings of a serial killer....
[updates coming soon]

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    Who is this flipping guy?!

       Andrew Swan has survived 20 full years of teaching middle school (currently grade 8 US Civics/Government in a Boston suburb). Previously he taught 6th, 7th, and 8th grade English, US History, geography, and ancient history in Massachusetts and Maine. 
      For the past 7 years, Andrew has flipped nearly all his direct instruction to give more class time for simulations, deep discussions, analyzing primary sources, etc. ... and also to promote mastery for students at all levels.
      His wonderful wife and his 2 high school-age children indulge Andrew's blogging, tweeting, & other behaviors. These include co-moderating the #sschat Twitter sessions and Facebook page. 
      ​Andrew does not always refer to himself in the third-person. 

    Twitter @flipping_A_tchr
    Instagram @swanversations

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