I always liked the idea of jigsaw activities (good description here) -- to give students more ownership of their learning, to use class time differently, to invite some creativity, etc. The Expert Groups meet for 1 or 2 or 3 class periods to learn about a sub-topic and to prepare a short presentation about it. Then students break into the Home Groups to spend another class period or two teaching each other. However, in real life these activities can get messy very quickly: 

• Some students read their material more slowly than others; other students rush through the individual work in their Expert Group. 
• The volume level in the classroom distracts some students as they try to learn their topic for the first time.
  
• What about students that were absent on the learning day? Jigsaws typically take 2 or 3 days to complete, so you get the problem of a student who missed the time in their Expert Group... what's he/she supposed to do now??

     If you flip it, then the Expert Groups can learn their material outside the classroom. Give them a couple nights to watch / listen to / read whatever you provide. Each student takes the time he/she needs, in a more appropriate location, regardless of their attendance at school. The small group peer pressure should help ensure that most or all come to class prepared. Let the Expert Groups meet briefly (less than a class period) to prepare and align their mini-presentations -- this is an important quality assurance step.  Then break student into the Home Groups and let the teaching begin!  
      
     The Civil War Trust has a fantastic set of informational videos about various aspects of the war.  Last June, I used these topics for the Expert Groups in a flipped jigsaw. I'm very glad that I assigned such short videos, because students re-watched them to improve their understanding.  We use Schoology, which allowed me to individually assign videos. On a regular website you could list all the video links on the same page, and then list the names of individuals or groups next to their assigned video.

   I love tonight's #flipclass focus: how can we address our students' mental health, while still doing our jobs.
    For one thing, I also give at least 2 (usually 3) nights for video-watching homework assignments -- no more than two per week. That helps to address potential technology access problems, but also it allows for my students' crazy over-scheduled lives. It's really not their fault if the hockey rink isn't available until 8pm, or they have to travel 1 hour every Wednesday to the other parent's house, etc.
    Regarding projects, this year I tried something new that appears to be working. It's kind of weird, so please don't hate me immediately ... Students don't have to make a final draft. In fact, they MAY NOT turn in a typed, polished finished product. I want dog-earred copies of notes, scrawled and scribbled outlines, pen mixed with pencil -- whatever they could do in 4 or 5 class periods!
    

    Here's the link to the assignment handout. This is a flashblog, so I don't have time to add lots of details now, but I would be happy to answer follow-up questions in the comments section!

         I have tried eight or nine different video formats this year, and I still don't have a clear-cut favorite. Sometimes I think the topic helps to determine the most appropriate format.  I also have a personal rule that no video should take more than 2 hours to create (preferably closer to one hour), to prevent myself from going overboard.
         Below you can see two versions about the same topic: George Washington's presidency. I spent the most time preparing the script, distilling those 8 years to the most essential elements, and using a thematic approach rather than a pedantic chronology of events.
         I first recorded the video on the left -- with a school-supplied Macbook in my son's bedroom (because it was the quietest place in the house that afternoon!). This is my second take. Clearly I need a hair stylist but that's not in the budget. I spent about 20 minutes with iMovie to add the text captions and to trim out some bad takes.
         The right-side video was made using Screencast-o-Matic to capture the screen display. What you see is a Word document. I changed the font color for each box to white (starting at the end). Then I clicked the Undo button as I talked through the presentation to show those words. This video was recorded in my car on another afternoon, while waiting for my son at a sports practice. I think the laptop microphone sensitivity was set too high, which explains the crackling audio.

           My students have never seen the video on the left. Instead, I linked the "boring" video on the right. To my surprise, all my teaching assistants and several students told me they appreciated that format. It's clear, easy to follow, free of distractions, and informative enough to tell what they needed to know -- in about 9 minutes.

           And below you can see the corroborating data. If you're really curious you can see the questions here. 68 students (82% of my class) gave satisfactory answers to every question. 6 students needed to re-attempt at least one question, and 8 other students still need to do the same. That's a well above-average success rate. Best of all, the students' preparation led to a terrific set of class conversations about issues like the Whiskey Rebellion, the French Revolution, presidential power, Alexander Hamilton's monetary policy, and other topics that would probably bore my wife to tears....

          The moral of this story: You really don't need fancy videos to produce strong student learning.

       A recently published study from Brigham Young University is making the rounds on #flipclass. Yeah, I read the whole thing, not just the headlines or the abstract. The basic results report no statistical difference in learning between freshman biology students whose class was flipped vs. a more traditional class by the same professor. The authors conclude that active-learning strategies are more valuable than providing "costly" online instruction.  Yikes. Have I just been wasting my time??

       Oh, NDT, I can't stay mad at you! And of course you're almost always right, except #thedress is absolutely blue and black.
       But anyway, the study in question was not an astrophysical or climatological observation -- it was a contrived long-term experiment. I know, that's how science works. The authors make a good case in the first pages about the not-very-sciencey aspects of prior research which had no control group and/or included too many variables.  A well-designed experiment is almost as good as a toasted bacon sandwich (high praise!), but I have some reasons to disregard and devalue this BYU study:

1. The class studied was a college-level course, which meets three times per week. The dynamics of a college course are widely different from what I experience as a day-to-day middle school teacher. Furthermore, the class size was almost 60 students; I teach four groups every day, with between 19 and 24 in each section. Again, that difference produces very different dynamics in the classroom.
2. A major reason why I started flipping was to enhance connections with parents and with special education staff. My students' support group of adults get quite familiar with what & how I am teaching this week. That is generally not an issue or a need for college students, who are probably not getting academic support from their parents (?!) and no longer have an IEP. The bar graphs of exam results for "nonflipped" and "flipped" appear level in this study, but I believe that if I ran a similar study then the nonflipped score average would be much lower.
3. The study authors did not analyze or even comment about the length, the quality, and the specific nature of the professor's online videos. Garbage in, garbage out is a common IT saying. Some flipping lessons you find out there in Youtube-land are dull, pedantic, and unwatchable!  If the professor's video lessons were not really comparable with class lectures in educational value, then it's remarkable that the "flipped" group performed as well as they did!  Flipping teachers are still learning details of the best format, filming approach, interactibility, etc. of our online videos. There's more than one way to skin this cat, and this study should have been more specific about the online instruction provided to its experiment subjects.
4. Note that the formative assessments for the flipped group were performed during class, presumably with supervision to ensure academic honesty. However the chart on page 3 and subsequent descriptions show that the nonflipped group took some assessments outside of class, where they might have been able to check their notes, a website, etc. for helpful information! That would not impact the graph of unit exam performance, but it may certainly skew some of the other data and it could have improved those students' attitude toward the course. (Easy quizzes!)
5. I am also left to wonder: How did this college professor use the extra 15-20 minutes of class time with the flipped group when he/she wasn't lecturing?!  The real-life difference between the two courses is not described clearly enough for me to understand them. 

So anyway, I will keep doing what I'm doing: teaching the best way I can.  I don't make any cash from flipping. (In fact, I would probably make more if I spent more time tutoring and less time blogging!)  If science can develop an even better way to do what I need to do, then I will jump ship faster than the speed of light ... just to see what Neil DeGrasse Tyson would do about it.