September 2015

• hottest opening day ever (93 degrees!)
• first video assignment: How to Watch a Video (that turned out to be a good idea)
• postponed teaching historical content in favor of SHEG activities about historical thinking
• two middle-of-the-week Jewish holidays interrupted the calendar (no 5-day weeks!)

October

• field trip on Friday Oct 2 cancelled by big cold rainstorm
• had to 'tread water' for 3 weeks until we could re-schedule the trip to the 30th
  • I think video assignments were too long and heavy on details
  • disconnected in-class activities didn't help, but my mid-October plans hinged on the field trip!
• then I got sick on the day of the trip (a respiratory flu)

November

• slogged through the first week while sick...
• then the Veterans Day and Thanksgiving holidays busted the calendar
• I don't really remember this month, but I think it was when I first heard the Hamilton soundtrack album! So that wasn't not a total loss.

December

• end of the 1st grading term, so I gave a structured reflection assignment
  • got some helpful student feedback that I blogged about afterward
• re-arranged the Declaration of Independence rewrite task to give variety of output options 
  • still one of my best videos....
  • got some very good projects, especially the song lyric rewrites
• the teaching assistant I had for 2 of my 4 classes quit to take a long-term substitute teaching job ....

January 2016

• .... her replacement was much less effective -- I was basically on my own for the last 6 months
• We made the Leutze painting re-enactments that made me semi-famous on the interwebs this month
• I got philosophical and reflective, inching toward a rabbit hole this month.
• shook up my assessment procedure with very encouraging results  ...  but after two more rounds it was clearly impractical 

February

• I became even more alone (after the TA departure) when my content partner got pneumonia at the start of this month. She was knocked out until March!
• now things really went off the rails:
  • an unexpected snow day on Friday the 5th ... and then another on Monday the 8th!  
  • Stoopid 4-day weekend before the scheduled week-long vacation.
  • Better than the previous winter's snowmageddon, but still had a big impact on my planning
• Here I was on Valentine's Day trying to convince myself it's gonna be okay. Sad boy.
• Disneyworld on vacation week!  That was the only 5-day stretch of no work since ... um .... probably 3 years ago.

March

• still kind of flailing after the vacation, because I saw the year's end rushing toward me with just 11 teaching weeks left to go
• finally, though, I think we got the 19th century unit under control
  • I used a set of Hamilton songs to help us zoom through the tumultuous 1790s, with mixed results but I know how to fix that next year.
  • The 19th century key was a set of thematic timelines, which I will probably blog about later this summer.

April

• big highlight for students: the 2-week Pioneers simulation -- it's like a real-life Oregon Trail game
  • I made some significant changes, but the core is what I blogged about in 2015
  • This time, though, I flipped the groups' trail decisions so they could consider and discuss the choice outside of class time.
  • However, a big consequence was losing the skill focus. In 2015 it was discussion participation; in 2016 it was.... nonexistent. Oops.

May

• another blur of a month, with standardized testing in the morning of 7 days
• got back to skills with a pair of decent research activities which were pretty well-connected to the flipped videos (19th century reformers, American slavery)

June

• the long good-bye for 8th graders, with Step-Up Day and a 3-day out-of-state trip punctuating the month
• the "working for stickers" Civil War mini-unit was at least as successful as in 2015 -- maybe I can start the school year with something similar in September/October?
• last day: Thursday June 23   ---    byebye for now, room 212!

      Yikes!  It has been far too long since my last fresh blog post. I have been thinking and writing, but not so much online lately. During the February Vacation week, I changed my early-morning routine to avoid computer time during breakfast.  Instead, I started journaling while slurping my cereal on pages like the scrawling you see on the right. ----->
       I have been teaching nearly half my life (!) and flipping for almost 3 years. However, I still feel insecurity and uncertainty from time to time. Can't imagine what this is like for newbies! In this journal page you can see my struggle to establish routines and patterns for my Social Studies class.  Basically, that's the model I have adopted this month and I plan to write more about it in here soon.
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          Anyway, the main inspiration for today's post was a recent piece by Jon Bergmann about "Why Student Centered Learning is Only Half Right."  It reminded me why my colleague and I started this method in the first place.  We tried for years to encourage independence with creative projects like research and simulations. We had a fervent desire for our 8th-graders to lead their own learning, while we operated as coaches and guides.  However, there's some information that you just gotta know in every subject. When our students produced glossy, fancy, unique pieces of crap that showed serious misunderstandings, these self-directed experiences seemed like educational malpractice. At best we were the ignorant bystanders to a crime; at worst, we were accomplices or perpetrators.  What's the point of an illustrated "travel brochure" to an imaginary island if the student can't identify the direction of north?!*

* inspired by a very true and very sad story

          I hope Jon Bergmann doesn't mind me borrowing the image above. It's such a terrific illustration of our efforts to find balance between didactic "traditional" instruction & libertarian "free-range" schooling. The teacher DOES know things the students do not know.  The student can first show understanding (provided as many times as necessary in a video or audio recording) and then the student can apply/analyze/evaluate those basics in various ways.  
          As Jon Bergmann concluded, "Flipped Learning is a way to foster greater student ownership of learning while at the same time valuing and encouraging curriculum."  I can liberate class time from nearly all direct instruction, and I can avoid the pitfalls of textbook reading assignments (valuing and encouraging the curriculum); my students can gain ownership of learning with meaningful activities under my supervision like role-playing​, document analysis, individual research tasks, etc.  
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        Okay okay, I am calmer now. Things are gonna be okay. The previous post contained some despair and self-doubt. I omitted the fact that my teaching colleague has been sick with pneumonia for over two weeks. Last year I wrote about the importance of flipping with a partner; she is a crucial collaborative planner and sounding-board. Without her I have been spinning my own wheels and trapped in my own head. Nevertheless, I turned a corner last week, with help from my wife and from a flipping role model.
        After I blabbed at her for a few minutes on an afternoon dog-walk, she reminded me to consider what's really important: critical-thinking skills > factual information.  Accountability for video-watching is still important, but perhaps we had over-emphasized the assessments of understanding facts.
        The next day, Jon Bergmann appeared on a #reflectiveteacher chat. I seized the moment to ask him:

         BOOM. Don't expect solid factual understanding right away.  Just check their notes.  
       That can mean various things and depends on amount of class time, age/skills of students, and video content. If you have 11th graders in a block-scheduled Chemistry class, then you might individually verify students' well-formatted notes of formulas and chemical reactions. In my case, I have short class periods (45 minutes), middle-school students who are still learning note-taking strategies, and ~10-minute history videos that tell a story and/or explain a concept. So "checking notes" might vary from assignment to assignment, and I have little class time to do so.
       I tried an informal self-assessment by displaying 5 sentences on the screen, labeled A B C D E. The direction was "Write the letter of each true sentence" by thinking and working independently. They could use their notes to help decide, and meanwhile I walked around the room to observe. Who did/didn't have a sheet of notes? By now I know which students need an extra look, and which can probably fly through the task. I was also looking at the letters they wrote. "I hope you chose A and C," I announced after about 2 minutes. "If not, then your notes might not be good enough."  Then I assigned seat partners to rewrite sentences B, D, and E to make them correct.  We spent class time that day and the next day to synthesize, simulate, and discuss the video topics.
       The "real" assessment came two days later. I will write more about the details another time. These questions were higher up the Bloom's taxonomy scale than my quizzes used to be.  They are also "non-Googleable" so I allowed students to use their notes. "Why were some people afraid for America's future in the 1780s?" (Yes, you get some hits when you Google that question, but the articles are unfriendly to 8th-grade readers, even the Wikipedia link.)
          My experiment was marred by external factors. We had two unexpected and consecutive snow days on Friday the 5th and Monday the 8th, and this coming week is a school vacation. That killed the intended flow from homework video to class activities to basic assessment and beyond. I must wait until the end of the month to restart the process.

          Below you can see the diagram that I used to illustrate these ideas for my students:

      If this blog is an authentic representation of my experiences with flipped teaching/learning, then I can't just write about the good times and successful lessons. The past few days have required significant soul-searching -- not quite to the point of abandoning this method, but certainly reconsidering some elements. I propose 3 new questions of humanity to replace Gauguin's famous trio:

• What the #@$& are we doing?
• Why the #@$& are we doing this?
• Where the #@$& is this class going?

      Any teacher who can confidently answer those three philosophical quandaries is in a happy place.  I'm trying to find my way back.

        I'm not quite sure where the angsty-ness came from. It creeped up on me like one of those gigantic Australian land crabs. I've tried various strategies to get/feel/be healthier: going to bed earlier, journalling during breakfast instead of schoolwork/email, drinking a little less wine/beer/port/vodka/cider. Dammit, I'm even riding a stationary desk-bike while I type right now.
        A couple weeks ago, I blogged proudly about assessing students' understanding orally.  Today, about halfway through period 2, I realized that I just can't sustain it.  This was my 3rd attempt, and I never make it through the entire class list within 40 minutes. I have 6-8 more students in every class to assess tomorrow, plus a few others who really didn't perform well today and will be asking to make corrections. It's a 3-alarm dumpster fire of a problem. This failure is disappointing on many levels, not least of which is the shame of trumpeting a useless strategy....

       Maybe teachers of other disciplines don't struggle with this, but I often find it difficult to prioritize my teaching topics -- what is truly essential and video-worthy? vs. what are the high-order levels that should stay in the classroom?  There are so many topics & sub-topics to each period of American History ... more than I expect for 9th-grade algebra or 7th-grade chemistry, but perhaps I'm totally off-base about that.
       I'm just going to end with that for now. My legs hurt. The kitchen smells good and I want to go to there.