How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter - Part 1 (of 4)
[This past summer (2018) I had the opportunity to present at two different Indiana Department of Education Summer of eLearning conferences; the South Shore eLearning Conference hosted by School City of Hammond and the eVillage Conference hosted by East Porter County Schools in conjunction with eLeadNWI. The presentation that easily received the most buzz was my "How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter." This blog entry is the first in a four part series outlining the contents of that presentation.]
For years, the underlying structure of each day in my classes was essentially the same; go over questions from the previous assignment, lecture over the new lesson, and give students the next assignment. Lather, rinse, repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat... And I kept doing it this way for far too long because that was how all of my math classes were when I was in school. That was basically how all of the math teachers I knew taught their classes. That was just how math was supposed to be taught. Or so I believed.
As a result, many students were bored. Many students were not paying attention. And many students would not do the assignments. For a couple of years, I could justify this result by believing that the disengaged students were disengaged because that's just what that group was like. They would be replaced by the next class and that class would be better. And while each year I would get students who would do well, there were always students who were bored, inattentive, and generally disengaged. I was teaching my classes like my teachers taught theirs when I was in school and it wasn't working for my students even though it had worked well for me.
About 6 years ago, Hebron was in the process of transitioning to a 1:1 environment. The 8th grade would pilot chromebooks for one year, and, barring any significant problems, the high school would adopt chromebooks the following year. As part of this process, those of us on the committee to implement this change were involved in frequent meetings. Some would be after school, but many would take place during school, pulling a handful of teachers out of the classroom.
One morning, as I was sitting in the Board Room waiting for such a meeting to begin, I was thinking about what I could differently in my classes that might increase student engagement and, by extension, student learning. One thing I had going for me was that there was a computer lab connected to my classroom. I had used this lab before back when I was also teaching Web Design. The lab had 28 tower computers in it. This allowed me to get a little more creative with how I could solve this problem. We were spending a lot of time talking about putting powerful technology in the hands of students all day long and I had similar technology next to my students all day long.
I was familiar enough with Khan Academy at the time to know that I could probably find skills for most of what we would be covering in class. I searched the available content and made lists of which skills on Khan Academy correlated to the course content we were covering at the time. Then I had to create instructions for how students should log in and access the skills. And all of this had to be done before the meeting began. Thankfully, I was able to put all of this together and email directions to the high school office to share with my sub before the meeting started. So, thank you Khan Academy for making it easy.
I felt good moving forward using Khan Academy to help students practice the skills from class. They would be using the available technology. They would be able to use it the following year when they had chromebooks. They would be getting instant feedback on the questions they answered. They would have remediation available to them whenever they needed it. Class would be something other than me talking about math for a while.
In the end, using Khan Academy did lead to increased student engagement, motivation, and learning. But you can almost guess where I saw the most improvement. Of course, the most improvement was among the students who were already doing well. Those students who are going to do the assignments no matter what format they are in. Khan Academy helped them do a little better. And there were some of those "middle of the pack" students who also improved. This left me with an important decision to be made. It would have been easy to see this modest improvement in results and be content that I had solved the problem. But the underlying problem remained. There were still students who were bored, inattentive, and generally disengaged, just fewer of them. In the end, this wasn't much of a decision. I had already seen learning increase by making some changes into how my classroom operated. What other changes could I make to get even more?
There was more work to be done.
For years, the underlying structure of each day in my classes was essentially the same; go over questions from the previous assignment, lecture over the new lesson, and give students the next assignment. Lather, rinse, repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat... And I kept doing it this way for far too long because that was how all of my math classes were when I was in school. That was basically how all of the math teachers I knew taught their classes. That was just how math was supposed to be taught. Or so I believed.
One morning, as I was sitting in the Board Room waiting for such a meeting to begin, I was thinking about what I could differently in my classes that might increase student engagement and, by extension, student learning. One thing I had going for me was that there was a computer lab connected to my classroom. I had used this lab before back when I was also teaching Web Design. The lab had 28 tower computers in it. This allowed me to get a little more creative with how I could solve this problem. We were spending a lot of time talking about putting powerful technology in the hands of students all day long and I had similar technology next to my students all day long.
I was familiar enough with Khan Academy at the time to know that I could probably find skills for most of what we would be covering in class. I searched the available content and made lists of which skills on Khan Academy correlated to the course content we were covering at the time. Then I had to create instructions for how students should log in and access the skills. And all of this had to be done before the meeting began. Thankfully, I was able to put all of this together and email directions to the high school office to share with my sub before the meeting started. So, thank you Khan Academy for making it easy.
In the end, using Khan Academy did lead to increased student engagement, motivation, and learning. But you can almost guess where I saw the most improvement. Of course, the most improvement was among the students who were already doing well. Those students who are going to do the assignments no matter what format they are in. Khan Academy helped them do a little better. And there were some of those "middle of the pack" students who also improved. This left me with an important decision to be made. It would have been easy to see this modest improvement in results and be content that I had solved the problem. But the underlying problem remained. There were still students who were bored, inattentive, and generally disengaged, just fewer of them. In the end, this wasn't much of a decision. I had already seen learning increase by making some changes into how my classroom operated. What other changes could I make to get even more?
There was more work to be done.
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