How I Flipped My Classroom In All the Ways That Matter - Part 3 (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 third in a four part series outlining the contents of that presentation.]

Part 1 Recap: Teaching the way I was taught wasn't working. I started using Khan Academy in class. That helped. But I wanted more.

Part 2 Recap: I flipped my classroom for 2 years. That seemed to work better, but it wasn't great. I wanted more. Great. Now you're up to speed.

I thought I had changed some big things about how my classes operated and was only seeing small changes in the outcomes. But the truth is that I hadn't really changed all that much. Khan Academy simply took the place of worksheets and book assignments. The instant feedback was great. But for the students who didn't do the assignments in the first place, there was no feedback, instant or otherwise. For the most part, the same types of students who wouldn't do book assignments or worksheets also wouldn't do Khan Academy or watch videos online. The paint may have changed on the walls, but the underlying structure of my classes was still the same. I needed new ideas. I needed to shift my focus.

It used to be the case in education that really fundamental changes took a long time to get implemented at a large scale. Someone may have written a transformational book based on the most recent research, but unless enough of the right people who subscribed to the right journals read it, not much would change. At least not quickly. That was before the internet.

With the advent of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and many others, ideas get shared instantly billions of times each day.

I had joined Twitter a few years prior to this, but was only recently beginning to get much out of it. Very little of what I was seeing on Twitter was about trying this activity or teaching that method. Almost all of it was about questioning ideas that had become accepted as normal. This is what ultimately prompted me to think about making bigger changes to my teaching. Not changes about content delivery, per se, but changing assumptions. I was still assuming that the students who continued to struggle just didn’t want to learn and that there was nothing I could do about it. I rethought that assumption and started to think about what it would mean if instead I assumed that my students wanted to learn, and that the reason some of them were not learning was NOT about motivation at all. What if they just thought the instruction sucked?

Years ago I had started learning how to program web pages. My quest introduced me to a variety of programming languages and I have spent many hours working on pages and programs trying to make sure everything looked or worked correctly. The basic structure of writing code for web pages and other programs looks something like this;

• You have an idea.
• You do some planning for what you think the code ought to look like.
• You code it.
• You run it.
• You address the bugs you found.
• Repeat.

Coding stinks. It’s hard. It’s confusing. It’s challenging. You fail almost all the time, even when you have a fairly good idea of what you are doing. And once you get the code to work you feel AMAZING! But the odd thing about this process is that despite repeated failure, you will also typically experience new success at each stage. This is growth. This is LEARNING!

The single thing about programming that kept me engaged was the ability to check my code and address any problems with it immediately. Coding is not a one-and-done proposition. If it were, technology would not be advancing as quickly as it is. Learning is the same way. We must allow learning to be a process, not an event.

Based on my own experience with coding, I suspected that providing faster feedback combined with opportunities for students to fix their mistakes would lead to significantly more engagement. I had already seen this through Khan Academy. However, a critical and necessary part of this kind of learning environment is that students must feel that the mistakes they make are only part of the learning process and are not reflections on their quality as a student. Most of the time, by the time the student has their hand up, they already know their solution is wrong. They’re not looking for me to confirm it. They want to know what their mistake was and how they can fix it. WHICH IS GREAT!!!!!!!!!!! Let the computer be the jerk.

The environment must not only be physically safe, but intellectually safe. The students don’t care if the computer tells them they’re wrong because they know the computer isn’t judging them. I think many of our students still think we are judging them, as people, not students, and they are terrified because of it. Your students have to know that you care about them and their learning.