"I am very interested in hearing more about how you will incorporate your flipped teaching into workshop model. I've seen other teachers do flipped learning, but the videos were strictly skill based. How do you get the deep conceptual understanding with a video? I'd love to hear more about this."
So I started to respond, but it turned out to be more of me working out my thoughts of the way I wanted to start planning for next year. I'm not quite ready to do that yet since I am not finished with the book and am taking another online course (a really great one by the way! Check it out here.) But I did think it would be better for a blog post in order to organize my thoughts since they were flowing pretty well!
Ok, so back up a bit. Last summer I "discovered" the flip classroom, hence the name of my blog! I really thought this was going to be the key for my students and my motivation behind it was to encourage more higher order thinking in my classroom by having more time to do so and also I won't lie, I thought it might help with behavior. I figured the less time they had to sit quiet and listen to me lecture in class, the less time they had to act up. In some ways it worked well, my videos were mostly just vocabulary notes and a very quick example of what we would be doing for that concept. It was a way for kids to copy the notes without doing it in class. They could go at their own pace and didn't have to wait for others to finish etc. I never really "taught" on the video and they never took ownership of the learning. I still had to teach in the classroom, they just had less notes to copy!
So, I still thought (think) the flipped model is beneficial, I just needed to work at it more, of course I didn't think I would get it perfect the first year. I saw that Dr. Lodge McCammon and Katie Gimbar were offering their online "Flipped Classroom Training Program" so I applied and got accepted into it. I really like their method of filming one take videos with the teacher in them, opposed to screencasts (which I was doing originally) and I thought that taking the course would help me become better at this.
During the course, I realized that the way I like to teach is with questioning and feedback from students. It was very hard to teach to a video camera! Dan Myer even questioned my motivation for flipping with his comment on my blog:
"I have got to learn to jazz them up since I am so used to interacting with my students during my lessons and I use a lot of questioning instead of telling during my lessons."
But isn't this an argument against flipping the classroom? You're saying you're trading "questions and interactions" with "telling and jazz" and it seems you're feeling troubled by that. So what else do you (or your class) get in that trade that makes the flipped classroom worthwhile?
But isn't this an argument against flipping the classroom? You're saying you're trading "questions and interactions" with "telling and jazz" and it seems you're feeling troubled by that. So what else do you (or your class) get in that trade that makes the flipped classroom worthwhile?
I have to say that made sense, I agreed with that comment, but something was still holding me on to the flipped classroom. That is what really made me think about what I need to accomplish in my classroom and how the videos were going to help me achieve those goals.
Finally, this is what leads me to my thoughts on flipping with workshop:
What i have learned so far with all of my PD this summer is that kids need to get their hands dirty working with those complex open ended problems, they need to construct their own understanding of the math. However, I know my kids and I know some of them need to first get those basic lower level skills down and have them modeled for them before they start playing with it. Some don't. That is why I am thinking that my videos will teach very basic "procedures" of a concept, along with trying approx 5 of those basic problems for homework. You know those very basic computation problems the textbook starts out with. When they come to class we will work on the workshop model in order for them to construct meaning for why we do those procedures and when to apply them. I am really looking forward to finishing the book and start digging into my planning!
Great post Robin. I really look forward to seeing how the flipped model plays out in your workshop. I have thought how great the flipped videos would be for absent students or those who need to go back and watch what happened a second time.
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