Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Opening thoughts

I have been challenged lately to start to put down my thoughts about what I am doing in my classroom. So here it goes.

After years of flirting with more constructivist practices in my own room, I began in earnest with a visit to Colorado last spring. I attended the Flip conference in Woodpark, CO, headlined by Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams, two pioneers in the flipclass movement. It was there I was exposed to flip class beyond the Khan Academy idea; flip as a philosophy focused on challenging students to take control over what and how deeply they learn. And also to encourage teachers to find ways to interact more frequently with all your students (the goal many participants gave was to interact with each student at least once every day). I walked away from the conference challenged and inspired to figure out how to integrate flip into my practice (and having some really great software from Techsmith to aid me).

But then I went into summer, where I began to understand the magnitude of what lay ahead of me and I chickened out. Well, actually, I spent a lot of time with my kids and enjoying Calgary's brief moments of actual heat which we call summer (and have to be enjoyed when they happen, otherwise they are gone and don't come back). I put the notions of creating a whole catalog of videos aside and concentrated on the challenge of blending all the of classes in one schedule, which was the proposed goal for my grade team that fall.

Fast forward to November. The blended classroom experiment failed with a whimper, (not a bang), and I was left looking at how to structure my own classroom and practice in a way that would bring about the innovation that I sought. Which led me back to flip.

I had done a lot of reading and observing (virtually) of how other teachers were doing flip. I was inspired by the examples of Mr McIntosh, Troy Cockrum, Brian Bennett, and many others, but I also wondered how I could make this method of teaching my own. I am not naturally excited about being on camera and was feeling cautious about importing teacher-directed methods to video and pretending it was the constructivist method I was seeking. The compromise I found was in creating a space for my students to understand what questions were being asked of them (by the provincial curriculum) and to explore the answers on their own terms. I put all of these questions up on our school wiki with each question linked to some resources and then explained how this process was going to work. I showed them the resources, I booked all the necessary computer time (iPads, with the GoSkyWatch app and one of our Computers On Wheels) and emptied our library of all astronomy related books.

So far we are only a couple of classes in, but interest is high, I am excited by the focus students are showing and I am able to add resources as we go (I created a video to help explain what question one was really about, as an example).

What I like about what we're doing is that my students are determining how they figure out the answers to the questions posed by the curriculum and that I get to see what they are doing each step of the way. That way if I see a common problem, I can address it for the entire class in the most appropriate way.

I'm sure there are issues and problems with how I'm approaching this and I would love your feedback.

1 comment:

  1. It was great having you. I look forward to hearing how this goes.

    ReplyDelete