When in doubt, talk it out

So, on the last day of Unit 1, I started informally polling the students. What could be done differently? Why can't you do better on the assessments? What can I do? What can you do?

I went back to the basics.....the kids can sometimes identify problems more easily than I can (I often over think things), and getting their input and acting upon it is the best way to get their buy in.

So, some of their suggestions weren't going to work, I was not giving up on the flip. No, I was never going to give them a word bank on the quizzes. NO, not even an English word bank. (Seriously!!)

Some were  great. Yes, I would number pages in the packet so that they could find things more easily. Yes, I will move supplemental materials to the back. (Because they refuse to look at them unless absolutely necessary.) Yes, I will go back to some warm up activities. (I thought they always hated those!)

I also made my own list. Maybe instead of using activities from texts, I should take the time to use the vocabulary in the exercises. (Honestly I was kidding myself that I wouldn't have to do that). When I have conversations with the students, I have to make sure I am forcing them to use unit vocabulary. (Sure it is more fun to talk about current movies and the football game, but they need to practice their new vocabulary too.) I also thought that maybe I should make each of them a  class calendar in addition to the assignment sheet and give them some time to plan the unit and how they want to break down getting the work done.

So, I made the changes, and the kids noticed! I am in this with the students, and it's great to remember that and for them to realize that too!

Flipping my classroom, why??

I wanted to start writing down my experience with the flipped classroom because I am learning so many new things everyday and I wanted to have a place to document what I have done, right and wrong, so that as I go forward I can continue to improve. I also want to share what I have done with others who are thinking about flipping, hopefully this will provide some help/support.

For anyone who finds this who wonders what flipping a classroom is all about, it is basically creating videos of your classroom lectures for students to watch at home and do what is traditionally thought of as homework during classtime.

When I first heard about this, I was intrigued because I knew that I needed to spend more time working on conversation and speaking with my students, but we spent so much time on grammar, I could never give it the attention it deserved. Also, I was giving my lectures using Power Point, and I felt like we wasted so much time waiting for some students to take notes. I had really had enough of "don't change it yet" and "I am still writing it down" and "go back" which of course was a small number of my students, but enough to hold up the rest of the class.

Last year, I also had to teach AP Spanish for the first time, and after going to the training to learn about the test, I realized that our students were in trouble. It wasn't that we hadn't been teaching them enough in AP, or even III, but that they hadn't been doing enough from day 1 in Spanish class.

This training was also eye opening because I realized that there were so many ways that the curriculum needed to improve. There were so many topics that were on the AP exam that we never even really got to in class, and there wasn't enough time to cover all of them during the AP class.

So, as I made my way through last year, I started looking for a new way to do things to optomize my classtime and include all of the topics and concepts that would help my students be able to be more successful on the AP exam if they decided to go that far.

So, at the CCFLT (foreign language) conference in 2010, my favorite German teacher and I attended some sessions together that led us to the idea that we should have thematic units instead of following our text to cover all the topics we knew we needed to get to. As we worked on that, I still searched for more, because being the teacher that loves technology, I knew that there had to be a way to get more done in a way that would appeal to the kids and me.

After much wasted time on the Internet, I stumbled upon the flipped class idea.

I started to think that this might work, an when I discussed the idea, I discovered that my dad, a science teacher, and a Chemistry teacher at my school were also considering the flip.

Luckily, Aaron and Jon, whose website we found, were having a conference last summer not far from home, so my favorite Chem teacher and I made the trek, and I don't think we have looked back yet!