The only thing certain is change

Note: This blog has always been for my own reflection. I needed to get all of this out, but will understand if you don't want to read it. 

 I feel as though I have been struggling through the wilderness of my career. After 12 years at Elizabeth High School in Colorado, I have moved on. As I look back on it now, I should have done it sooner. I would not trade my time there for anything, but as I reflect, I now see things more clearly and hope others can relate. If my reflection resonates, please let me know.

1. The year before I left I was angry, actually ANGRY. Although I was one of the more senior staff members, it was made clear that I wasn't ever going to be considered for a leadership role. I had written curriculum, maintained the department standards as there was turnover and we dwindled to two staff members, and always volunteered to help with anything and everything. (Well, not the teacher vs. student volleyball game...I am NOT athletic). However, I FINALLY realized that nothing I did was going to move me to the leadership table. I could not even be named Department Chair. All I wanted was for my title to reflect the work that I had done and was still doing. 

2. My anger was my fault. I did not get into teaching for recognition. I knew what the school and district I was teaching in was like from the beginning. I knew that sometimes my mouth gets me into trouble (anyone who knows me can attest). It is a small district, and opportunities for advancement as a teacher were few and far between.  I was able to ask questions and give feedback and my principal had my back. I know that these are things that not everyone is lucky enough to have. If I felt unappreciated by the school or district, all I had to do was look at my students and parents and I would quickly see how much I was valued. I was looking in the wrong place for validation.

3. The longer you stay the harder it is to leave. Truer words have never been spoken. This is especially true in a small community where you can teach ALL the brothers and sisters. I had taught my two oldest children and got to hand them their diploma. Leaving is HARD. However, I think I had reached the point where I was looking for more from my career and my district wasn't able to provide it. I should have realized that sooner. 

So in the end we moved from Colorado in January of 2019. As it turned out, I was able to teach my students remotely for the remainder of the school year (which has come in handy now!). I left not for higher pursuits, but because my husband got a new job in Atlanta. We were happy because we wanted to be able to be closer to our older children who were at Auburn University, my brother in South Carolina and my parents in Florida. It is a move that has been good for everyone....bet you can't guess who has had the hardest time???

People, transitioning to a new school is hard! I spent the majority of the year feeling like a new teacher again. I moved from a district that handed me a book and said good luck to a district that has a curriculum map and common assessments. It has been a bit of a culture shock. I work in a department of 5 and my coworkers are all talented teachers. Just as I felt like I was hitting my stride, we shut everything down. 

Now I have decided to go back to what works for me. I am going back to the flip and I have plans of using it to require mastery (but of course, COVID again) but those plans will have to wait for another year. 

I am teaching Spanish 1, Spanish 1 Honors, and Spanish 2. I am recommitting to using the flip to help my students learn at a pace more comfortable for them and being able to better challenge my advanced students. 

2020 - The Year of Change. Let's do this. 

Being the champion for your students

There are times when as teachers we sit back and wonder why we continue teaching. More and more it feels as though we work for not just little pay, but little respect from the outside world. We are constantly working to find new ways to compete with all of the distractions in our students lives. We are trying to reach the students that seem unreachable, teach the students that can seem unteachable. Most importantly we try to give our students a base of knowledge, compassion, drive and the ability to think so they can be successful when they leave our classrooms, no matter what they choose to do later in life.

Of course in the education world driven by achievement and test scores, this often seems like an insurmountable task. As teachers we often look around and feel a sense of hopelessness because it doesn't seem like we are making a difference to anyone. We start to wonder if it is time for us to do something different-we can't imagine what. This is what drives teachers to be constantly changing and evolving what we do. To drive us to find our spark again. In 2011, this brought me to the flipped class movement.

As I look back now and reflect on how far I have come since that conference in Woodland Park with Jon Bergman, Aaron Sams and about 60 other interested flippers, I realize that the biggest change I made had nothing to do with my curriculum. My biggest change was the way I thought about my job and what I did. I stopped thinking that I taught Spanish. I don't teach Spanish at all. I teach students. 

My focus on teaching students is helped by the additional time I can spend with each of them in my flipped classroom. I am able to get to know them: how they learn, issues they are working through, challenges they face. Teaching students gives me the power to stop a lesson if someone asks an off-topic question that should be answered. To get side tracked in a good way to promote student thinking and questioning of their education and their life.

This last week I was reminded of the best part of teaching students - the influence that we have on them that sometimes we don't always realize. The best part is that sometimes these students manage to turn up right when we need them; right when we start questioning all that we do. This happened in a few ways for me last week. It started with a small thing, a huge hug from a student who senses you are having a bad day, students that bring you chocolate ice cream because they want you to have a good week, etc. Sometimes it is a Facebook friend request from a student that joined the military and wants to let you know how they are doing. Other times it is a student that contacts you to taunt you about a football rivalry, but also mentions that even though they are in college now, they learned more from you than in any other class.

Then, there are other students, the special ones that maybe you don't want to love, you know they are trouble. However they somehow find their way into your heart. They are the students you give a hard time to because you know that they can be more. The students that aren't making good choices, in school or in life, that you keep trying to get through to. The ones that other teachers, administration, and maybe even their parents don't know what to do with anymore. The ones that goes away for the summer and then doesn't come back. The ones that you find yourself thinking about and wondering about long after they are gone from your class and your school.

Sometimes these students show up out of the blue to thank you for what you did for them: for believing in them, for pushing them, even for giving them a kick in the pants when they needed it. These are the moments that we as teachers live for - to realize that we have truly made a difference. These moments, though often few and far between, can keep a teacher going for months or even years.

Teaching students is what we all do. Forging positive relationships not only makes a difference in our students' lives, but in our own. It is the reason why teachers go to school everyday, plan and grade in their free time, spend summers planning and learning. I think this quote sums up my perspective now more than ever. "Every child deserves a champion – an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be." - Rita Pierson

I will continue to strive to be that champion for my students. I don't know any other way to teach.

Student centered class through flipping

With the class time I have gained since switching to the flipped class, I am able to better meet the needs of all of my students. Before the flipped class, I would stand at the front of the class and lecture, then have students practice, then go over work and lecture some more. What I found was that I had three types of students in my class - the "Got It" which was about 30%, the "Almost There" which usually was about 50%, and the "Never going to get it" which was about 20%. 

Each of these groups present their own problems when lecturing to an entire class. The "Got It" kids often get bored and tune out as you try to help the "Almost There" group understand the material. The "Never going to get it" kids then start to feel hopeless because now you have explained a concept multiple times and they still don't understand. So this group will pretend to understand so they don't have to ask questions and put themselves on the spot. I just wasn't able to find a way to meet the needs of all of the students without some students being bored or frustrated. That is why I wanted to try flipped class - I needed to find a way to reach all of my students.

When I flipped my class, I was able to move the majority of the "lecture" to video. This way students could take as long as they needed to take notes. No one missed something because we had moved on and they were afraid to ask to go back or have something repeated. This meant that each student ended up with the same base of knowledge to work from when we started applying the lecture to the classroom activities.

Then, by changing the structure of my class time to allow every student an opportunity to work on assignments in a more self-paced manner over the course of a week, I found that students worked at different paces on different types of assignments. Some students were great readers, but struggled with listening. Others could write with ease, but couldn't put a sentence together in a conversation. So, by making classwork assignments assigned in a weekly time frame, rather than on a day-by-day basis, students were able to allocate their time across all of the activities and amazingly were finishing the week pretty much all in the same place. Students that needed to read a passage five times to gain the comprehension necessary could do so because they only had to do a listening selection one time to get the gist. This structure gave students a bit more freedom with their class time and I really saw an improvement in their comprehension of all of the modes of communication for all of the students. 

When the students could work individually (or in small groups) on tasks, I was able to better monitor students as they worked which enabled me to be able to see errors students make BEFORE they had made the same errors repeatedly. This also allowed me to do mini-lessons on an ongoing basis to address students needs, as well as able to give students the consistent encouragement that they need to be able to have to confidence needed to keep trying. 

Additionally, I have been able to use reading to be able to help students of different abilities all continue to improve. I love being able to work with students as they read and the make the connections with everything we have been learning and continue to make gains not only in their language proficiency but in their self-confidence. 

This year I am working on incorporating more Google Forms to help students get the additional help they need when working on classroom tasks so I can better meet the needs of each and every student. With Google Forms, I am able to give remedial instruction right away to students as they are working on formative classwork which (so far) allows them to more quickly realize and correct mistakes. I have just begun to work with this, but so far the results have been promising. 

Overall the flipped class enables me to focus on the individual students. Although I still struggle to find the time to have the individual conferences I would like to have with students on a quarterly basis, I have found more and more ways to help reach each student at their level and keep them engaged in class and language learning. Best of all, I see way more smiles now than the frustrated sighs I saw when I began teaching. ;)

Leaving teaching behind

Flipping my classroom has changed everything. It all began with trying to find a way to increase the fluency of my students and create a more rigorous Spanish program at my high school, but it has evolved into so much more. I have discovered so many great ideas and methods for incorporating not just the required information, but fun, real world based activities that the students love. It has become a personal journey of learning for me as well, and the best part of it all has been the people I have met along the way that have helped me continue to improve.

The biggest change for me through this whole process has been my discovery that I don't want to be a teacher anymore. Standing up in front of the class all day delivering content and leading class activities used to make me feel so happy. But, as I have continued teaching, I have realized that I just don't want to do that anymore. The traditional teacher role has brought me joy, and my students were all good enough at the content to be satisfied with their progress. During second semester, I picked up a Spanish I class, which I did not flip to maintain continuity with what their teacher had done with them the previous semester. I found that lecturing in front of the class was not where I was comfortable anymore because I knew how ineffective of a method this was.  Things change and new challenges present themselves, so choices have to be made.

I have accepted the challenge of being a facilitator and leave my teaching role behind forever. I have realized that my students can take control of their own learning and they many push themselves harder than I ever would. I understand now that to move past "getting through" my class to really "appreciating  and excelling", they need to be given the freedom to find ways to apply their learning to their life and I need to facilitate this happening, not dictate.

I am committed to doing this by giving students as much choice as possible in my class. As long as they can show me they are increasing fluency, I am not going to force them to conform to my ideas of fun. Let's face it, many times that are more creative than I am with their assignments, and only when that students start tapping into their creativity do they truly learn. I am moving aside to let my students be the "stars" of the classroom, and I think it is the best choice I have ever made.

Do you want to join me? Become a part of my PLN (personal learning network) and let's all work together to make our classes a place where students can express themselves with the content and surprise themselves with how much they learn because our classes are something the look forward to, not something they have to get through.

Looking for more information? Join #flipclass chat at 8EST on Twitter or #langchat on Thursdays at 8 EST on Twitter. Want more concrete information? Preorder the book Flipping 2.0 - Practical Applications for Flipping Your Class coming this August. This book is full of ideas for every content area, with a chapter by me dedicated to World Language! Select me as your author when you preorder.

Heather

Increase your World Language PLN today!

There are many things that make being a World Language teacher difficult, but I think the hardest part is a feeling of isolation. Often, World Language departments in schools are small, and like-minded collaboration is difficult. Additionally, there is little professional development for us at the school level. When schools have professional development, we often don't fit in. We aren't a core class, but we don't fit in with most electives either. So, for professional development, we head to local conferences as well as national conferences like ACTFL in the hopes of learning new techniques, gathering new materials and meeting new contacts to help us improve our classes.

Thankfully, we also have the magic of technology to allow us to find our own professional development. So, it is time to get out there and find your PLN (personal learning network) and get some great ideas to improve your class!

Blogs are great ways to learn new things. Best of all, they enable us to learn from the successes and mistakes of others to save us valuable time. I have a long list of blogs that I read (ok, sometimes I skim). The ideas on these blogs can save us hours of searching and writing our own plans. The teachers that write these blogs are always open to sharing ideas, making them a very valuable resource. (If you are a blogger, or know a great WL blog, please add it on the form at the end of this post!) Check out the list so far!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aob9qf9ypisidFMzLUxfNmF2b093OTNuc0YzMDNGdHc

Social media is another way to find great resources and other WL teachers to collaborate with. I know many people shudder at the thought of Twitter, I was always the same way. However, I have found that just with my small amount of activity, I have met some other great teachers, found some great resources and participated in some wonderful chats. If you are ready to give it a try, here are some great people to follow:

@SraSpanglish
@viajando_kj
@Riete
@espanoles2amigo
@SecCottrell
@Zjonesspanish

Great conversations happen quickly on Twitter. Here are some I like to try to participate in:

#flipchat is every Monday at 8EST
#edtech is every Sunday at 8EST
#langchat is every Thursday at 8EST

And of course, there are many webinars available. I have one on November 13, you can register here. I am also co-presenting in December 5th with French middle school teacher Ellen Dill, and you can register here. If you are interested in Project Based Learning, check out this one. You can find a webinar on just about anything if you look. Although I think it is best to do them live so you can ask questions, most are recorded so you can watch them when your schedule allows.

So, now that the weather is turning cooler (it snowed this week in Denver!) cuddle up to your computer and learn something new today!

Off to a great start in 2012 - Reflections on #flipclass chat from 7/2

First, if you are not a Twitter person, you might want to become one just to participate (or follow along) with the #flipclass chat every Monday at 8EST. Even if you can't make the chat, you can read the archive and get some great ideas. I am not big on Twitter, but this is a great resource.

The focus of the chat this week was getting the next school year off differently (and better) than last year. For new flippers, a great way to get started is a great letter for parents/students explaining the flipped class. Last year, I emailed one to every student and parent and then sent it home on the first day. Check mine out here. One of the great ideas from the chat was to create not just a letter, but a video to share with parents so they get a good feel for how the system works. I am going to have to add that to my To Do list for the summer.

Another idea from the chat was to use newsletters to send home to parents to keep them apprised of how class is going. I like the idea of doing this as a video created by the students so they can show their parents something they have learned in the target language. Think of how hard they will work to create this if they know I am sending it to parents! As a parent, I would be pretty impressed to get something like this from my kids teachers. This also addresses a problem I have been having with the Project Based Learning idea - having an audience. I am envisioning the students having to create a visual to go along with their speaking (skit, picture, PP slide) to help parents understand the meaning of what they are saying. The more I think about it, the more possibilities I see.

The topic of Back to School night came up, and the group started discussing the possibilities of flipping it. Of course, I was the one that saw this as a possible escape from this evening (but seriously, I teach mostly Juniors and Seniors, and hardly any of those parents come anyway!) However, in all seriousness, this is another opportunity to send home a video of what is going on in class. (I would be creating this one.) Since the flipped class looks so different from the traditional class, it would be a great window for parents to see it in action. I am thinking I would show the video on Back to School night and then email it to all the parents afterward. This idea works nicely with my goal this year of documenting students working in class through pictures and video. Just to be safe, I am going to add a line to my syllabus that informs parents that their students may be photographed and/or filmed in class which will be shared in the education community. (CYA, but a necessary evil.)

I am looking forward to experimenting with the new Camtasia 8 and trying out the closed captioning on videos. I can see endless possibilities for this. This could enable me to use video clips that I know are a little advanced and help the students with some captions to assist in teaching listening, which is always a goal. It would also be a great way to use a grammar video at various levels. For example, a video on the present tense in Spanish I would be spoken in Spanish, but have the captions in English. However, that same video in a Spanish III class would not have the captions. I have to do more investigating into this. It may be something for the Flipped Class 301!

Hope you all have a great 4th! Here in Colorado we will be without any fireworks since we are in so much fire danger. We still have 11 wildfires burning!