Sustaining the flipped instructor

We addressed this topic some in the flipped learning SlackChat last Tuesday:

The topic for this week's #flipblogs chat is similar:

I'll start with the more general thoughts I had in response to the SlackChat question, then address the more specific bits of the #flipblogs prompt at the end.

Little hands are...not so helpful.

The first thing that came to mind when I read the chat/blog prompts was this:

Spending quality time nursing and holding my baby/toddler and talking with my 6-year-old about the things that are important to 6-year-olds is all important to me, but to make sure I can participate well in that (rather than passively nodding at whatever the boy says while I'm actually composing a video script in my head), I also need child-free time to do the "stuff" a flipping teacher does outside of class time: write learning goals, plan and record videos, put together group space activities, mark papers (uncrumpled or torn by tiny hands), and so on.

Remember this guy?

The kids crashing this professor's interview on TV was cute, but I think I could only get away with my kids showing up in one of my videos by accident once before the cute moment of levity would become an annoying distraction to students trying to focus on the material, even if I didn’t lose my train of thought and go off-script with them around. (Maybe I could get away with including them intentionally if I gave them roles, but I doubt the baby/toddler is ready to cooperate with me on that front!)

I am trying to get myself firmly in the mindset that I need to do my recording at school, and I have indeed finally managed to record a video there. (I happened to get it edited and uploaded there, too, but normally I think I’ll be able to do those bits at home.) I’m trying to fight through the “perfastination” I mentioned in my last post, and just “get it done” instead. Hey, score one for progress due to reflective blogging :). (I'm also getting closer to having the setup I really want at school, but I was able to get that video recorded using an intermediate kind of setup just fine.)

A fishing coach...or, rather, a community of fishing coaches

You know the saying: “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” Matthew Moore made this excellent point in his post on Sept. 27:

"In the end the biggest barrier to successful flipped learning is not having someone willing to take the time to teach you how to fish."

I still only know of one other person at my school who is flipping (there may be others I just don't know of yet). He just got started this year, although he's wanted to start flipping for several years now, so we're probably not too different in terms of our background knowledge about flipping the classroom. When you want to get better at something, though, it really helps to be able to draw on the experience of experts in that "something." A good expert can explain what he does to be effective in his own practice. A good expert coach can also support you in your own journey, helping you to troubleshoot when you run into obstacles and providing encouragement when you get frustrated with or disappointed in your progress.

I am very thankful that many in the flipped teaching community are this kind of coach. I've read Flip Your Classroom by Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann, sure, and I've taken the Level - I certification course and am working on both Level - II and the trainer certification courses. Really, though, for inspiration, motivation, encouragement, and help with troubleshooting, the chats on Twitter and Slack have been invaluable. Lately I've been trying to check into the #flipclass Twitter chat (every other Monday at 8pm Toronto time), the Flipped Learning Network SlackChat (every other Tuesday at 9pm Toronto time), and the #flipblogs Twitter chat (every other Wednesday at 8pm Toronto time). To those of you reading this who participate in those chats, thank you for helping to boost my fishing skill :)!

Stakeholder support

For my flipping to be sustainable, I also need buy-in from most of the students and their parents, and I'd also need support from my admin team if a challenge were ever raised over my using this nontraditional approach. I can point to the research that supports flipped instruction, and to the positive response from previous students, but if I ever got a lot of serious resistance to flipping from students, parents, colleagues, and/or my admin team, I know there’s only so long I'd be able to fight before I’d be worn down and feel defeated. Fortunately, I don't foresee this kind of massive resistance on the horizon at all, and I'm looking forward instead to seeing what the students and I can accomplish with the support we have.

More specific thoughts for #flipblogs

Tools & tech:

All my students are very familiar with Google Classroom. This is my first year using it, but having a platform the students already know how to use to access content is fantastic. It's also been handy that my department has a cart that holds 15 notebook computers.

I continue to find it helpful to use Camtasia to record on my personal laptop -- this is what I saw being used by the first flippers I met, so that's what I imitated, and now I'm hooked. I also continue to use an AverVision document camera and a Blue Snowball microphone I bought myself about 4 years ago when I started experimenting with flipping.

When I get my lightboard set up, I will likely record the video with my Canon T1i but continue to record the sound with the Snowball hooked up to my laptop -- an early trial to see if I'd be able to get the audio and video to sync up right went well, thankfully. I'll save any further lightboard tech details for a post I'll make once it's actually up and running workably well, but I'm getting close (I have to prioritize getting some marking done first).

There are other tools I've put on my "things to try" mental list as they've come up in the aforementioned blog posts, training, Twitter chats, etc., but I think that's all I've been using so far.

Ideas & beliefs:

I suppose I should work on my ability to communicate my philosophy of education on demand, because questions like this tend to make me feel a bit like a deer caught in the headlights. Here are some ideas I can articulate, though I'm probably forgetting some:

Relationships with the students are one key to their learning. Flipping can create time to better develop those relationships. (Ergo, flipping is worth pursuing, despite the work involved.)

Spending time in class on a lecture can be a huge waste of time. Students don't need their friends around them to listen to one person (me) talk. Any time spent on shushing them is time that could have been better spent (on a more active learning activity, for example).

Assessment that is based on learning goals can be very powerful, if done right, allowing you to communicate with students, parents and all other stakeholders exactly what they need to improve to increase their standing in the course. (Ergo, it's worth making the extra effort to have gradebook entries that don't just look like "quiz 1," "test 1," "assignment 1," and so on.)

Flipping can make more time for more natural formative assessment, as the teacher can check in with each student in an informal way more frequently than she can when part of each class period is taken up with a lecture. This also means more time to provide support during class time to students who need it -- students who may not come to any extra help session offered outside of class.

Flipping can be a great way of differentiating your instruction to meet students' needs, giving them easy access both to a way to control the pace of the lesson (speed through it if they feel they really get it, or pause every so often and slow things down if they need additional time to process each "chunk" of information) and to repeat a portion of the lesson as much as is helpful to them. This can all be beneficial both to students with special education needs as well as those whose first language is not the language of instruction. (Ergo, my responsibility to meet the needs of all my students kind of demands flipping.)

Students need better resources for review before quizzes and tests (and for any reassessment of learning goals being reattempted) than just being told to go over their notes and relevant sections of the textbook. For students who can't or won't take advantage of extra help opportunities face-to-face, videos by the student's teacher chunked into segments can provide a great way for students to do a just-in-time review of the knowledge and skills where they are lacking.

Fellow flippers, what beliefs drive your decision to flip? Those who do not (currently) flip your instruction, are these beliefs in line with yours, and if so, are you satisfied with your current means of addressing them?

"Perfastinating" in flipping

I have invented a word our language needs.

For context, here is the series of tweets that leads up to and includes the moment at which this word entered my lexicon:

I know that I am far from the only person who suffers from bouts of perfastination. I know this partly because I made a Facebook post about it and immediately started hearing from others familiar with the condition:

I made brief reference in a previous post to the obstacle that perfectionism poses to my ability to do flipped instruction well.

I want my flipping to reflect learning-goal-based instruction and assessment, so I put off flipping until I've got a great set of learning goals written in student-friendly language, set up in a way that meshes workably well with the textbook my colleagues and I are using (especially given that my department does common unit tests), and with an accompanying assessment scheme that meshes well with the categories of achievement I'm required to use in my province. In other words...until I have a perfect plan of instruction and assessment in place.

I've been introduced to the concept of a lightboard and seen it used effectively by Jon Bergmann in part 1 of the certification course available through the Flipped Learning Global Initiative, so now I've somehow decided it's super important that I use a lightboard in my flipped videos, and researching information and materials to build myself a perfect lightboard without spending thousands of dollars is perhaps getting me more sidetracked than it should (but once it's done, oh my, will it ever be great...right??).

I'm still in the experimenting stage of lightboardery.
I'd like to improve my lighting, for one thing.
Interestingly, I've not seen an image yet of a woman
teaching at a lightboard...why is that?

The problems with "perfastination"

What's getting me closer to giving up this "perfastination" is reflection on its impact. There are at least three problems with "perfastinating" flipping in these ways that I can see:

1) Not flipping means I'm trying to get by with traditional teaching in the meantime, with all its attendant problems.

I've already written a post about problems solved by flipping (and so have many others). The flipping I have done in the past didn't yet have a solid foundation of learning goals and was not done using a snazzy lightboard, so why shouldn't I at least do what I can while I keep working behind the scenes to improve?

2) Perfastinating discredits the great stuff I've already done in previous flipped lessons.

Students have learned from the flipping I've already done -- even the early videos that had awful sound, awful tablet writing, awful lag from the document camera, and even an entire section I forgot to edit out (my students did ask why I'd kept repeating myself in a certain part of the video, but ultimately they shrugged it off and kept watching). It doesn't have to be perfect to do good for the students. If I really believe even the imperfect flipping I've done has been more helpful for students than a traditional lesson on the same material would have been, I should embrace that imperfect approach for now, for their sakes.

3) Perfastinating sets up a standard that is impossible to expect from others, and thus kills a tiny part of the momentum of the global movement.

I'm working on my flipped trainer certification. I'll be running a PD session for some interested teachers at my school next month on the flipped classroom. Am I going to tell them they have to do it perfectly or not even bother at all? Of course not! I need to give them an achievable vision for how they can start. I can point to my own small beginnings from my early days of flipping, and talk about how I've grown in my flipping over time -- and I can tell them that while I'm still not perfect in my own implementation of the model, I'm growing, and the students and I will grow together. (And as more people get on board the flipped classroom train, there will be more of us to hep each other along!)

Actually, that reminds me of another part of Wednesday's chat:

Maybe it's not easy being green, but it's time to embrace my inner frog, and make the jump anyway. Wish me luck and off I go...ribbit, ribbit.

[but is this blog post perfect enough to publish :)?]

Doing it Backwards...On Purpose

I did talk somewhat about this in my previous post, but I will reiterate here (and unlike the last post, this one will be done in time for the chat).

My systems & secrets

When I have everything running the way I want, it will look like this:

• Each unit has learning goals.
• Each goal is associated with one of Ontario's categories of achievement.
• Showing evidence of having achieved is goal is worth a preset amount of the student's grade.
• Each learning goal has one or more videos specifically associated with it.
• Each learning goal also has one or more assessments specifically associated with it.
• If a student has a low grade in the course, the student and I look at what learning goals the student needs to bump up. The student reviews those videos, asking me questions if needed, and we look at what other learning activities can increase the student's ability to achieve those goals. When the student is ready, I reassess the student and, if appropriate, bump up the student's mark accordingly.

I know that sounds like a mastery system. In reality, I'm currently aiming to keep most of the class working through their initial exposure to the material at the same pace, but I am OK with some students going through things at a more individual pace if that is what is best suited to their circumstances. I may one day move to mastery, but I have more to learn myself yet about how that plays out -- for example, how can whole-class group space tasks happen if the class is scattered in where they are in a course? Do you just run the group space tasks with those who have got to the appropriate spot in the course, and those who aren't there yet just do their own thing instead?

Changes since "the old days"

I learned about standards-based grading (grading based on learning goals, rather than a set % for a particular quiz, for example) before I learned about flipping, but it's only recently that I'm really wrapping my head around how they can work together. My videos so far have been topic-based, but not goal-driven.

When I think of "the old days," I tend to think more in terms of "before I learned about standards-based grading." I think grading based on learning goals is so important in terms of letting students have multiple opportunities to show improvement and what they really know / can do by the end of a course rather than a set of high-stakes quizzes and tests (which make it harder to tell a student -- or parent, student success teacher, administrator, etc. -- what the student needs to do to improve in the course).

Backward design?

My teacher's college program used Understanding by Design (by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe) as one of our course texts, so the importance of beginning with the end in mind has been stressed to me since the very beginning. I have always appreciated the logic of this approach. (Actually, a lot of stuff put out by ASCD makes a lot of sense to me, and I became a member earlier this year.) My personality is that I need to know where I'm going and plan for it -- flying by the seat of my pants makes me nervous, even though it is part of every teacher's reality at least some of the time.

Other related topics...

I can't think of anything else related to share right now, but I'm looking forward to hearing/reading the thoughts of others. Time to see what the rest of the #flipblogs community has posted...after daycare pickup :).