Last June, as we were finalizing our timetable for this coming year, a twist of fate saw me headed back into the classroom to teach two sections of Mathematiques 8 (French Immersion Math) after 2 years as a Learning Assistance Teacher (in addition to my administrator duties). As much as I loved my role as LAT, I had missed the classroom and working with a class full of students. I also missed teaching Math but at first I was a bit panicked. I had taught it for 10 years but wondered if I could get back into the swing of things with the subject matter? Also, since my past teaching in the Math classroom was what I consider my "pre-Twitter" days, I knew that I had discovered so many new and different technologies and teaching methods that I just couldn't go back to some of my old ways. My head was swimming with possible ideas for how I could fuse some of the great things I was doing before (Kagan cooperative structures, project-based assessments) with all of these new ideas while dropping some of the more antiquated methods (worksheets, lecture-style teaching). Wow!
I decided to try not to think about school for the month of July which I mostly did. I ordered a couple of books which I had heard about on Twitter such as Dave Burgess' Teach Like A Pirate
and Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, and Total Participation Techniques by Persida and William Himmele. Once August hit, I was reading these books and searching for articles related to these topics and mathematics instruction. I didn't just want to teach Math, I wanted to inspire my students to see Math as something fun, engaging, useful and relevant.
One place I really hooked into was Todd Nesloney's Flipped Classroom website: http://www.toddnesloney.com/ This guy is a veritable wealth of information and experience about how to go about flipping your classroom and using video lessons with your students. I decided I would like to try some flipped lessons and see what happens.
I did my usual course outline and also added a letter to parents and students (based on Nesloney's which you can find HERE) which explains what a flipped lesson looks like, what I would be expecting of students and also included a short survey to gather information on students' computer access at home. It is important to know what level of internet access your students have in order to make this work.
So far, I have flipped one lesson on square numbers and square roots. Here is my very first video lesson:
It is, of course, in French but you get the idea. It is also funny how you don't realize what your voice sounds like until you record it!
I used the Educreations app on the iPad to create the scenes and narrate the exciting "action". After I finished the video I discovered that this app does not allow you to download or share the video to You Tube. You can give your viewers the video link where it lives on the Educreations website but I was worried that this would not play properly on my students' mobile devices so I made a screencast of the video, capturing it on the web-based, Screencast-O-Matic. It worked pretty well but was an extra step. I am looking for other apps which have Educreations ease of use but which allow downloads or YouTube publishing.
I taught my students how to view a flipped video by doing a practice video in class the day prior to assigning my acutal video. Based on Nesloney's WSQ (Watch, Summarize, Question), I am having my students do an ERQ (Écoutez, Résumez, Questionnez for each video. For practice, I had them watch a video with a simple message and a couple of key points which I found on the Alberta Education website. Here is the English version of Math: It's everywhere. I was happy they also produced a French version.
Then, I assigned my square numbers/square roots video which is about 4 minutes long. I asked students to spend about that same amount of time doing the ERQ.
The next day, we began the class by a quick turn-and-talk to share ERQ's and then a whole class discussion, supplemented with some notes I had made on a Notebook slide (not for them to copy but to verify that the notes they had taken had enough detail). I collected their notebooks to read and give some written feedback. The next day, I highlighted a couple of student examples of well-done ERQ's on the Smart Board, pointing out what to do to create quality summaries and questions.
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| Sample Student ERQ |
Following this, I asked students for their honest opinions of what they thought of this learning experience. I was surprised and not surprised at their various, insightful answers, some of which included:
- I like how I can watch and re-watch the lesson without having to ask the teacher to repeat something, which I am sometimes embarrassed to do in front of the class.
- I like that I can pause the video for as long as I want to make notes.
- I can watch the lesson free of distractions from other students because I am at home with my headphones on.
- Being able to re-watch the video helps me to better understand what is being said in French.
- I like the face-to-face part of being in the classroom.
- Sometimes I wanted to know the answer to my questions right away but I had to write them down and wait for the next day in class.
What I learned from their feedback, their work on this lesson and their learning is that this sort of instruction really demands students to personally take charge of their learning. A large percentage of the students really did a great job of writing a summary of the lesson content in their own words and they came up with some great questions. A few students will need a push to become more independent learners but this is the case in most classrooms, I think.
Another benefit which I hope to gain from this model of instruction is increased classroom time for problem-solving and more time for me to spend with each student. Spending less time on direct teaching and note-writing should leave more time for hands-on activities, inquiry and projects. I will let you know if this pans out.
Moving forward, I would like to keep making videos and perhaps have students create video-lessons too as unit projects or performance assessments. I think they will have even better ideas which they will more creatively present than I ever would. Also, as teachers, they would really be absorbing and learning the content, they would have to collaborate to create these videos and I think they would really be engaged in the use of technology to show what they know.
To be continued...but in the meantime, I would love to hear about your flipped class experiences. The more I can learn, the more I can improve. Merci!
