Reaching every student every day in every class can seem like an impossible task, but the truth is if we want to have the most significant impact, we must do just that. Recently, I decided that when I started this school year, I was going to make reaching every student a priority. I wasn’t really sure how I was going to make this happen, I just knew that it needed to happen.
I started by committing myself to the idea: I told parents at Back to School night that I was going to do it (still didn’t know how I was going to do it). The reaction from the parents told me that connecting with every student every day was essential. I told parents that I would know their child’s voice and that I would be checking to see how their child’s day was going. The smiles, the expressions of relief, and “thank yous” cemented for me that connecting with every student every day was what every parent didn’t know they actually wanted from their child’s classroom teacher. I was on a mission to make the idea of connecting with every student a reality. I decided to create a basic checklist that would allow me to know where students were with their understanding of content, how well they understand the expectations, what progress they were making on personal and academic goals, and finally how is life. These conversations would allow me to see every student, hear every student, and value every student. I wasn’t sure how the students would respond to me chatting with them every day. I wasn’t sure if they would feel annoyed that I was disrupting their efforts in class or if they would welcome the dialogue. The first day I started meeting with students, they were a little nervous, but when I asked them how their summer went, their shoulders relaxed, and they just started talking. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to meet with every student. When students entered my room on the second day, I actually had students come up to me and say, “Mr. Jones, we didn’t get to chat yesterday. Are we gonna talk today?” They noticed the conversations I was having with other students, and they wanted that same experience. The students have started to look forward to the conversations. They have remarked that the dialogue helps to keep them accountable, and they know that I genuinely care about them. I have been able to help students work through academic issues more instantly, and the students feel supported more than ever before. I want to challenge you to look for ways to reach every student every day. The smallest gesture could have a huge impact.
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During one of my first years as a teacher, I remember standing in front of my class, and a particular student was not paying attention. I noticed that he was drawing instead of listening to my lecture. I wasn’t trying to make a big deal of it, so I continued my lecture as I walked up to the student and placed my hand on his notebook. The student looked up at me with rage in his eyes and lifted his pencil as though he was going to stab me. My heart raced, and it was at that moment that I realized that I had never even had a conversation with this student before I attempted to discipline him. We have all had students that have made us more than a little nervous. Over the years, I have had students threaten to injure me, other students, or themselves. Since I have flipped my classroom, I have been able to lessen, not eliminate, but lessen the aggressive behaviors in my class. Within the past few years, I have had a couple of instances where the relationships that flipped learning allows me to build has enabled me to recognize more of the red flags so that I could engage parents more quickly, alert administration, and make the necessary calls to area agencies.
One thing I have noticed since I have been flipping my classroom is that I have more time to build relationships with my students. Robert Talbert, in a recent interview about his book, Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty, said, “A flipped learning environment is one where you as a faculty member can have meaningful contact with every student (or at least every group of students) every day.” Each day, I walk around my classroom chatting with every single student. These conversations have a dramatic impact on the atmosphere of the classroom. Most of the time, our conversations are related to the curriculum that the students are working on, but there are times when it drifts to other topics: “How was your weekend?”, “How did you do in your basketball game?”, “Did you get enough sleep last night?”, “Why are you struggling to get your homework done?”, etc. Flipped Learning provides teachers with the time to build necessary relationships that allow each of their students to be seen and heard every single day. Before I flipped my class, I dealt with many disruptions in my classroom. I had students that were utterly defiant, belligerent, and toxic to the learning environment. I also dealt with the reclusive students that did not want to be seen and just wanted to blend in with the shadows. I broke up numerous fights within my classroom, and I sent plenty of students to the office for being disruptive; that all changed when I flipped my class. The connectedness and relationships that I now had time to build flipped the entire atmosphere of the classroom. An article by Melissa McInnis Brown, PhD, and Teresa Starrett, EdD titled Fostering Student Connectedness: Building Relationships in the Classroom reports that a study they did on how connectedness impacts students showed “Almost all students (94%) indicated that they felt connectedness improved their academic performance.” Due to the nature of a flipped classroom, I was able to create an active setting that engaged my students. They didn’t have time to be disruptive. There is always something to do. When students are engaged, the off-task behaviors seem to melt away. The class time now had a purpose for my students. It wasn’t a place to show up and mess around. Another significant change was that I now have the time to engage my students on a personal level. This engagement allows me to see them. I am not just talking about seeing where they are struggling with their work, but seeing them as a person. I can tell when they are struggling emotionally, or when they just feel lonely. I am also able to see the red flags as they come up. Having the time to engage every student in every class has the potential to be a life-saving tool in the classroom. It can save the life of the student that is having thoughts of suicide, and it can save the lives of students throughout a school. I cannot overstate the importance of building relationships. Relationships create trust and confidence in ways that are difficult to comprehend, indeed. Flipped learning provides me with the time to have classroom conversations about real issues. Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools wrote an article about their personal learning program. The article focused on their morning meetings. “Morning Meeting gives kids energy, helps them perform better in school, and helps them make better choices throughout the day.” During my classroom meetings we talk through bullying issues and what to do if they or someone they know is being bullied. We talk about the importance of being kind. And we talk about the importance of taking what students say seriously. It is these conversations that have shown me that flipped learning was more than a meta-strategy for education, it has been the meta-strategy for advocating for my students. Flipped Learning will not solve the violence found within schools, but it is a step in the right direction to enabling teachers with the commodity of time to have a conversation with every student every day in every class. It gives teachers the chance to see those who feel unseen, hear those who feel ignored, provide a voice to the silent, and encouragement to those who are struggling. When preparing for a lesson or unit of study, it is important to think about how to organize the content so that students are able to engage deeply with it. Though there are a variety of instructional methods (Inquiry, Project-based Learning, Mastery, etc.) that we could employ, if we only use one, our students will quickly become bored and disengage. The method loses its flavor. It is important to begin to view our instructional methods as though we are preparing a meal. We need to think about the ingredients we select, as well as what would happen if we combined instructional methods to create new flavors. Dinner can become monotonous. The same old dishes being served in the same old ways. The old adage “everything tastes like chicken” becomes relevant because basic ingredients used in basic ways makes everything start to taste the same. Recently, my wife decided to try a new recipe that sounded really fancy and complicated. Coq Au Vin, though it seemed daunting to create initially, has become one of my favorite meals: chicken marinated in white wine, thick cut bacon, mushroom caps (cooked in the bacon drippings), and carrots paired with onions. Sorry, if I’ve made your mouth water… This meal is exactly what our classrooms should look like. A variety of instructional methods expertly combined with just the right ingredients to meet the educational palettes of our students. Approaching classroom instruction in a similar manner means that we should be able to create our recipe for the most enriching education possible. When I began teaching, I used basic ingredients to make up my instructional practices. The main ingredient in my dish was lecture. I would season that lecture with an activity or the occasional project, but there wasn’t anything fancy or innovative in my practices. No matter what unit I was teaching, or what the students were learning, it all tasted like chicken. After eight years in the classroom, I began to flip my class. It was similar to discovering how to marinate meat. The raw material was the same, but by presenting the instruction in the individual space, the information that I presented had a chance to marinate with the kids. According to the article, 6 Advantages of The Flipped Classroom for the Learner, students have a chance “to think critically and truly absorb the information.” When the students come to class, everything has a richer flavor. As I saw the benefits of marinating the content, I began to see that the way content is delivered can move an ordinary lesson to an extraordinary lesson in which students desperately want to indulge their appetite for learning. Instructional strategies are the ingredients that make up our unique recipes for delivering the best education. One of the things that I love about teaching is that I get to try out different recipes to see which ones resonate with my students and which recipes produce the greatest outcomes. It is even more exciting to tinker with and optimize recipes and eventually design something that is unlike anything you had ever tried before. According to MIT, using a variety of instructional methods will give students the opportunities to express their talents and learn in unique and meaningful ways1. Educators have known that using a variety of instructional practices will help meet the varying needs of their students. Combining instructional methods brings a completely new experience to the classroom. This idea is so cutting edge that there is little research available on it. Flipped practitioners from around the globe have weighed in on this strategy. I surveyed flipped educators in Australia, Italy, Spain, Hong Kong, and the USA about combining instructional methods. Their extensive experience with this type of innovation indicates that there are central pillars for its implementation. Students are more engaged and excel to new levels when instructional methods are combined. Now, in my fifth year of flipping my classroom, I have been able to season my instruction with different methods, and I have finally developed my own recipe to produce some of the greatest outcomes. Here is my instructional recipe for what I do in class. I call this my Gamified Project Based Learning with a Dash of Mastery. Project-based learning engages students in higher order thinking skills and 21st-century skills. I noticed, though, that on its own, some of the more concrete learning was falling by the wayside. To develop a stronger balance, I began to integrate more mastery learning into the curriculum by combining PBL with mastery. My students were developing a solid understanding of content while also engaging higher order thinking strategies. Motivation is a difficult factor to infuse into the learning process. It was at this point that I determined that gamifying my PBL classroom would season the instruction in such a way that my students would develop an internal, self-motivated drive to engage with the learning environment differently. I begin with my marinade. My students research an essential question before the unit of study has actually begun. This information prepares the students for what they will be learning throughout the course of the unit. By letting this information marinate, the students are able to process it and develop higher order thinking questions (How and Why). I plan out my unit as a PBL unit, and the project drives the learning. With so many variations of PBL and confusing definitions, I created my own definition for Project-based Learning. PBL is the act of using a project as a learning tool for students to gain understanding as well as express their mastery of the curriculum. Using PBL as the main ingredient in my instruction, I create the time and temperature for the unit of study. I lay the unit out on a game board. Seasoning PBL with gamification allows me to integrate a pacing chart in which my students gain points towards their teams (Houses). These points do not affect their grades. Rather, the points drive the students to engage in every aspect of the unit of study. The game board helps students to manage their time by providing them with a visual cue of what needs to be completed each day. The game board design that I use came from a flipped teacher known as Secondary Sara. I build my game boards using a free program called Lucidchart.com. The final ingredient that I use in my instructional dish is Mastery. I only use a dash of Mastery checks. The mastery checks are lightly sprinkled daily to ensure that students have a complete understanding of the content that was covered in the video the night before. These mastery checks are in the form of a Google Form. The form is set up as a quiz that gives students immediate feedback, and on any missed questions, students are directed to a link that allows them to revisit the misunderstood content. Students must demonstrate an 80% mastery before moving onto the next section of the unit. This recipe takes a variety of ingredients, but due to the variety of educational palettes, it is essential that educators understand the needs of their students so that they can use the right combination to produce mouth-watering and differentiated instructional delicacies.
Originally posted HERE Recently, I was asked the question, “Can you just do a flipped classroom and not have it be a flipped project-based classroom?” Truly, this question comes out of a lack of understanding as to what it means to inject flipped learning into your classroom. My response was in line with my previous blog post: The Method Behind the Madness. I asked this individual, “Well, how do you teach, now?” He looked at me perplexed. And then it hit me; he was looking at flipped learning from a flipped 1.0 perspective.
When flipped learning first began, it was seen as its own thing. You could be a flipped classroom teacher or a traditional classroom teacher. This idea is referred to as a flipped 1.0 perspective. Educators viewed flipped learning as something that would require them to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Many saw it as a “new way” to teach. This perspective is one of the reasons why some teachers are slow to move to flipping their class. Most teachers do not want to “start over” in the way they structure their class. They just don’t. They would instead tweak what they are currently doing and continue to tweak it, and tweak it again, and tweak it again and again and again until the teacher believes that he or she has developed the right strategy for getting their students to learn efficiently. The problem is that no matter how much we tweak our approaches, we are still left with a lack of time to do those approaches in a way that would, indeed, make them as effective as we would like them to be. Flipped Learning 3.0 is a perspective that says, “Let’s take what you are already doing with your students, and add to it the time needed for it to be effective.” Time is an elusive element in education. We all want more of it, but we struggle to find it. I use a project-based learning methodology in my classroom. Before I flipped my class, there was never enough time to do PBL with every unit, even though I knew it was a way to engage 21st-century skills as well as higher-order thinking skills. Because I wasn’t working through a flipped model, does that mean that PBL was a terrible way for me to engage my students…NOPE! What flipped learning does, though, is it gives me the time to do it well. I was able to take what I was already doing, and amplify its impact by adding flipped learning to it. Let’s go back to the original question that sparked this post, “Can you just do a flipped classroom and not have it be a flipped project-based classroom?” It would be like having the best operating system on a computer with no programs installed. Flipped Learning is the operating system in a classroom. However you teach your students, flipped learning makes your instructional methods more effective. I could do PBL without flipping my class, but if I know that flipping my PBL class would increase the amount of time I can work with my students, and it will provide me with the time to deepen my students understanding and mastery of the content, wouldn’t I be doing my students a disservice by choosing to not flip the class? I want to encourage you to begin thinking about how flipped learning works with your instructional approach. How could infusing that instructional approach with flipped learning improve your time with your students? Let’s chat… Originally posted HERE Listen to my story in the video above, and then leap into the blog post. The nature of teachers is to teach…I know, shocking, but what is surprising is the number of teachers that don’t use a specific instructional method to meet the needs of their students. The question needs to be asked, “How do you teach your students?” Many teachers would answer that question by saying that they use a variety of methods: small groups, one on one, activities, etc. The truth is, though, small groups, one on one, and activities are not instructional methods. They are groupings for instruction. For years, I delivered content to my students in ways that I thought were effective. I taught, or so I thought. I presented information through lecture, reading, and sometimes we did an activity. These are the most passive and least effective means of teaching students according to the Edgar Dale “Cone of Learning.” It wasn’t until I took FLGI’s Certification Level II course that I realized that there were so many instructional practices: Mastery, Project Based Learning, Peer Instruction, Gamification, Socratic Seminars, Inquiry, Genius Hour, and Station Rotation. I learned so much from this course. I knew about Project-Based Learning, it is kind of “MY THING,” but it was so refreshing to learn about so many other ways of structuring a class. When I first began teaching, my classroom did not have structure. I was always trying to decide what the best way for delivering a particular lesson would be. It wasn’t until I decided that I was going to develop a Project-Based Learning environment that my instruction started to become more effective. All of a sudden I had a focus regarding how I was going to prepare every lesson. Integrating a methodology into your classroom is critical. It allows students to make sense of the content in a constant fashion. When I decided to run a PBL classroom, it worked great sometimes, and then there were other times that it was terrible. Something was still missing: Time. It is the one argument against PBL; there just isn’t enough time to do it and do it right. When flipped learning comes into the equation, everything changes. Flipped learning provides teachers with time. It wasn’t until I flipped my class that Project-Based Learning became a genuinely effective instructional methodology. The fact that I wasn’t trying to balance my instructional time with project time solved everything that had once made Project-Based Learning a challenge at times. Regardless of the instructional methodology you use, flipped learning is the meta-strategy that makes it work even better. I want to encourage you to take a look at your instructional practices and ask the question, “How do you teach your students?” Are you using one of the methods I discussed: Mastery, PBL, Peer Instruction, Gamification, Socratic Seminars, Inquiry, Genius Hour, or Station Rotation? How has flipped learning made your instructional methods more effective? Originally posted HERE
Part 3 In part 2 of this series, I wrote about Flipped Learning being the meta-strategy that enhances the implementation of Standards Based Grading. To take the conversation from theoretical to practical, let’s explore a few simple steps that will help you to transition from traditional grading to standards based grading. Have A Conversation In a flipped environment, the group space is an active learning environment. Teachers are able to move throughout the classroom having meaningful conversations with students about the content. These conversations lead to a deeper understanding of the content. Teachers are able to identify where a student is struggling and clear up any misconceptions. Because the conversations are focused on moving a student forward in their understanding, students do not have to fear failure on a given task. The focus is on learning. When compared to a traditional classroom, the assignments take on a whole new meaning. Traditional homework is completed outside of the guidance of the teacher. Flipped classrooms have students complete those assignments with the teacher. The attention moves away from completion of the assignment to completion of understanding. Stop Grading Homework and Activities Homework is the practice. When we grade the practice, and we allow that to have a direct impact on the overall score of the final evaluation of mastery, we have negated the whole purpose of the practice. Practice is where it is okay to fail. It is where we learn what we are doing incorrectly so that we can advance in our understanding. If a student struggles to understand a concept at the beginning of instruction and gets 65% of the information correct, but by the end of the unit, a student is demonstrating complete mastery, why oh why would the student not be marked as having complete mastery of a state learning standard? The learning process is not where the grade should be placed. Standards Based Grading has a focus on where the student is at the end of a unit, not at the beginning or during the middle. Include Your Students In The Evaluation Students need to be included in the evaluation process. A very simple way to involve students in the evaluation process is to ask them to rate their own understanding of the content. I used a student rubric that looks at the essential question, as well as topics found throughout the unit of study. The students use the scale covered in part 2 of this series (scale of 1-4). By asking students to evaluate their own knowledge, it allows teachers to have a clear perspective of growth. Exit tickets are commonly used by teachers to see what students learned during a class session, but in a flipped classroom, self-evaluations have the potential to play a larger role in a students ability to recognize that they are growing in their mastery of content. Summary Flipped Learning is the meta-strategy to give grades a whole new meaning. Flipped learning supports the role that learning serves in an active classroom, and SBG is the assessment that evaluates what students learn. Due to the amount of time that flipped learning provides teachers to work with their students, SBG becomes a natural transition in taking grading to the next level. Let me know if you plan on using SBG in your flipped classroom, as well as how you have seen flipped learning impact your grading. Originally posted HERE Part 2
Previously, we looked at how a traditional grading model fails to reflect a student’s actual learning. Standards Based Grading (SBG) is a system of grading based on academic content standards. Students’ learning is measured based on their growth through the academic standards. Because students’ grades connect to the content standards, they do not align to a test or assignment. The tests and assignments are used to determine a student’s degree of mastery of a standard. SBG focuses on growth rather than a fixed interpretation of proficiency. “Dr. Dweck coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset to describe the underlying beliefs people have about learning and intelligence,” (“The Growth Mindset,” n.d.). A fixed mindset sees learning as static. It is focused on an individual’s performance. When faced with challenges, a fixed mindset either avoids or gives up easily. The opposite is true of a growth mindset. Learning is seen as something that can be developed or grown. It is also viewed as a process, not an event. When faced with challenges, a growth mindset allows a person to persevere or push through. SBG is focused on the academic growth of a student. Because the grade is not determined by an average of test scores, it is determined by the growth a student has made toward mastery of a given standard. Grading using SBG is actually much simpler than it may appear. Instead of a student earning an A, B, C, D, or F, the student earns a 4, 3, 2, or 1. These numbers tell the student where they are achieving in reference to mastery. Take a look at this chart: 4 = The student has exceeded the standard 3 = The student has met the standard 2 = The student is approaching the standard 1 = The student is not approaching the standard Work Habits = This category covers behaviors: Completion of homework, behavior in class, timeliness, working with peers, etc. Using this method of grading allows teachers to actually grade what the state departments ask schools to assess: State Standards. Students are no longer given a zero due to a behavior. Behaviors are a completely separate category. SBG puts the focus on academic achievement and not on activities, homework, or organization. Flipped learning creates an environment centered around a growth mindset. The group space is an active space that promotes the application learned content. The group space is used to grow students towards mastery. Flipped Learning is the meta-strategy that enhances the implementation of SBG. In my next post, I will look at a few manageable steps to move from a traditional grading model to SBG. Until then, what are your thoughts on SBG? Do you see flipped learning as a way to enhance the way in which we grade? *The Growth Mindset, What is Growth Mindset. (n.d.). Retrieved February 07, 2018, from https://www.mindsetworks.com/science Originally posted Here This is Part 1 of a three-part series about Flipped Learning’s impact on grading. Part 1 My first years flipping my classroom were focused on making videos and finding great videos that my students could watch in the individual space. My attention then shifted to the group space, moving it from passive to active. Now that my class is functioning smoothly, I feel like I have moved into the next phase of flipped learning…assessment. When addressing assessment, I am not thinking about how to assess, rather I am thinking about the results of the assessments. That’s right; I am talking about grading. If flipped learning is the meta-strategy that allows our current instructional methods to be more effective, and our class time to be more supportive, then shouldn’t our grading be taken to the next level as well? Grades are meant to reflect how well a student understands the content standards, not how successful a student was on assignments. The problem arises when a student doesn’t do the assignment at all. Should that student get a zero for not doing the assignment if the grade is meant to reflect how well the student knows the content? There is also the pitfall of the completion grade. Because a student completed the assignment, he/she receives a complete mastery grade of 100%. In both cases, we are grading a behavior and not the learning. A grade is a measurement of the learning that has occurred. When we grade an assignment, what are we looking for? Are we looking for how many answers the student got right, or are we looking to measure the learning that has occurred? A student who gets 50% of an assignment correct fails the assignment. If we look at the learning that has occurred, has that students demonstrated mastery of some of the content? With traditional grading, there is a finality to the grade, especially on summative assessments. How often have teachers graded an essay by going over it with a fine-toothed comb, making corrections to grammar, adding comments about the wording of sentences or paragraphs, only to have a student look at the grade and ignore the edits? The grade is a finalizing statement about how well the student did on the assignment. My question is this: Does the grade reflect the learning that has occurred?
Kids are by far more complicated than what an A, B, C, D or F can communicate. The student that maintains a B or C average may be one of the hardest working kids in the class and has developed a sense of ownership in the learning process. Flipped learning gives us the time to get to know the complexities of our students because we are working with them in an active learning environment. If a traditional grading system isn’t the best measurement of student learning, where do we go from here? I recommend a look into Standards Based Grading (SBG). In my next post, I will discuss why I think SBG is a perfect fit with Flipped Learning. What are your thoughts on the impact Flipped Learning has on grading? Find my original posting on flglobal.org by clicking HERE
For years, my students did projects in my classroom, and I thought that was what made my classroom project based. I was particular in the design of the project, and my students turned out some impressive tri-fold boards. My students became the kings and queens of PowerPoint (and when they were feeling adventurous, they made a Prezi) and tri-fold boards/posters. As long as the students followed my specific instructions with the design of their, I could guarantee a beautiful project. I was always proud of how my students learned the content, and then created my vision of how to represent their mastery of the content. The students had an opportunity to add their own personal flair to their projects by choosing different colors for backgrounds, and I made sure to let them pick different topics from the unit for their projects to represent. And then I learned that I had no idea what project based learning was. I always thought that as long as my students were doing projects, I was engaging them in project based learning. This could not be further from the truth. Project based learning looks at the purpose of the project and who generates the design of the project. 1. Projects are the MAIN COURSE, not the dessert of a unit. The project is what students use to cement their understanding of content during a unit of study. It is not an at the end of the unit create a diorama of what we covered. The students use content AS THE LEARN IT to develop their project. This helps students to understand the purpose of the learning and how all of the information connects. 2. Projects are student designed. Teachers do not tell the students what sort of project to create; the individual student determines that. This allows the students to develop more significant meaning and connections within their project. Students will also have greater buy-in to mastery of the content when it is THEIR project. Project Based Learning, to do it well, requires something that I lacked: TIME! There just wasn’t time to have the students do a project with every unit of study. Flipped learning solves that problem. Because direct instruction is not consuming the group space, students have time to dive into the application of knowledge. The higher end of Bloom’s taxonomy (Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create) becomes the focus of your class time. Your students have the TIME to apply their knowledge by creating a project that enables them to evaluate the depth of their understanding of the information. How have you used projects in your classroom? Were you like me, using projects as dessert instead of the main course? How can you take project based learning to the next level? Find my original posting on flglobal.org by clicking HERE
How on Earth can I continue to stand in front of my students and lecture at them about things that they truly…don’t care anything about? How can I drone on and on day after day staring into vacant expressions and disrespectful behaviors? These were the questions that plagued me in 2012 as I sat at my desk thinking about getting out of education. I could not see a light at the end of the depression I was dealing with every single day I walked through my classroom door. I have had tough students, and I have had tough years, but I was at a different point in my career; I was experiencing hopelessness. It was at this point that two amazing people had a heart to heart conversation with me, and it would change my life. I walked into my administrator’s office and sat down at the conference table. Before me sat my Principal, Sandra Sutherland, and the Dean of Students, Michele Gorman. I looked at both of them and said, “I can’t do this anymore.” I was shocked by their response. They looked at me and said, “We will not let you quit.” I told them, “I cannot continue to do what I am doing.” Sandra said, “You’re right, you can’t continue to do what you have been doing.” “BUT YOU ARE A TEACHER,” Michele said emphatically! I looked at both of them very perplexed, “I don’t know how to teach any differently than what I am already doing. I do projects, integrate technology, play educational games, and it doesn’t seem to matter.” Sandra looked at me and said, “I don’t have the answers, but I do know that you are a teacher, and you just have to find a different way of engaging your students.” I left that meeting feeling depressed, but I at least had a mission or focus…Find a New Way to Teach. I took to the internet a typed in the words: New and Innovative Teaching Methods. Immediately, the search turned up the words Flipped Learning. The more I explored the methodology, the more my depression seemed to fall like scales from my eyes. It was as though my passion for teaching was reignited. I could not read enough about it, and I told everyone about it. I went to Sandra and Michele and explained what I had been reading, and even though they didn’t know much about it, they said…GO FOR IT! Flipping my class has been the biggest change I have ever made in my career, and I could never go back to traditional instruction. I LOVE my job. I won’t say that there aren’t challenges each day, but I now feel like I am doing education the way it was always meant to be done, working side by side with my students helping them master content in a personal way. |
Mr. Dan JonesMaster Flip Educator with 13 years experience in the classroom. FLGI Faculty Trainer who trains based on the Gold Standard of Flipped Learning 3.0. Expertise in project based learning. Archives
October 2018
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