Friday, August 29, 2014

Spotlight on the Flip: the Anatomy of Mastery Learning Cycles

In the flip stage, I cover the bulk of the content. I try to use just one video to cover the facts but may rely on two if I need to go beyond 10 minutes or teach two distinctly different concepts.

Prior to the flip, students have completed an exploratory activity, which created cognitive dissonance and challenged the students with a higher order thinking task. Typically, the students don't have the content to complete the task at that point; therefore, they need the video to provide the facts and background.

The video is not the only part of the flip stage. Students are provided with a guided note sheet that they have to fill out while viewing the video. 
Guided Note Sheet

In the latest videos, I've been more thoughtful of sound pedagogy. Those videos start with a warm up question to get students thinking about the concept. Throughout the videos, I intersperse questions, ask students to pause and record their answers on the guided note sheet. At the end of the video, they have to think of a question that they want answered or could be answered by the video. I'll have to work on getting students to ask higher order questions rather than the normal factual recall questions they tend to ask. 

After taking notes, students complete an online low stakes quiz. Quizzes from previous years were Google forms loaded with back-end scripts (like Flubaroo) to grade student responses and allow me to respond to student questions. Since we moved to a new learning management system (LMS), I've offloaded most of those tasks to Haiku. The quizzes, called practice assessments on Haiku, consist of understanding level questions to give students feedback about whether they need to re-watch the video. 
Beginning of Practice Assessment
I also include an online forum for students to ask and answer questions about the content in the video; the hope is that students will begin to get their questions answered by peers rather than me. Finally, students are asked to rate the video in order to help me prioritize which and what ways to edit the videos in the future. 
Video Feedback Form
While many folks are invariably interested in the Flip, I must remind you that the Flip is just a vehicle to making more important changes possible. The videos allow for differentiation, mastery, asynchronous learning, etc. When content is offloaded away from the community space, the real magic happens!

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