Flipclass Resolutions in 2015

http://christmasstockimages.com/

I usually avoid making resolutions in my personal life because they rarely come to fruition. However, I followed my professional resolutions last year. They really catapulted my course and held me accountable. For that reason, I offer professional resolutions for 2015 below:

1. Continue to explore differentiated learning. In particular, offer alternative ways for students to acquire and process content.

2. Investigate project based learning in an asynchronous course.

3. Similar to number 2, enhance the role of data analysis and inquiry throughout the course. Even though all labs are student-designed and data-rich, I wish to incorporate these principles during non-lab opportunities. Some ways to accomplish this task is to increase the role of inquiry through case studies, assignments, POGILs, problem sets and projects. 

Quarter One Reflections

After a quarter into the school year, I have a solid grasp of the effects of the changes I've made. Here are the chief thoughts I have about quarter one.

Standards Based Grading

The transition to standards based grading has been mostly smooth. This year, I have a much better handle of what my students know and do not know. The SBG Grade book on Haiku is easy to use. The color codes make it easy to see which standards each student or class section is still working on. This has helped me identify which students need targeted intervention.

Standards Based Gradebook on Haiku

At first, it took students some time to understand the concept of "I can" statements and my particular system for showing learning. They seem to have figured out the system. 

The most noticeable difference is the quality of my reports. I've always struggled with writing first quarter reports because I barely feel like I know my students well enough by that time in the school year. This time around, I had plenty to say. Rather than including the general fluff, my reports focused on what my students knew and were able to do and the ideas and skills they still found troubling. Adding this component to my comments about performance on major assignments, my general impressions and suggestions moving forward, the reports are much more informative. 

Haiku LMS

The new learning management system is quite effective. The layout is beautiful and the interface is intuitive. I have consolidated many of my online tasks within Haiku - recording and sharing grades, assigning and collecting student work, repository of resources and interactive components like polls, practice quizzes and discussions. In the past, many of these roles would have been offloaded to separate resources. I'd like to move my actual quizzes to Haiku but it does not support randomized questions from a test bank, so I still need Moodle for that purpose. 

Haiku can be a bit buggy though. There is a limit to how many objects can be embedded on one page. Some students complained of notoriously long loading times. A student suggested that I make more usage of subpages. Now each step of the learning cycle is housed on its own page. This has significantly increased loading speeds.

Subpages on Haiku

Asynchronous learning

As mentioned in a previous blog post,  asynchronous learning continues to allow students to submit their best work and internalize a growth mindset. Most students are keeping to a reasonable rate, even though there are students who I believe can work faster. I've made some changes this year, which hopefully will help students adjust to the responsibility of setting their own pace. The most important change, at the request of a student, was allowing students to create their own weekly plans.

A student's week plan

Creating the plans take a lot of time so I've been trying to encourage students to send their plans to me during the weekend - with varying degrees of success. At the very least, students are using less class time to create their plans and becoming better at working while waiting for my indication that their plans are satisfactory. For students who show difficulty with this task, I've started to collaborate with them to create pacing calendars for a few weeks, rather than letting them work alone on their weekly plans. 

Mastery projects

A handful of students have elected to complete the mastery projects. In most cases, these projects have been good enough to help other students learn the content. My library of student made teaching materials is growing and some students have already taken advantage of this library to prep for a quiz. I recently added a leader-board to acknowledge students who have completed mastery projects- in hopes of motivating a few more projects.

Mastery Project Leader-board

Quiz retakes 

This year, I have a better handle on whether students are ready to take quizzes or retake quizzes. The hot seats have been a nice addition. The only problem I've seen with the hot seats is when students opt to take the quiz a few days after completing the hot seat discussion. 

After the first batch of quizzes, I've added a few layers of permissions for quiz retakes. In addition to submitting quiz corrections and explainations of the mistakes, students have to do one more thing for permission for a retake. Making the students go through a few obstacles seems to help students take each attempt more seriously. 

Labs 

The switch to inquiry based labs has proved to be most effective with asynchronous learning. Last year, I tried a combination of inquiry and full class labs. I struggled with students who got to the labs first and figuring out whether they should use last year's data. It became confusing for students to know whether they were using this year's or last year's data sets. This also prevented me from adjusting procedures. 

For the full class synchronous labs, students working at a slower pace had to rush through content or temporarily skip steps in order to be "ready" for labs. Now that students design most of their own labs, there is no confusion about what data to use and no need to worry about skipping or rushing through steps - students do labs when they are ready.

So far, I've managed to keep up with the demand for lab materials. I place small lab kits around the edge of the counter space on labeled lunch trays. Since different students perform different labs, I only need to make a small amount of materials available for one particular lab. The trick is to have several labs prepared simultaneously and to anticipate when students will be ready for future labs. Below you can see how I organize lab materials.

DNA extraction lab materials

UV bacteria lab materials

Protein Synthesis model exploration materials

Upcoming changes

In the upcoming quarters, I'd like to incorporate some synchronous projects to help me experiment and think through PBL and 20Time in future years. I also want to offer optional content and let students who work ahead design their own parts of the course. 

100 Flipping Ways - Comparing Models of Flipped Learning

The media portrays an oversimplified version of flipped learning. Media Synopsis: videos teaching content done for homework, while traditional homework assignments completed in class. In the early version of Flip 101, I suspect the majority of these in-class activities really were normal homework assignments like worksheets and problem sets. But as Aaron Sams and Jon Bergman stated throughout FlipCon13, Flip 101 is the entry point to flipped instruction and most teachers move beyond the "traditional flip" (irony of this term is not lost on me.)

A brief summary of some Flipped learning models:

Traditional Flip - synchronous course where students watch videos at home to learn concepts then apply their learning in class.

Mastery Flip - an asynchronous course where students view videos and complete learning activities at their own pace. Note: videos can be watched in class. 

Explore-Flip-Apply (EFA) - inspired by the learning cycle and inquiry instruction, students synchronously engage in hands-on exploration of concepts, which are explained in the videos that follow. Students apply their learning after the explore and flip stages. Consistent with "just in time teaching," these videos can be created in response to deficits, questions and misconceptions identified in the explore phase.

Flipped PBL (project) - students complete projects to learn concepts in depth and demonstrate learning. Videos are offered as supplemental aids in completing the projects and/or direct instruction of required content.

Flipped PBL (problem) - similar to the other flipped PBL but the focus of the course is to solve "messy" problems. Students identify concepts they "need to know" in order to solve the problems. Videos and other materials are shared to provide students with the content they need to solve these problems.

Mastery Learning Cycles - inspired by the Explore-Flip-Apply and Flipped Mastery models, students engage in asynchronous learning cycles. They explore concepts before watching videos. After videos, they apply their learning and can choose to demonstrate "mastery" of concepts by completing higher order tasks. 

The irony is there is so much diversity within these models and some teachers might even disagree with these definitions. Many of these paradigms are not mutually exclusive, just like the Mastery learning cycle model is a blending of EFA and mastery models. Not to mention, the addition of Standards based grading, student Voice & Choice, Understanding by Design and Universal Design learning can add limitless flavors to flipped instruction. 

What led me to flip my class: reflections on learning culture

Socratic method

The story of what ultimately led me to flip my class should answer some questions about my learning culture.

What kind of learning culture do I currently have in my classroom? What type of decisions do I make to support this culture?

I struggled all year to meet the needs of a student in my class. (This student will be named "Sue" and I'll modify the true story a bit here.) Sue had successes throughout the year but her struggles were more salient. One of Sue's parents argued on multiple occasions that Sue did not have ample opportunities to speak in class and that I called on other students more often. I accepted the criticism (or at least acknowledged that it was possible) after the first time, but was perplexed when this criticism continued into the third quarter. Not only was I more aware of Sue's participation, I prided myself on using the Socratic method of questioning (in retrospect, should be renamed "lecture 2.0") and other engagement strategies like wait-time, turn & talk, and letting students pick on other students to answer questions during direct instruction. All students spoke in my class in every single lesson; therefore, (I thought) I had an "engaging and dynamic" class. But the scientist in me sought data to determine if this was a valid criticism. I started to keep track of student participation during direct instruction days. I was happy to see that Sue spoke as often as the other students; however, the bombshell was she only spoke one-two times per lesson. Even though there was a democracy of voices, the maximum number of times a student could speak during my "engaging and dynamic" lectures was about three times. Just as Socrates is imagined above, I was at the center of the class. I thought of the questions; I asked the questions; I answered the questions. This revelation was the final proverbial straw. I knew it was time to flip my class.

Don't get me wrong, there were tons of engaging activities in my class. I was committed to doing a lab every week and inquiry was becoming a larger role in my course. The course culminated in a student-designed project presented at our annual Science Night. In fact, it was obvious that each student spoke frequently during non-direct instruction days. I wanted a way to deliver direct instruction (sometimes, it actually needs to happen) but have students engaged everyday. Flipping the class meant students getting direct instruction through video outside of class, while creating even more time for students to engage in inquiry, collect and analyze data, and ask questions.

Before the flip:
My learning culture was teacher-centered. Even though I had elements of a student-centered class, I was at the heart of everything. I made decisions that supported this teacher-centered classroom. Even during lab days, I decided the questions to test, the lab procedures (most of the time), the data to collect, how to display the data, how many days to spend working, how students demonstrate understanding, etc.

After the flip:
Over spring break, I created the videos and other activities to flip my class in the fourth quarter. The difference in the class was immediate. The first change was of course the additional class time. With that new class time, I tried a few things.

• I created Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) activities. In POGIL activities, students study and explore models.  Guided questions force students to go through the inquiry cycle to uncover important concepts. The combination of the video lectures and POGIL lessons replaced the pre-flipping direct instruction. The POGILs mimicked the Socratic method by helping students think through and understand the content. This reinforced the student-centered dynamic because students did the work to uncover reality, instead of me doing the work for them. In addition, POGIL groups require specific group member tasks (task manager, recorder, spokesperson, etc), which ensured all students participated.
•  I decided to increase the amount of time donated to inquiry labs. In previous years, I had two versions of each lab: cookie cutter and student designed. If I had enough time, I would opt for the student designed labs but many times was forced to use the cookie cutter lab. After the flip, I gave students as much time as they needed to design their experiment, get feedback and make multiple revisions. They also decided what data to collect and how to display this data.
• The most important decision I made to support a student-centered class was to let go. Since all of the videos and activities were posted on the course website, some students wanted permission to go ahead. After the first student went ahead, everything changed! Instantly, we moved from a traditional flip to a mastery flip. Students worked at their own pace. Some kids re-watched videos and asked for individual help at the board, while other students blazed ahead. I also let go of the assignment sheet. As a temporary stopgap, I created a spreadsheet with each student's name and towards the end of each period, I checked their progress and recorded what assignment, if any, each student had for homework. This was an ineffective process that will be reworked next year, but this method put each student in the center of the class. Kids controlled their pace and I was available to give students what they needed. I asked students to redo work as often as I thought necessary. Some kids I let go on to the next activity even if their work wasn't perfect and other kids had to submit flawless work before moving on. I rarely entered grades anymore (our middle school does not report grades.) I just entered checks because each check represented good enough work for each individual student.

The flipped class gave me the gift of seeing a student-centered class in action. Moving direct instruction out of the community space (not necessarily out of class time), gave my students the freedom to work at their own pace. They received direct instruction only when they were ready for it. This one fact opened the door to my planned adjustments (POGIL & increased inquiry time), and my on-the-spot adjustments (individualized assignment spreadsheets and revision-until-mastery assignments.) However, I'm most excited about the implications for next year when I will introduce student choice in how they learn and how they demonstrate learning.

Although this blog article sounds like a piece on the flexibility pillar of F.L.I.P. learning, it is a testament to the fact that student-centered learning cultures require flexible classes. This is true because students are individuals with different skills and deficiencies; a class centered on all students needs to be flexible enough to accommodate all of their differences.

Works Cited

• "6 Types of Socratic Questions." 6 Types of Socratic Questions. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 June 2013.
• "Inquiry-based Learning: Explanation." Inquiry-based Learning: Explanation. Thirteen.org, 2004. Web. 26 June 2013.
•  Nagel, David. "Report: The 4 Pillars of the Flipped Classroom." T|h|e Journal: Teaching with Technology News. T|h|e Journal, 18 June 2013. Web. 26 June 2013.
•  "Pogil - Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning." POGIL. N.p., 2012. Web. 26 June 2013.
•  "Un-cooking the Lab - A Guide to Constructing Inquiry-based Labs in Biology" The Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching. N.p., 2005. Web. 25 June 2013.