Making Time for Synchronous Activities in an Asynchronous Flipped Class: Week 8 reflections

Successes:

After last week's successful unveiling of peer instruction, which my students now affectionately refer to as Pi (pronounced "pie"), I instituted a few more beginning of class synchronous activities. This week, I added Metacognition Monday and Controversy Thursday, in addition to Pi Tuesday and Wednesday. Friday is a full work day since many of my deadlines are at the end of the school day on Friday. At the beginning of class on Mondays, I'll have students journal about metacognitive topics: how they are doing in the course, which topics they feel great about or not so great about, mapping goals for the week, etc. On Controversy Thursdays, students will discuss controversial topics related to the current unit. The middle of the week will be dedicated to peer instruction. 

I cheated on the first Metacognition Monday. Instead of a reflection, I asked students to organize their materials from the current learning cycle. This is in response to the loose papers and handouts I've noticed left in class. Now that students got the clear message that they'll be held accountable for keeping materials, I expect some of this lackadaisical behavior will change.  

Both attempts of peer instruction were successful. In both attempts, students were highly engaged. Generally, 8th graders seem to love debating each other. It was great to harness that desire to argue and apply it to science concepts. Who would've known that Punnett squares can elicit such vigor! In all attempts, incorrect responses decreased and correct responses increased after the student discussions. My favorite part of PI was the post voting discussion. I was impressed with my students's ability to explain why the incorrect choices were incorrect; more importantly and my eduwin for the week, they were able to explain the confusion that led to incorrect responses from other classmates. These discussions were informative; some sources of confusion were predictable but others were interesting. Most issues were those related to either reading comprehension or a conceptual misunderstanding. 

Near the end of the week we had our first Socratic Seminar. This was our first full class synchronous activity since the course scavenger hunt on days one and two. These discussions were a treat to facilitate and changing the pace for the synchronous discussion was the right move. Some students made interesting comments that their peers had not considered. I need to incorporate more of these rich discussions. 

Adjustments:

I'm considering making most assignments optional for the students who are excelling. I mentioned in last week's blog post a student mentioned frustration about be required to do all of the assignments because he/she felt all of the steps were unnecessary to learn the content. I will reach out to a small group of students who demonstrate strong ability and will inform them that the video forms are now optional; in addition, they will no longer need to complete every question in the problem sets. I might denote specific questions as mandatory but otherwise they'll be free to pick and choose questions. I won't offer this option to all students because I want to see how it works first. There are logistical things I need to work through, like setting up exempt or optional assignments in calculations of grades. Of course there are pedagogical reasons to have some mandatory assignments. All students will have to perform the labs and participate in the exploration and revisitation of the exploration phases. Eventually, I want to make most assignments optional but I'm just not there yet. Some flipped teachers make their videos optional. In principle, I agree. In practice, this is difficult because my course is a hybrid of different levels of biology. Some topics we cover specific aspects that are closer to a 9th grade course and others are 11th grade and even above. My students learn Punnett squares at a basic level yet they perform chi square analysis. They learn of protein synthesis but not the names of specific steps. It's difficult to videos and readings that will be appropriate to my course unless I create them. I worry about students learning of vocabulary and details that we will not address. It's easier to find readings because I share links  and tell students to skip certain sections. My long term project is to write my own e-textbook tailored to the content of the course. 

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• Introducing Alternative Assessment & Peer Instruction in the Flipped Class: Week 7 reflections

Introducing Alternative Assessment & Peer Instruction in the Flipped Class: Week 7 reflections

Students only had an exploration, video, problem set and Moodle quiz  because I wanted to add some breathing room for students to catch up to my pace. I also instituted peer instruction at the beginning of lessons. Students are all over the place - anywhere from one week behind to one week ahead. The number of ahead students has increased in the last day or so. After next week, I plan to speed up the pace a bit and offer more synchronous activities.

Successes:

One cool thing that has emerged from post quiz conferences is pin pointing each student's conceptual issues. In previous weeks, I suggested struggling students to work through pre-planned remediation modules after a quiz. The pre-planned modules are divided into topics, so students always had the choice of how to spend their time. But these conferences have better equipped me to recommend certain tasks or to create remedial tasks on the spot. A few examples will make the point. Two students struggled on the same quiz but had different issues. One student couldn't couldn't decipher the difference between codominance and incomplete dominance, while another student had some issues solving blood typing Punnett Squares, which included codominance. For the first student, I told him to create a list of traits (the weirder the better.) He had to imagine the appearance of a heterozygote, in situations where the trait displayed codominance and incomplete dominance. I pointed the second student to a blood typing reading and online practice quiz that was already part of the remedial module. I'm also adding more remedial activities to the modules because these conferences are uncovering areas of confusion that I did not anticipate in the planning phase. It would've been difficult to identify and offer specialized remediation without the post quiz conferences built into the class period, courtesy of the flipped model. My eduwin for the week is using post quiz conferences to suggest tailor made remediation.

I really love adding a synchronous activity to the beginning of class. It changes the feel. It's slowed things down a bit and made the class feel whole. I'm glad that I opted to go with peer instruction instead of a tracking journal at the beginning of the class. The tracking journal could've helped with goal setting and slowed down the pace but it would not have the added benefits of peer instruction. I posted a scenario with a multiple choice answer. It was an engaging and conceptually rigorous question. Students thought about their answer individually, with no help. They jotted down their answer and closed their eyes to vote. I recorded the class results. Then students found someone with a different answer and tried to convince them to change their answer. After a few minutes, students re-voted. I shared the results of both votes and asked students to explain their reasoning. I made sure to include students who were convinced of the correct answer. I revealed the answer and had time for explanations and clarification. Once the session was over, I let students resume their work. Students were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about this change. We all craved for communal time. I'm ecstatic that the communal time was a research based approach that was still student-centered. It was the best of all worlds. 

Adjustments:

I expected a two year roll out of the flipped class; year one is flipped videos and associated guided notes and forms, explore flip apply, Moodle quizzes and asynchronous learning, while year two will be standards based grading, blogging and voice & choice. I'm starting to question whether I should institute voice & choice earlier. I have a student or two who have struggled with the Moodle quizzes, despite post quiz conferences and retaking them. Even though there are some real issues with learning the material, the lack of partial credit has been a real detriment here. Moving forward, I will have a paper version of the quiz to administer to a small number of students who struggle. In addition, I ought to institute voice & choice sooner for students to display learning in alternative ways. I've already opened things up a bit. I've asked some students to create their own problems and solve them to convince me of their understanding. Even though I've done this informally and on an as needed basis, it has worked nicely. I ought to build in these alternative opportunities more often and eventually, allow all students to choose from a menu of ways to demonstrate knowledge. 

The other change I'm thinking about instituting a year earlier than originally planned is an element of standards based grading. In a recent response to a my ongoing course feedback form, a student mentioned that all of the activities were unnecessary to understand the material. I, of course, agree; this is one of the main reasons that I planned to institute SBG next year. In the interim, I've decided to reach out to individual students and discuss making certain activities optional. I won't open things up for all students just yet until I've thought through effective accountability and grading systems. At the very least, I can tell students to complete as many or as few problem set questions that they need.