#merit14 Talks #flipclass

I was lucky enough to chat with a few awesome #flipclass folks on Tuesday for MERIT about what their classrooms look like. It was a good conversation and touched on a bunch of different subject areas. Delia Bush, Crystal Kirch, Andrew Thomasson, and Cheryl Morris joined the conversation.

If you're interested, the hangout is embedded below.

#flipclass Panel

I got to hand out with a whole bunch of intelligent #flipclass folks and chat with a group of teachers working with Chris McGee today. Really enjoyed this convo and the way it showed off the many facets of flipped learning.

The GHO is embedded below.

#MIflip14 Reflections

I was lucky enough to be a part of the planning team for the second annual Michigan Flipped Learning Conference which was held this past weekend in Byron Center, MI outside of Grand Rapids. Over 100 dedicated educators braved the cold and snow showed up to learn for a day.

Similar to the first version of this conference, I had a blast there. I tweeted some initial reflections on the conference - the screenshot is below.

A couple things bear some fleshing out. First, Steve and Zach did a great job with the keynote. Inspiring, funny, and self deprecating. A great job.

Second, Michigan education policy is, umm, well, pretty tough. To the best of my understanding, half of Michigan educators' evaluations are based on, wait for it, test scores. I'll lay off the string of profanity that this induces in my mind and just say that this is beyond a travesty. A buddy of mine tosses around the phrase traveshamockery. That's what an evaluation system like this is: a travesty, a sham, and a mockery.

But the point wasn't to rant about Michigan education policy. It was to express gratitude and amazement at the incredible dedication of the Michigan educators who, despite adverse conditions, still want to change education and schools for the better.

Ideas flowed all day. Conversations continued into the hall after sessions ended.

I had a blast and can't wait for #MIflip15.

The #MIflip14 planning team

Flipped History GHO

I got to hang out with David Fouch, Tom Driscoll, Jason Bretzmann, George Phillip, Kaelyn Bullock, and Kenny Bosch on Wednesday and talk all things flipping history.

We shared some ideas about new things that we were trying in our classrooms, new tech tools, and conference plans for the new year. It had been a while since we had gotten a chance to chat, and it was a blast. The archived hangout is embedded below if you want to check it out.

History #flipclass Teachers Unite (Again)

It had been about a month. It was time for the batsignal. We needed a #flipclass history teachers hangout. Luckily, Kaelyn Bullock started asking good questions about what a flipped inquiry history class would look like. And just like that, the batsignal was sent. The conversation is embedded below.

History #flipclass Discussion

I got to hang out with Jason Bretzmann, David Fouch, and Tom Driscoll on a Google+ hangout tonight and chat about flipped history classes. The conversation ran a little long - not the worst thing in the world. We chatted about summer PD, what we'd learned this summer and would be taking into our classroom in the fall, and what changes we saw making for the next school year.

I live demo'ed Voice Comments for the gentlemen. We ended with our summer beer highlights. Hope you enjoy!

CanFlip13: #BetterTogether

I had the distinct pleasure of attending CanFlip13 last week. CanFlip, a Canadian flipped learning conference, was started last year by two teachers in Kelowna, British Columbia - Graham Johnson and Carolyn Durley. It was an incredibly well-run conference with a very relaxed vibe to it.

I look up to both Graham and Carolyn for the work they do in the flipclass community, and this conference really hammered home just how much they do. Attendance at CanFlip13 more than doubled from last year. I met four presenters at this year’s conference who attended last year’s conference and came back and presented this year - I’m guessing there were others I didn’t meet as well. Talk about growing your own all-stars!

Graham and Carolyn are everything you would expect them to be - dedicated, brilliant, passionate, and full of an infectious, seemingly boundless energy that is absolutely awesome to be around: hanging out with them is an absolute blast.

Really, that is what this blogpost is going to be about: meeting people and relationships. As I often toss around with my PLN, we are always #BetterTogether. To me, that was what stuck out to me at CanFlip13: with all of these friends - some new, some old - we all are better together. So who’d I get to meet?

I had the honor of meeting Troy Stein, a former German teacher who now works for Techsmith. Troy is a super thoughtful guy and I had the pleasure of sharing several conversations with him about school and structures around school. Andy Miller, a science teacher from BC, was another long-time member of my PLN that I was excited to get to meet. I was bummed I didn’t get to spend more time talking to Scott Harkness who had some fascinating things to say in the few moments I got to talk to him. I got to meet Valerie Lees, Lynda Hall, and Peggy Drolet, all people I’ve followed for a long time on Twitter. Plus, I got to hang out with Ramsey Musallam and Audrey McLaren-McGoldrick again!

I was also excited to get to find out about - and meet! - some more collaborative flipclass teachers: Tara Cody-Simpson and Val Pereira co-presented about their first year flipping together and listening to Ben Arcuri’s sessions it was clear how much he and Scott Harkness work together.

So yes, like in my - or any - classroom, relationships are what I am left with after CanFlip13. I’m so glad to have gotten to meet so many great people, and so excited to continue to learn with a ton of talented British Columbia educators that I’m now following on Twitter!

And I hope Graham and Carolyn will have me back next year...

A whole lot of #EduAwesome! #BetterTogether

CanFlip13 Initial Thoughts

I got to meet Graham Johnson and Carolyn Durley!!!

They are just as #EduBadass in person as you would expect them to be. Allow me to most accurately complete this sentiment with a tweet I sent out the evening after the conference ended:

#canflip13 Presenentations

I had the absolute honor of attending and presenting at CanFlip these last two days. While more parts of my experience and some reflections are coming, here are the two presentations that I did.

Connected Teacher, Connected Classroom with my buddy Carolyn Durley


Starting Your FlipClass Year Right

The Right Way to Flip Your Class

There seems to be an implicit value judgment in the labeling of various ways to flip your class. Mastery. Self-paced. Standards-based grading. Flip 101. Project (or problem) based learning. Universal design for learning. Homework. No homework. Lectures. No lectures. Inquiry. POGIL. Explore-flip-apply. Etc etc etc forever and ever.

News flash - there isn’t a best kind of flipclass. The best kind of flipped classroom is the one you run: you know your students best. You know their needs. If you are willing to look at the huge variety of ways that you can flip your class, judge them based on what your students need, experiment and tweek classroom implementation, then continue to reflect on what works best for your students in your classroom, then you are flipping your class the right way.

A Strange #flipclass Benefit

My last day of school was today. Well, my last day with students was today. I have a teacher workday tomorrow and three days of voluntary PD that I’ll be attending next week but I won’t see my kiddos again (I loop with my students and have them again next year) until mid-August. The reflections from my year in a self-paced mastery based classroom will come out in bits and pieces. Here’s an initial one that I realized today.

Yes, in a self-paced classroom all I do on self-paced workdays (about 60-70% of the time) is walk around and talk to students. It’s freaking awesome. Answer questions, check-in about a piano recital or soccer game, maybe some small group instruction if a group of students are struggling on the same thing. As I’ve written before, I got to know students very quickly this year, both as people and as students.

But on to the realization. I think, because I’ve gotten to know students pretty darn well this year because I’ve spent more time than ever before talking to them, that I am hearing more negative feedback and concerns than I have in the past. Yes, I’m sure there is a ton of negative feedback I’m not hearing - I’m not delusional. But I think, just because of the sheer number of conversations I’ve had with kids this year, they have gotten more comfortable being honest with me.

Two students came in after the last final today: one that regularly challenges me on why I do things the way I do them and one that I haven’t heard a ton of negative feedback from. After some small talk, the regular said, “Come on, dude. Just tell him.” And so this student explained the issue they had with my class.

And it was great! Not that they had an issue, but that they felt comfortable sharing it. Because if you want to push on what a classroom is and what a classroom can be - in the name of creating a more student-centered classroom - there will be mistakes made (that blog post is coming) and students might be uncomfortable with all or some of the changes. And if you want to make your classroom student-centered, student concerns better be heard and addressed! So much the better that those concerns get shared with me - or that more of them get shared with me than in the past.

And that - hearing more student concerns and negative feedback - is unexpected flipclass benefit #1.

Flipped History Featured on Flipped Learning Podcasts

Troy Cockrum, an English teacher in Indianapolis, runs a series of podcasts about flipped learning through EdReach. Recently, three flipped history teacher (Frank Franz, Tom Driscoll, and myself) have been featured on his podcast. Check out the links below.

Tom Driscoll: Democratize Learning

Frank Franz: Flipping History

Me: Flipping History

History #flipclass Discussion

I got to chat with Frank Franz, Jason Bretzmann, David Fouch, Kaelyn Bullock, and Dan Hoehler tonight on Google+. It was a good, wide ranging conversation on flipping history classrooms. Check it out below!

SVCUE #flipclass Presentation

I presented about flipped classrooms with Cheryl Morris at the Silicon Valley Computer Using Educators event a couple weeks ago. Sam Patterson livestreamed the presentation and put it on YouTube. I figured I'd share it here. (part 1, part 2) Here's a link to our presentation that day - lots of good resources here too!

History #flipclass Discussion

I got to chat history #flipclass with Tom Driscoll, David Fouch, Jason Bretzmann, and Frank Franz today. It was a good discussion that we uploaded to YouTube. Check it out below! Unfortunately, I hit the 'Off the Air" button too early...

An Alternate #COflip Definition

As I look around at, for example, Thomasson Morris Instruction, or #ladygeeksanddave, the power of collaborative flipclass planning is really clear. Like crystal clear - the more teacher brains you have working on an idea/unit/lesson, the better it will turn out. This has always been my experience with collaborative planning as well - the more dedicated people you bring to a collaborative session, the better it will turn out.

I flip my world history class. But I don’t have a collaborative partnership like the two that I mentioned above. However, I do have a Twitter account. And a Gmail address. So as I was preparing to head home from school on Wednesday night, this article came across my Twitter feed. As I read about Crystal’s struggles with her 11th and 12th grade Math Analysis class, I realized they were the exact same struggles that I was having with my 9th grade world history class. As I hopped over to my Gmail account, I saw Crystal was online. A 10 minute Gchat occurred: what was she doing to try to get more students to own their learning, what was I doing to try to accomplish the same thing. What class structures were we using - tests, deadlines (or lack thereof), other things. We talked about sources of leverage for to get our students to more own their work. Frustrations were vented. Was anything solved? Not yet. Did I feel better? Yes.

To me, #COflip is having a PLN to call on. It is being a connected educator. I know both of those things aren’t revolutionary. At all. But the ability to reach out, via Twitter or any of the myriad of Google tools, to teachers all over the world? To have all those brains, and all their experiences and thoughts to call on? That’s powerful. And for me, that’s my #COflip.

Inquiry-Based History Class

If you listen to too many of the jargony phrases in education, your head might explode. Or you’ll design a tic tac toe board with educational jargon in preparation for a big conference. Either way… But despite, or maybe because, talk about education can become buzzword-y, it is always a good idea to know what people in your field are buzzing about.

I have seen (thanks Twitter) a lot of discussion about inquiry-based learning. In some ways, it was fascinating reading about these classes, particularly science classes. To have students do experiments to learn scientific phenomena (as opposed to learning about these phenomena out of a book and then experimenting to prove that they are true) is a darn cool way to teach, and intuitively it seems very ‘sticky’: kids seem more likely to remember what they have deduced from their experiments.

In other ways, reading about inquiry has been incredibly frustrating. As a history teacher, I don’t have tangible objects to manipulate to determine the laws of nature. This makes the type of inquiry that goes on in science classrooms difficult in history classes. Still, there has to be a way to teach an inquiry-based history class, right? I think there is. In the conversation around what history teachers should be doing in their classroom, flipped or not, it seems like there is a way - a necessity, I’d argue - to base history classes around inquiry.

In short, I believe historical inquiry means having our students do the work of historians in class. Students receive (or find, depending on the teacher’s preference and/or students’ abilities) multiple primary and secondary sources about an era or event and figure out why and how things happened in the past. By doing this, students analyze the past by creating meaning, not being handed facts. With historical inquiry, students synthesize disparate interpretations of events to create their own unique understanding of the past. They are also given opportunities to connect events that happened in the past and in a particular place to what is happening now around the world.

Focusing on historical inquiry pulls to the fore the content skills students learn through history class, skills that are absolutely essential for any functional member of a democracy. (For example, how to find bias, analyze meaning behind and within a source, or make meaning from conflicting accounts of the same event to name a few.) By doing this, historical inquiry also pushes the knowledge of historical content a bit to the backburner. Students still need context (the basic facts around a historical event) to do the work of historians but how they use these facts becomes far more important than if they remember when World War I started.

So what is historical inquiry? What does it look like in a classroom? A great place to start, and a source on which I base much of my thought on historical inquiry, is this book by Sam Wineburg.

Uh Oh

We are about two weeks into my ninth graders’ second semester of self-paced history. Time to check in and get some solid numbers to get a better feel for where everyone is at. Google forms to the rescue!

Anecdotally, I have seen some great growth in students who really struggled with self-paced learning last semester. However, I didn’t have solid numbers to know more precisely where all my students are in our imperialism unit. These numbers are based on my ‘suggested pace’ that I create for my students - this pace is what I feel is reasonable for students to move through a given unit at if they use their classtime well. Here are the numbers I got:

more than 1 week behind: 12%
1 week behind: 8%
3 days behind: 29%
1 day behind: 29%
right on track: 7%
1 day ahead: 7%
2 or more days ahead: 8%

So my students aren’t where I hoped they would be in the imperialism unit. Clearly my students aren’t using the time they have in class with me the way I hoped they would be. Yet. This means that the work they are choosing not to get done in class will need to move outside of classtime into homework, which I’m not thrilled about. But this is also a choice my students have made. And it provides some good fodder for a class discussion on Monday!

#MIflip Thoughts

So several months ago - I’m not sure when, really - a Twitter conversation started about a flipped learning conference in Michigan. Free. Hands on. With some relatively serious folks (David Prindle, Dan Spencer, David Fouch, Delia Bush, Doug Ragan, and Brian Bennett) organizing it. Since I was lucky enough to meet David Prindle at MERIT two summers ago, and since I knew David Fouch from G+ conversations about flipping history classes, I threw my hat into the ‘let’s make this conference happen’ ring.

It was certainly a unique experience to plan an entire conference via Google+ hangouts. I don’t think there was one in person meeting in the lead-up to this conference. That’s just a neat fact - we’ve reached that point where entire learning experiences can be planned online!

So why was MIflip a great experience? Several reasons:

• I love meeting my PLN in person. It is really neat to get to move someone from ‘internet friends’ to friends. I got to do that with some folks I have learned a LOT from.
• It was free. ‘Nuff said.
• It was on a Saturday. Only people who wanted to be there were there - slackers and people who aren’t interested in improving their craft don’t go to optional conferences on Saturdays.
• Brian Bennett’s keynote. Brian focused on making one little change, focused conference attendees on thinking about one thing that they could focus on and take away from the conference that day and use in their classroom on Monday. At a conference with such a wide experience range, it makes sense for teachers to focus on one little thing. Also, given the climate of education and the myriad of issues facing it, the idea of focusing on changing just one thing is appealing - it gives a both a sense of purpose and immediacy to the conference.
• Getting to facilitate sessions with Dan Spencer, David Fouch, and Delia Bush. Yes, That was bragging. But to get to share ideas with a group of people who are so talented and dedicated, well, that’s pretty cool.

Finally, huge props to Dan Spencer and David Prindle for doing so much work to make this conference happen. And also to David Fouch, who went above and beyond and opened his house up to me for the weekend.

I'll leave you with this: MIfllip cleanup courtesy of Brian and David F. Shaky camera work by yours truly...

A Weekend of #EduAwesome

Last weekend was a weekend of semi-organic awesomeness. Extended discussions about classroom practice ensued, to the tune of an 11,000 word, 25 page Google document edited by people all over the US and Canada. Google Hangouts happened. To get to hear the thoughts of so many smart people over the weekend was incredibly revitalizing.

Much of the conversation that occurred dealt with the recent more strident criticism of flipped classrooms. Others have written about this more eloquently than I can - see here, here, and here - and while I echo their sentiments, I won’t repeat their arguments.

I will say this: my conversations, with six amazing, inspiring educators, would not have occurred without my involvement in the flipclass movement, particularly my active engagement with that community on Twitter - I wouldn’t have met these great, thoughtful educators without conversations around the flipclass hashtag.

So say what you will about flipped classrooms. Define flipped classrooms narrowly. Demonize them. If a movement that teachers come to of their own volition that pushes a mindset of organizing a classroom around student ownership of learning is the antithesis of good teaching to you, that is fine.

But know this: I will continue to be involved in the discussion of flipclass. Troll the hashtag and the people involved in it. Attack and demonize flipclass. Attack and demonize teachers who make the choice to flip their classrooms. If the best target of your (in my mind misplaced) vitriol is reflective teachers who are looking to improve their practice and are willing to take great risks to do so, well, there is not much I can do about that other than be supportive of those teachers who are willing to take these risks.

But I will continue to be involved. I will continue to share with flipclass teachers around the world. Say what you will about flipclass rooms, or flipclass teachers creating PLNs that are echo chambers. I know when I hear the stories from Carolyn Durley or Cheryl Morris of how they are placing student interest and authentic learning at the center of their classroom, I am embarrassed at how far I still have to go.

But I also know that by continuing the conversations with the amazing educators involved in flipclass I will be driven to be a better teacher. I will be forced to continue to innovate in my classroom, to continue to push on what a history classroom is and can be.

So say what you will. I’ll be here, looking to do the best for my students that I humanly can. And to continue to try to help other teachers do the same.