Unit Structure: Reflection on Last Year’s Shortcomings

Which were numerous. And led to this year’s changes - more on that later. The best part of those failures? I loop with my students - the ninth graders I had last year are the same kids I have this year as tenth graders. On day one of this year, I got to own those failures and explain how I was going to fail forward and make this year better; I got to explain my plan for fixing last year’s mistakes but not to worry - that new mistakes would be made this year.

So what didn’t I like about last year? Thanks for asking. Running a self-paced, mastery-based world history class was a blast - I got to walk around and talk to students all period. But. But. There were things that needed changing. My class was too prescriptive. Do this, then this, then this (here’s a unit plan to check out). This is your test - short answer questions, same for everyone. Revealed at the beginning of the unit. Completed when the unit work was finished. Transparent? Yes. Self-paced? Yes. Waaaaaay too prescriptive? Yes. Too much ‘everyone does the same thing’? Yes. Absolutely yes. There was nowhere near enough room for student choice within the structure of my class last year.

And what about when students work at their own pace? It was freeing for them. But when students are wrestling with primary source documents, there is some power in the shared experience of that discovery together. I still kept a couple weeks at the end of each unit for synchronous, whole class historical thinking activities like structured academic controversies and Socratic seminars. However, that aspect of richness that was present in those synchronous historical thinking activities was lost in the self-paced sections of my class because everyone wasn’t always wrestling with the same documents.

Were there more failures last year? Most certainly. But these were the two biggest ones that needed fixing over the summer. My solutions will be up here soon.

A Realization

Friday was a rare day in my class where my students were all working on the same thing. There are always several days in each unit where, regardless of where students are in terms of working through a given unit, they come together as a class and we work through a bigger question that is at the core of the unit. Sometimes it is through a Socratic seminar, other times a Humanities paper. This Friday it was a Structured Academic Controversy (SAC).

At this point in the semester, my freshmen are finishing up their second self-paced world history unit, a unit that covers the Industrial Revolution. Given the freedom and lack of daily structure in my class - like I mentioned previously, students work through units at their own pace - students are making strides at owning their learning. As the semester winds down, I have seen flickers of hope from students who had spent their time in my class less wisely than perhaps they should have.

But Friday was an eye opener. Students were familiar with the structure of a SAC - they had done one earlier in the semester. They are used to looking through primary and secondary sources to find evidence to back up a thesis. As I wandered class Friday, because there were so few questions, I just got to listen to a lot of conversations about what the best evidence was to defend whether or not the Industrial Revolution was good for the people of England.

Students were on task. Though not the most engaging task, the ability to work in groups to learn collaboratively as well as the contextualization I did of the task - how the question they were wrestling with for the SAC tied into the unit question as well as their in-class written final exam, a Humanities essay - seemed to engage students enough. And with no (or far fewer) hurdles than in a normal class period, the level of discussion among groups was very impressive.

As I stepped back and thought back to other years I have had freshmen, I believe that a part of the reason that the conversations around evidence were so advanced Friday was due to the level of independence and control I have given my students this semester. They have become more used to managing their time with less structure than in other classrooms. This ‘used-to-ness’ showed itself in my class Friday.

I’m excited for the thinking that I’ll get to see in class tomorrow. And I’m excited for what my students will do with their second semester of self-paced, mastery-based learning.

Glimmers

I haven’t written anything in like forever. It seems a little weird, to be honest. Life, like it sometime does, has gotten busy. My history class is also busy. I have seen increase in student ownership of learning. That makes me excited - I had a lot of students fall behind in their first taste of a self-paced, mastery-based classroom. Why the catch-up? A few reasons, I think.

• Provisional zeroes in the gradebook: Students who didn’t demonstrate mastery of the democracy and revolutions content on the timetable I suggested received provisional zeroes in my gradebook for the classwork as well as the summative assessment that they weren’t ready to complete. I think these provisional zeroes increased the tangibility of my students’ inability to manage their time while in my class.
• Contracts for success: These students that received zeroes also filled out contracts for success, linked here. These were a good initial reminder of what exactly needed to be done, and gave students a schedule to complete classwork they had fallen behind on.
• Individual conferences: About a week after students filled out the contracts, I had individual student conferences with students who were still on the previous unit. These typically lasted two to four minutes. Some classes I only had five meetings; in other classes the meetings took most of a 50 minute period. This was not something I could have ever done before I moved to a self-paced, mastery-based flipped classroom. These meetings set specific goals for students to demonstrate mastery of parts of a unit and culminated with a date students would be ready to complete the summative assessment for the unit. Students have done a good job staying faithful to this second date of completion. Nothing like a little #EduHarassment to get some of them back on track.

So what’s next? Despite the fact that more students are owning their learning, there is still one class period where the feeling is just a little off. Students are viewing their classtime as something that is to be played with, not something to be taken advantage of. I am still working to come up with changing the dynamic of that class.

Thoughts on Week 1 of Flipped Mastery

Having finished off the first week of self-paced, mastery-based world history, I think it is useful to get some thoughts out there. These have been percolating all week, as events unfolded in class.

There were actually a lot of positives that came out of this week. A lot of people I really respect, people I interact with on Twitter, people I look to for intellectual inspiration, have had some issues moving their classes into a flipped-mastery model. They have gotten students who have not used classtime well. I was ready for a really bad week this past week. I was excited that that didn’t really happen. Getting to speak to every student every day was a good thing. More importantly, out of these conversations, I was able to really see what my students were thinking throughout last week. Occasionally, a check-in would be brief, as student were on the right track or just needed a brief redirect about what to do next.

Other times, conversations lasted closer to five minutes: what did the student see? What was I looking for? This ability to see what kids really knew - not ‘I swung by your group and your answer looks good’ but more along the lines of ‘I can have an individual conversation with you about what you know’ - was really neat. Another positive was that the vast majority of my students used their classtime well. I had a couple students have bad days come back and recognize their mistake and apologize for wasting time - that hadn’t happened before in my class. More importantly, both students who did this showed up the next day and were productive.

Those students off task also were a negative. Though I was ready in my head for more students being off task and not owning their learning in a productive way, I am hopeful that next week is more productive for all of my students. Also, I need to make a couple changes moving forward. I need to be clearer on an ideal order for task completion, a way through the work of a unit that makes the most sense. That will happen next unit (I’ve already done damage control for this unit). I also need to remind students that screencasts are only one option for getting the content of the course - textbooks work fine too, as do internet sources. This mistake is correctable next week.

The less-than-ideal use of time one? That might be a longer process. I am hopeful that it can be corrected, and I am glad that it is a student or two in each class, not entire classes that have lost their ability to manage their own learning.

Finally, an anecdote: I was sitting out in the hall helping a couple students - my classroom is tiny and students often escape to the hall - when my principal came by. She asked me what my students were working on. It was kind of neat to say, “Well, I’m not really sure. Ask them.” Flipping the responsibility for and ownership of learning over to students - I like it.

How I Tried To Successfully Start A Flipped Class Year

There have been a couple great posts in the past week by Brian Bennett and Glenn Arnold about how to NOT start your year with a flipped class. Cheryl Morris wrote very openly about issues that she has had with her flipped English classes this year. It is always great when teachers are willing to put themselves out there, the way Glenn, Brian, and Cheryl did, and openly air their struggles and why things aren’t working for them. It makes them better teachers, but by publicizing their blog posts it makes me a better teacher too.

By no means do I pretend to know more about flipping classrooms than Glenn, Cheryl, or Brian. All have flipped longer than I have. I am in my first year in a self-paced flipped world history class; all of them have done what I am doing for years. But as I read their thoughts, I thought over the choices I made to start my year. I figured I might as well share them.

So how do you prepare ninth graders, who have at least nine years of ‘this is how school works’ beaten into them, for a self-paced mastery-based environment? They know school where teachers control the pace and structure of the learning of students. Where students lack choice in gaining or demonstrating their understanding. Where creativity is drilled out of them.

So what’d I do? Again, I make no claims to knowing what I am doing. (I do, however, make the claim to knowing less Brian, Glenn, and Cheryl.) But the more information that is out there for teachers looking to flip - or to move into a self-paced flipped environment - the better. Without further ado:

I spent my first six weeks not self-paced. We focused on the skills students will need to be successful in my classroom. I focused on collaborative skills as well as some intense literacy and historical thinking skills done around multiple conflicting textual accounts of historical events. Finally, I tried to build my students’ comfort with and knowledge of the technology pieces they would be using over and over during our two years together. This focused around Google’s tools, particularly collaborative projects using Presentations. Students also learned to use Blogger and became more familiar with using Google Forms to submit answers or feedback to me or URLs for blog posts they had written.

My early screencasts for my students dealt exclusively with explaining the technology tools I mentioned above. They were non-threatening (well, in a content way) and relatively straightforward. Also, before I sent students out to watch screencasts independently, we watched a screencast together in class. We talked about what I would be looking for from them to prove that they watched the screencast - notes, a Google form, etc. I also created a ‘how to watch screencasts’ video that my students will watch and add their own ideas to.

Several times in the first six weeks I talked openly about how things were going to get ‘weird.’ We discussed self-pacing and what it would look like on multiple occasions. Students saw the first unit plan - and the three week stretch of ‘worktime’ that was ahead of them - multiple times before they received a physical copy of it. I also made every attempt to reinforce the positive things I saw in my room - groups being on task and collaborating well together, people asking good questions, groups pushing beyond the bounds of what I was asking for and delving into new areas - things that students would need to do in order to be successful in my classroom once they took full control of their own learning.

When students finished their collaborative tasks early in class, they got worktime on other homework. A few times, groups got solid chunks of free worktime at the end of their history class. I wanted students to get used to occasionally using history to do work for other classes. Again, if I am going to trust a student to take control of their own learning, I need to trust their judgment that at any given moment their English homework is more important to them than work they can do anywhere, anytime for my world history class.

Students have gotten (more) used to using technology in class. Slowly, students are becoming comfortable having their phones or iPods out on their desk and using them to look up information they need. (Yet another thing they need to unlearn - or learn: using all available tools to learn should be encouraged, not repressed.) I still occasionally have students ask questions then look blankly at me when I tell them to look it up. But slowly they are getting used to the technology mantra of ‘if I see it I assume you are using your phone/iPod to get smarter’ - students are getting used to my assumption of positive intent around their technology usage in my classroom.

I didn’t assign homework for about five weeks during this introductory period. Again, I wanted my students to get used to doing their thinking in class, not in at home. We talked as a class about part of my job being to cut down the ‘stuff’ they had to do, to figure out how to get them to think deeply in my classroom and then get rid off the superficial aspects of my class that pushed tasks into the homework space.

I pushed students to excel and think more deeply about class assignments, but since so much of the thinking I was asking students to do was skill-building, I didn’t grade their work using a mastery/standards-based system - I was looking for completion. How I get them used to mastery-based grading is the subject of another post... But I didn’t try to institute that from day one. Or even month one.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I built support for my flipped-mastery classroom with my administrators - at a summer meeting I called to explain to them what I would be doing and so I could answer their questions - as well as with the parents and guardians of my students at Back to School Night.

And now? Well, now here goes nothing. My classes will get the outline for my class through the end of October tomorrow. Hint: it says ‘worktime’ a lot on the plan for any given day. We shall see how things proceed from here...

My board on Back To School Night - how I introduced my flipped classroom to parents

Selling Your Administrators on Flipped Classrooms

First, why sell your administrator on flipping your classroom? If/when pushback come from parents about how I am structuring my history class, I want to make sure that my administrators know both what I am doing in my class on a daily basis as well as my rationale for flipping my classroom. As teachers, we all hope for administrative support in the face of angry or disgruntled parents: being transparent with administrators helps to keep that support but also allows administrators to speak knowledgeably about your classroom structure to unhappy (or happy) stakeholders.

So before I begin this semi-advice section, a bit of context – I’m a history teacher, we love to contextualize things. Two pieces of needed context: what I define the flipped classroom as and administrator competence/willingness to support innovation.

Let’s start with the administrator part. I met with two of the three administrators that work at my high school yesterday. They are both very supportive of innovation in the classroom and are hands-off in terms of what happens in my classroom. I don’t know if that means I’m doing a good job, or if not a ton of parents complain about me, or if I have their trust. Regardless, it is a pretty sweet set-up; I didn’t anticipate having this be too hard of a sell. And I’m not just saying that because they may stumble upon this blog someday…

I define a flipped classroom as having two components. These are no means original ideas – you will recognize them. Promise. In my mind, flipped classrooms flip the responsibility of learning from the teacher to the student. That doesn’t mean I don’t teach, it means that students are responsible for taking ownership of their learning. Second, flipped classrooms consciously make the teacher reflect and adjust their instruction based on the question, “What is the best use of my face to face time with my students?” I’m going to drop this next section bold and centered, because I think it is important:

In my mind, the flipped classroom is not a pedagogical technique, it is a mindset.

Many flipped classrooms leverage technology to help deal with these two aspects of a flipped classroom, but I do not believe that in order to flip you must use technology. In order for my classroom to be self-paced, I will be screencasting short lectures to provide students with the necessary context to do the evaluation and creation of history that is focus of my class, and my students will be utilizing technology where it is appropriate within my curriculum. However, technology is not a prerequisite of a flipped classroom the way I believe the other two pieces of my definition are.

Enough context. How can you gain administrative support for your flipped classroom?

• You must, must, must know what your classroom structures and unit progression will look like. For me, blogging about this and writing it up on my class website helped to clarify this in my mind. I went into the meeting with my administrators well prepared to both explain what my class would look like on a day to day level and on a unit level, but also prepared to defend why I was choosing to structure my class this why. (In super-brief, I am going to run self-paced, mastery-based world history class – this is known to some as the flipped-mastery model.)
• Being able to clearly articulate the differences from my old classroom set-up (students are self-paced), but also the similarities (emphasis on reading, writing, and the creation and interpretation of history; Humanities focus) was something I was glad I was able to do. A flipped-mastery history class sounds big and scary and imposing, and the changes will be big, but there will be numerous similarities in the kinds of thinking that students do on a daily basis in my classroom.
• I did my best to guess what questions I expected to hear from my administrators. How can you know what these might be at your school? Know what your school (or principal) values in a classroom. I was able to tie my decision to flip to our school cornerstones, our history department philosophy, the common core standards, and the 21^st century skills our students will need as they move on from high school.
• Be prepared to answer the tech question. It will come. For me, the answer is easy: in a self-paced classroom, the videos aren’t homework (Digression: I wish more education experts understood this, but I’ll stop here before this becomes a rant.) There is a classroom desktop to upload the videos to and play the videos on, as well as a school-provided laptop, and, if need be, my personal laptop. I will upload videos to students’ phones and iPods. Plus, those with internet access can watch them at home if they want to.

So what questions did my administrators ask?

• What will you do with students who fall behind? Our school is divided into smaller learning communities (SLCs – more about them here). I will communicate with parents and guardians when students are slipping, as well as looping in the student’s advisor (either myself or the English, math, or science teacher who shares the same group of students with me). If need be, I will un-self-pace my class for students, requiring them to spend lunch and my office hours with me until they have gotten closer to the suggested dates of completion I lay out for the students for various parts of a unit.
• What about the Humanities focus? I work in close contact with an English teacher who teaches the same students that I do. We run overlapping English and history units (reading All Quiet on the Western Front while studying World War I, for example) that end in some really neat, memorable projects. Similar to the more conventional history class that I have run in the past, unit end dates are somewhat synchronized so that time can be blocked out to work on these projects in class. This was an easy answer: the Humanities focus remains unchanged.
• Won’t this decrease the amount of reading that students will do? Nope – students will still wrestle with primary and secondary sources on a daily basis in my classroom. The amount of reading (and writing, though this was not asked) will remain unchanged, and may actually increase thanks to the Blank White Page project.

And how did the conversation end? Administrator number 1: “This sounds fascinating. I’m looking forward to coming into your class this year and seeing what it looks like. Thanks for looping me in.” Administrator number 2 (a former history teacher): “Share your unit calendar with me. I’m looking forward to seeing what this looks like on paper.”

And that is how I got administrative support to run a flipped-mastery world history class.

Veterans, any advice for those seeking administrative approval for flipping their classroom? Add what I missed below.

Concerns About Groupwork in a Flipped-Mastery History Class

Chase Moore left an excellent question on a previous blog entry this morning. I answered his question cursorily and then went out for a run. Like most runners, I think when I run, often (most of the time?) about my classroom. I kept turning the last sentence of his question over in my mind. The entire question is below.

Chase's question

So how do you maximize collaboration in a flipped-mastery classroom? I can’t speak to this, for next year will be year one of running flipped-mastery classroom. I do know, from reading and talking to people at FlipCon12, that students seem to self-select into groups that move through a given unit at a similar pace. And that is all well and good – the people I talked to have run flipped-mastery classes and I trust them.

Still, Chase’s question stuck with me. I am coming from a groupwork-based history class. Students sat in groups every day, and interacted with their groups at minimum multiple times per class period. How can I ensure that I still have students collaborating to build knowledge together in a self-paced class?

1. My first unit is entirely skills-based and will not be self-paced (at least as I currently conceptualize it). It is based heavily around collaborative groupwork while learning how historians create history: how to read, write, and think like a historian. It is a four-ish week unit that also explicitly builds in the sentence starters as well as the body language and task division that are essential to group success. I am hopeful that this unit, combined by giving the students feedback daily on what their groupwork looks like by highlighting great things I saw or heard from groups, will lay the foundation for my students to continue to collaborate successfully after we move into the self-paced, mastery-based structure after the first unit.

2. I got several things reinforced at FlipCon12 around the idea of groupwork. One was the good old, “ask three then me.” Forcing students to talk with at least three other students before they come to me with a question will hopefully help. Theoretically they would be working in those groups that are moving at the same pace and would ask each other then head out to other groups to get their question answered. Presenters also suggested that once you answered a question from a student, that student becomes the expert in the class on that particular question. If another student has the same question, they go to the student who asked the initial question, not to you. Hopefully both of those tactics will help.

3. My room will be arranged in groups every day. Students will be able to work where they want to, but hopefully that initial reminder – look, we’re in groups – will help them to remember that my classroom is a collaborative environment.

There have got to be more ways of ensuring a collaborative environment than just those three. I’d love your ideas, either theoretical or this-is-what-I-do-in-my-flipped-mastery-class, to help me ensure that my students are working collaboratively in a self-paced classroom.

An Assessment Cycle in a Flipped-Mastery(ish) History Class

As I see it right now, my 9^th grade modern world history class next year will be self-paced and mastery(ish) based. I’d love to say that I will have time to go through all of my curriculum this summer and map it onto California state content and analysis standards and provide students multiple opportunities to meet each content and analysis standard I am focusing on in a unit, but I’m not going to get there. I’m nervous about trying to do too much this summer: all my flipped classroom thinking, collaboration, and work has been incredibly rewarding but I’m going to need to let next year be a part of the evolution of what I want my class to eventually look like. I’m okay with that. Plus, I’ll enjoy my vacation a lot more! But back to the point: what does assessment in a self-paced, mastery(ish) history class look like?

At the beginning of each unit, students will be given a list of assignment that they are expected to show mastery on as they move through the unit. Students will also receive the short answer questions they must show mastery on at the end of the unit. They will work through these assignments at their own pace and must show mastery of a given topic in order to move on to the next assignment. I will be creating checklists with suggested completion dates on them so that their progress can be tracked throughout the unit.

Upon demonstrating mastery on the classwork for each unit, students will receive an 85% for their classwork grade for that unit. (More about getting that missing 15% in the last paragraph.) If students complete the classwork in a unit early, they may work on the extension activities that are outlined below (that final 15% in their classwork grade) or they may choose to work on homework for other classes.

Once students demonstrate mastery on their classwork for a unit, they are ready to take the short answer section of their unit test. They may take this short answer portion of the test whenever they are ready, and may retake the test as many times as they want. All students must demonstrate mastery (score 75% or higher) on the short answer section of a test before they are allowed to move on to the content of the next unit.

Additionally, all students will take a multiple-choice test covering the content of a unit. This test will be administered on the same day for all students in an attempt to keep the results for this portion of the test as fair as possible. Two things about this: yes, I know that Moodle does some crazy cool stuff with randomizing multiple choice questions for tests, so theoretically I could have thousands of versions of the same multiple choice tests. (Again, I’m worried about biting off more than I can chew next year.) And yes, multiple-choice tests are less than awesome for numerous reasons that I won’t go into. However, given the fact that my students need to pass the CAHSEE (California state high school exit exam) and if I could keep my STAR scores somewhat respectable, well, I’m going to bow to the man on this one. Yes, I never take multiple-choice tests in the real world. It isn’t a life skill. Sorry – no teacher is perfect. I’m working to minimize the impact these multiple-choice tests will have on my students’ grades.

Retakes will not be allowed on the multiple-choice test (again, I don’t want to bite off too much next year). However, multiple-choice questions will only account for 1/3 of the points on any given test. Students will have to show mastery on the short answer section (2/3 of the unit test grade) before they move on to the next unit of a test. Plus, I want students to focus on the short answer questions as they move through the unit: this is why they receive these questions at the beginning of the unit.

All students will complete test corrections on their multiple-choice test. In an attempt to have students evaluate their study habits, they will also reflect on each test (both the short answer and multiple choice section). I got some great ideas from Jen Gray about this at FlipCon12. I will ask students to predict whether they think they got a given question correct before they hand their tests in. Upon receiving the test back, they will classify why they got a question wrong. They will also reflect on which of their study strategies seem to be working and which seem to be less effective through this process by looking at what helped them get answers correct – or partially correct. This will become a blog post, and hopefully over the course of the two years that I have my students, they will become more metacognitive about what test strategies work for them.

Finally, what about that final 15% students will not get credit for when they demonstrate mastery on their assigned classwork for a unit? For some, getting a solid B on their classwork will be satisfactory and they will choose to do no more work. For others, they may have been intrigued by the big ideas from the unit or just want to get more than a B on their classwork. To make up this last 15%, students can do several things, all of which revolve around choice and their interests:

• dig deeper into the historical content of a unit and create a product to show the understanding they have gained from this work,
• look into where the big ideas from the unit are currently still appearing in the world today and create a product to show the understanding they have gained from this work,
• or they work on answering a question from the collaborative Blank White Paper project (outline of the BWP project is located here).

That’s how I see assessment looking in my flipped-mastery(ish) class next year. What am I missing? What should I rethink? Thanks in advance for pushing my thinking on this.

Final(ish) FlipCon12 thoughts

Now that I’ve had about a week and a half to percolate the ideas from FlipCon12, it seems like a good time to get some final thoughts out about the conference. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the quantity of really smart people and the quality of pedagogical discussion that was present throughout the conference was, in a word, exhilarating. I came away from the conference, which was only two weeks after I ended my school year, incredibly energized for August to roll around. Usually the energized feeling happens sometime in July on my mountain bike way up in the Rockies in Colorado, but it came early this year.

So the final(ish) thoughts? First, the #flipclass community is so positive and supportive. The number of people who are willing to talk, help, and discuss ideas at a moment’s notice is pretty incredible. Second is assessment: Jen Gray’s and Marc Seigel’s sessions really challenged me to think about what, why, and how I assess in my class; there will be more on this later for sure. Third, it was great to connect with some fellow history flippers – there aren’t a lot of us, and it was nice to build a support network of folks who will be doing similar things in the fall. Finally, I went to FlipCon12 with the idea that next year I would be doing what is termed as Flipping 101 – move direct instruction to out of the classroom to video and run a normal classroom with more time in class to discuss the big ideas in a unit as well as current events relevant to a given unit. Well, all that goes out the window. I’d love to say there was an ‘ah-ha’ moment, or a great session that pushed me to make this choice, but it was a cumulative effect of the conference: I can’t do Flipping 101 next year. I’m all in – my world history class will be a self-paced mastery class next year. And I’m so excited to start!

I’ve titled this a final(ish) set of takeaways from FlipCon12 because the ideas are still going to get banged around in my head. I haven’t had a chance yet to go back and watch the FlipCon12 sessions I was unable to attend. I will continue to blog about my thoughts for my class next year and hopefully get some helpful feedback from the #flipclass community. The journey – with a healthy kick from FlipCon12 – has barely begun.