Sharing "the flip"

#flipblogs topic for Nov. 8:

... Recent interactions with non-flippers in your school / district: Do you evangelize? Should you? How does that go? #flipblogs https://t.co/Lq4oStwQyc

— Andrew Swan (@flipping_A_tchr) October 26, 2017

It doesn't have to be complicated...even if I like it that way :)

I share with others what I'm trying to do, sure. Trying to set up a lightboard at school has involved bringing in various pieces of gear that at times have had me much more laden than your typical teacher, so explaining my burdened state when other teachers see me bringing in another piece or moving things between rooms can create some natural openings. However, I don't want to create the false impression that flipping one's class has to involve such a complicated setup just because this particular approach happens to be my current pet project. Explaining the lightboard idea to one teacher led to her remarking on my technological savvy, but I know that those much less tech-savvy than I can flip a class successfully.

Image source:
https://catsengsourichanh.wordpress.com/2013/06/14/new-isnt-always-better/

I should probably be intentional about adding to these discussions a disclaimer that in the past I've flipped lessons using only one of the school's notebook computers (with a built-in microphone), QuickTime, and a pre-made slide deck, and I have sometimes shared the videos using only our school's pre-existing system of making files available to students when I didn't have them uploaded to YouTube in time. The sound wasn't great -- I now consider a decent microphone to be one of the first things a flipping teacher might consider adding to her toolbox, if only to avoid the KA-CHUNK noise if you push a key on the keyboard to advance the slide -- but it was still perfectly understandable by my students, who made no complaints about the sound quality at all.

Motivate the change

Adding a disclaimer that "it's really not that complicated" isn't going to sell flipping the classroom, though. I think that to really "evangelize" about the flipped classroom, you need to focus on the "why."

I've already written about problems I've found can be solved through flipping. I think the sharing that I've done with others has been more effective when it's either been in response to hearing others share about encountering some of those same problems (or other problems I didn't mention but which can also find at least part of a solution in flipping) or when I've used that problem-solution framework as an explanation of why I've been trying the flip. This kind of approach shows that flipping the classroom isn't just change for change's sake.

"Should you?" / Responding to skeptics

Should we be working to actively spread flipped practice to others? I think if we want our schools/education system to be able to teach kids as effectively as possible, our classes do have to change. Students aren't learning the same way they used to, so perhaps we shouldn't continue to teach in the same way we've been teaching for the last 100 years. If research shows that certain approaches are more effective than what common practice has been, then that common practice needs to be revised. Yes, there is part of me that wishes the kids would just be more respectful and sit quietly as a class for half an hour, diligently copying down notes while I pour forth knowledge, but when I type that out and hear myself saying that in my head, I wonder how many students really learn well that way.

Is flipping the class the only approach that could be considered for this change? Not necessarily. I think the name of the game is to get more active learning happening, and there are a variety of ways to accomplish that. However, flipping has been helpful to me and to many other educators -- particularly as we seek to find ways to make more time for that active learning while still acknowledging the need for some direct instruction -- and the research backs up its effectiveness. Some may ask why we should "fix what ain't broke." I think such skepticism can be met by pointing not only to personal experiences of greater student achievement and better relationships with students, but also to that research, carried out by those with a much broader perspective (and much better methodologies) than my own. Maybe the current system isn't completely "broke," but that doesn't mean we can't do better.

Want to see the research for yourself? Try starting with the "Research, Reports & Studies" page over at the Flipped Learning Network...though there's plenty more what that came from.

And so I will.

I will be running a 1-hour session about the flipped classroom during a PD day my school has coming up on Nov. 17 -- about a week and a half away at this point. I'm curious to see how many people will make that session the one they choose to attend that day, where their current knowledge of and experience with flipped classrooms are at, and what level we'll be able to take that session to. Will those attending think it's a nice idea, but impractical to implement, or will it spark an interest in getting a team of educators together to start doing more flipping at the school, supporting each other through any hurdles we experience as we do so? I'm hoping to be able to send out a little survey prior to the event to those interested in attending so I can know my audience better, and hopefully put something together that meets their needs. Their response both to that survey and the PD session could be good reflection fodder for a future blog, so...stay tuned?!!

Post scriptum:
I published this post before a change was announced to the #flipblogs format for this month:

#flipblogs will take a livechat hiatus this month .... let's just focus on reflection & blogging! ANY FLIPPING TOPIC will work just fine. pic.twitter.com/CPTfMFMXfp

— Andrew Swan (@flipping_A_tchr) November 7, 2017

...so please feel free to interact with me about this post through the comment section, or alternately through Twitter (@flippingwithjoy).

Sustaining the flipped instructor

We addressed this topic some in the flipped learning SlackChat last Tuesday:

The topic for this week's #flipblogs chat is similar:

I'll start with the more general thoughts I had in response to the SlackChat question, then address the more specific bits of the #flipblogs prompt at the end.

Little hands are...not so helpful.

The first thing that came to mind when I read the chat/blog prompts was this:

Spending quality time nursing and holding my baby/toddler and talking with my 6-year-old about the things that are important to 6-year-olds is all important to me, but to make sure I can participate well in that (rather than passively nodding at whatever the boy says while I'm actually composing a video script in my head), I also need child-free time to do the "stuff" a flipping teacher does outside of class time: write learning goals, plan and record videos, put together group space activities, mark papers (uncrumpled or torn by tiny hands), and so on.

Remember this guy?

The kids crashing this professor's interview on TV was cute, but I think I could only get away with my kids showing up in one of my videos by accident once before the cute moment of levity would become an annoying distraction to students trying to focus on the material, even if I didn’t lose my train of thought and go off-script with them around. (Maybe I could get away with including them intentionally if I gave them roles, but I doubt the baby/toddler is ready to cooperate with me on that front!)

I am trying to get myself firmly in the mindset that I need to do my recording at school, and I have indeed finally managed to record a video there. (I happened to get it edited and uploaded there, too, but normally I think I’ll be able to do those bits at home.) I’m trying to fight through the “perfastination” I mentioned in my last post, and just “get it done” instead. Hey, score one for progress due to reflective blogging :). (I'm also getting closer to having the setup I really want at school, but I was able to get that video recorded using an intermediate kind of setup just fine.)

A fishing coach...or, rather, a community of fishing coaches

You know the saying: “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” Matthew Moore made this excellent point in his post on Sept. 27:

"In the end the biggest barrier to successful flipped learning is not having someone willing to take the time to teach you how to fish."

I still only know of one other person at my school who is flipping (there may be others I just don't know of yet). He just got started this year, although he's wanted to start flipping for several years now, so we're probably not too different in terms of our background knowledge about flipping the classroom. When you want to get better at something, though, it really helps to be able to draw on the experience of experts in that "something." A good expert can explain what he does to be effective in his own practice. A good expert coach can also support you in your own journey, helping you to troubleshoot when you run into obstacles and providing encouragement when you get frustrated with or disappointed in your progress.

I am very thankful that many in the flipped teaching community are this kind of coach. I've read Flip Your Classroom by Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann, sure, and I've taken the Level - I certification course and am working on both Level - II and the trainer certification courses. Really, though, for inspiration, motivation, encouragement, and help with troubleshooting, the chats on Twitter and Slack have been invaluable. Lately I've been trying to check into the #flipclass Twitter chat (every other Monday at 8pm Toronto time), the Flipped Learning Network SlackChat (every other Tuesday at 9pm Toronto time), and the #flipblogs Twitter chat (every other Wednesday at 8pm Toronto time). To those of you reading this who participate in those chats, thank you for helping to boost my fishing skill :)!

Stakeholder support

For my flipping to be sustainable, I also need buy-in from most of the students and their parents, and I'd also need support from my admin team if a challenge were ever raised over my using this nontraditional approach. I can point to the research that supports flipped instruction, and to the positive response from previous students, but if I ever got a lot of serious resistance to flipping from students, parents, colleagues, and/or my admin team, I know there’s only so long I'd be able to fight before I’d be worn down and feel defeated. Fortunately, I don't foresee this kind of massive resistance on the horizon at all, and I'm looking forward instead to seeing what the students and I can accomplish with the support we have.

More specific thoughts for #flipblogs

Tools & tech:

All my students are very familiar with Google Classroom. This is my first year using it, but having a platform the students already know how to use to access content is fantastic. It's also been handy that my department has a cart that holds 15 notebook computers.

I continue to find it helpful to use Camtasia to record on my personal laptop -- this is what I saw being used by the first flippers I met, so that's what I imitated, and now I'm hooked. I also continue to use an AverVision document camera and a Blue Snowball microphone I bought myself about 4 years ago when I started experimenting with flipping.

When I get my lightboard set up, I will likely record the video with my Canon T1i but continue to record the sound with the Snowball hooked up to my laptop -- an early trial to see if I'd be able to get the audio and video to sync up right went well, thankfully. I'll save any further lightboard tech details for a post I'll make once it's actually up and running workably well, but I'm getting close (I have to prioritize getting some marking done first).

There are other tools I've put on my "things to try" mental list as they've come up in the aforementioned blog posts, training, Twitter chats, etc., but I think that's all I've been using so far.

Ideas & beliefs:

I suppose I should work on my ability to communicate my philosophy of education on demand, because questions like this tend to make me feel a bit like a deer caught in the headlights. Here are some ideas I can articulate, though I'm probably forgetting some:

Relationships with the students are one key to their learning. Flipping can create time to better develop those relationships. (Ergo, flipping is worth pursuing, despite the work involved.)

Spending time in class on a lecture can be a huge waste of time. Students don't need their friends around them to listen to one person (me) talk. Any time spent on shushing them is time that could have been better spent (on a more active learning activity, for example).

Assessment that is based on learning goals can be very powerful, if done right, allowing you to communicate with students, parents and all other stakeholders exactly what they need to improve to increase their standing in the course. (Ergo, it's worth making the extra effort to have gradebook entries that don't just look like "quiz 1," "test 1," "assignment 1," and so on.)

Flipping can make more time for more natural formative assessment, as the teacher can check in with each student in an informal way more frequently than she can when part of each class period is taken up with a lecture. This also means more time to provide support during class time to students who need it -- students who may not come to any extra help session offered outside of class.

Flipping can be a great way of differentiating your instruction to meet students' needs, giving them easy access both to a way to control the pace of the lesson (speed through it if they feel they really get it, or pause every so often and slow things down if they need additional time to process each "chunk" of information) and to repeat a portion of the lesson as much as is helpful to them. This can all be beneficial both to students with special education needs as well as those whose first language is not the language of instruction. (Ergo, my responsibility to meet the needs of all my students kind of demands flipping.)

Students need better resources for review before quizzes and tests (and for any reassessment of learning goals being reattempted) than just being told to go over their notes and relevant sections of the textbook. For students who can't or won't take advantage of extra help opportunities face-to-face, videos by the student's teacher chunked into segments can provide a great way for students to do a just-in-time review of the knowledge and skills where they are lacking.

Fellow flippers, what beliefs drive your decision to flip? Those who do not (currently) flip your instruction, are these beliefs in line with yours, and if so, are you satisfied with your current means of addressing them?

"Perfastinating" in flipping

I have invented a word our language needs.

For context, here is the series of tweets that leads up to and includes the moment at which this word entered my lexicon:

I know that I am far from the only person who suffers from bouts of perfastination. I know this partly because I made a Facebook post about it and immediately started hearing from others familiar with the condition:

I made brief reference in a previous post to the obstacle that perfectionism poses to my ability to do flipped instruction well.

I want my flipping to reflect learning-goal-based instruction and assessment, so I put off flipping until I've got a great set of learning goals written in student-friendly language, set up in a way that meshes workably well with the textbook my colleagues and I are using (especially given that my department does common unit tests), and with an accompanying assessment scheme that meshes well with the categories of achievement I'm required to use in my province. In other words...until I have a perfect plan of instruction and assessment in place.

I've been introduced to the concept of a lightboard and seen it used effectively by Jon Bergmann in part 1 of the certification course available through the Flipped Learning Global Initiative, so now I've somehow decided it's super important that I use a lightboard in my flipped videos, and researching information and materials to build myself a perfect lightboard without spending thousands of dollars is perhaps getting me more sidetracked than it should (but once it's done, oh my, will it ever be great...right??).

I'm still in the experimenting stage of lightboardery.
I'd like to improve my lighting, for one thing.
Interestingly, I've not seen an image yet of a woman
teaching at a lightboard...why is that?

The problems with "perfastination"

What's getting me closer to giving up this "perfastination" is reflection on its impact. There are at least three problems with "perfastinating" flipping in these ways that I can see:

1) Not flipping means I'm trying to get by with traditional teaching in the meantime, with all its attendant problems.

I've already written a post about problems solved by flipping (and so have many others). The flipping I have done in the past didn't yet have a solid foundation of learning goals and was not done using a snazzy lightboard, so why shouldn't I at least do what I can while I keep working behind the scenes to improve?

2) Perfastinating discredits the great stuff I've already done in previous flipped lessons.

Students have learned from the flipping I've already done -- even the early videos that had awful sound, awful tablet writing, awful lag from the document camera, and even an entire section I forgot to edit out (my students did ask why I'd kept repeating myself in a certain part of the video, but ultimately they shrugged it off and kept watching). It doesn't have to be perfect to do good for the students. If I really believe even the imperfect flipping I've done has been more helpful for students than a traditional lesson on the same material would have been, I should embrace that imperfect approach for now, for their sakes.

3) Perfastinating sets up a standard that is impossible to expect from others, and thus kills a tiny part of the momentum of the global movement.

I'm working on my flipped trainer certification. I'll be running a PD session for some interested teachers at my school next month on the flipped classroom. Am I going to tell them they have to do it perfectly or not even bother at all? Of course not! I need to give them an achievable vision for how they can start. I can point to my own small beginnings from my early days of flipping, and talk about how I've grown in my flipping over time -- and I can tell them that while I'm still not perfect in my own implementation of the model, I'm growing, and the students and I will grow together. (And as more people get on board the flipped classroom train, there will be more of us to hep each other along!)

Actually, that reminds me of another part of Wednesday's chat:

Maybe it's not easy being green, but it's time to embrace my inner frog, and make the jump anyway. Wish me luck and off I go...ribbit, ribbit.

[but is this blog post perfect enough to publish :)?]

Doing it Backwards...On Purpose

I did talk somewhat about this in my previous post, but I will reiterate here (and unlike the last post, this one will be done in time for the chat).

My systems & secrets

When I have everything running the way I want, it will look like this:

• Each unit has learning goals.
• Each goal is associated with one of Ontario's categories of achievement.
• Showing evidence of having achieved is goal is worth a preset amount of the student's grade.
• Each learning goal has one or more videos specifically associated with it.
• Each learning goal also has one or more assessments specifically associated with it.
• If a student has a low grade in the course, the student and I look at what learning goals the student needs to bump up. The student reviews those videos, asking me questions if needed, and we look at what other learning activities can increase the student's ability to achieve those goals. When the student is ready, I reassess the student and, if appropriate, bump up the student's mark accordingly.

I know that sounds like a mastery system. In reality, I'm currently aiming to keep most of the class working through their initial exposure to the material at the same pace, but I am OK with some students going through things at a more individual pace if that is what is best suited to their circumstances. I may one day move to mastery, but I have more to learn myself yet about how that plays out -- for example, how can whole-class group space tasks happen if the class is scattered in where they are in a course? Do you just run the group space tasks with those who have got to the appropriate spot in the course, and those who aren't there yet just do their own thing instead?

Changes since "the old days"

I learned about standards-based grading (grading based on learning goals, rather than a set % for a particular quiz, for example) before I learned about flipping, but it's only recently that I'm really wrapping my head around how they can work together. My videos so far have been topic-based, but not goal-driven.

When I think of "the old days," I tend to think more in terms of "before I learned about standards-based grading." I think grading based on learning goals is so important in terms of letting students have multiple opportunities to show improvement and what they really know / can do by the end of a course rather than a set of high-stakes quizzes and tests (which make it harder to tell a student -- or parent, student success teacher, administrator, etc. -- what the student needs to do to improve in the course).

Backward design?

My teacher's college program used Understanding by Design (by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe) as one of our course texts, so the importance of beginning with the end in mind has been stressed to me since the very beginning. I have always appreciated the logic of this approach. (Actually, a lot of stuff put out by ASCD makes a lot of sense to me, and I became a member earlier this year.) My personality is that I need to know where I'm going and plan for it -- flying by the seat of my pants makes me nervous, even though it is part of every teacher's reality at least some of the time.

Other related topics...

I can't think of anything else related to share right now, but I'm looking forward to hearing/reading the thoughts of others. Time to see what the rest of the #flipblogs community has posted...after daycare pickup :).

My context, my ideal flipped practice, and obstacles to my flipping

A little over 3 weeks into the school year (our school year began on Sept. 5), and I am finally typing up my first blog post for the year. Well, the beginning of the year is always a bit of a whirlwind, isn't it? I think I'll just pat myself on the back for feeling I can take the time to blog this early, rather than regret not doing any reflective blogging earlier.

Here is the #flipblogs topic that was due today, although I'm posting this too late for the actual chat (which will have ended by now), and I'm going into much detail in this post about things unrelated to this topic as well:

The context in which I work

Given that I interact with flippers from other jurisdictions, perhaps some would appreciate a bit of an explanation of the context in which I'm aiming to flip. (Those already familiar with or not interested in such details can feel free to skip this section.)

In high school courses in my province, there's a a required 70% / 30% split between the assessments given during the term and the final summative assessments given at the end of the term. (The final assessment for a course could be a 30% final written exam, for example, or split between a 15% final lab exam and a 15% final written exam, or some other combination of final products.) We're also required to assess our students in four categories: Knowledge and Understanding, Thinking and Inquiry, Communication, and Application. (Yes, "Thinking" is one of the categories, as if thinking isn't required in any of the others, and yes, I know they're probably trying to use that name to emphasize higher-order thinking skills, but it still sounds ridiculous...but I digress.)

My department (among many others province-wide) has broken the 70% total term work down into prescribed percentages for each course. For the academic-level courses I teach, for example, our breakdown looks like this:

Knowledge and Understanding - 25%
Thinking and Inquiry - 20%
Communication - 15%
Application - 10%

I am teaching only grade 9 and 10 science this year, and each of those courses consists of four units (biology, chemistry, physics, and an earth & space topic — astronomy in grade 9, climate change in grade 10). The category percentages given above can then be considered to also be broken across those four units; the Thinking and Inquiry marks, for example, can be thought of as 5% coming from each of the four units. (This is of course assuming the teacher is professional enough to adequately address all four units in their practice. I will make that assumption here.)

My ideal flipping practice 

Within this framework, I have been trying to use a type of standards-based grading with my students. In my system, for example, the Knowledge and Understanding (KU) marks are based on a set of learning goals that are in turn based on the KU-related specific expectations in that course’s provincially-mandated curriculum. I design my quizzes and other assessments with these learning goals in mind, and record the marks per goal accordingly. This is sometimes a little tricky for students to understand in cases when a quiz consists of questions for more than one learning goal (“So what’s my overall mark for this quiz?” “Well, your mark doesn’t work that way, but let’s look at how you’re doing in each of these learning goals and across the course as a whole...”). The advantage to them, however, is that if they take the initiative to get extra help from me and study in their own time to gain a better understanding of a concept or better performance of a skill than they previously gave evidence of, they are able to ask me to reassess them on those learning goals and get their former mark bumped up. If I understand the standards-based grading movement correctly, my method isn’t entirely SBG. However, I think this system preserves SBG’s opportunity to show evidence of post-assessment growth while still working within the requirement that in the end I must report only one overall percentage grade (not several goal-related levels) as a final rating of the student.

So how is this related to flipping? Easy: I would like each learning goal to have a dedicated video or set of videos. I would like to be able to give students (and/or have posted online) a unit plan that outlines what the learning goals are for the unit (and the category for each), what videos contain the direct instruction on those learning goals, what textbook material addresses the same content if they’d prefer to use that in place of or as a complement to the video, and what assessment is planned of that goal. This would give students a consistent structure for their initial instruction on a topic, and it would also act as a great reference through which they could find the appropriate information for quiz/test review (and for further reviewing material prior to asking for any reassessment on failed or mediocrely-passed learning goals).

So that’s a glimpse at the direct instruction and assessment pieces of my ideal flipping practice. Through the certification course and interacting with the flipping community, though, I’ve been learning that stopping there would be bad flipping. Video-worksheet-video-worksheet (and eventually a quiz based on those worksheets) is not what flipping is about. Being able to do more experiments in science classes because of time freed up by flipping is great, but only using flip-freed time to do experiments can be a mistake as well. I had a tendency in the past to describe one benefit of flipping as the available presence of the expert leader (the teacher) when the students are doing their work — “If you get stuck in a question, I’m there for you to ask questions and get help!” While this is true, I am learning that the in-class time should ideally at least part of the time take advantage of the opportunity the class has to be a learning community together, helping to build each other’s understanding of the topic under study.

Obstacles I need to overcome

So, full disclosure: I have not yet started to flip my classes this year. I believe in flipping, I try to help others better understand flipping, I participate in some of the hashtag and Slack chats about flipping as I'm able, I'm working on my trainer certification...so why aren't my attempts to flip this year off the ground yet?

1. A lack of focused time, when the process requires a front-end investment of time on the part of the teacher

Let’s see; to pull off my ideal practice, I must:

• translate the official curriculum document for each of my courses into categorized learning goals written in student-friendly language 
• determine how each goal could be assessed 
• determine how much of the student’s grade will come from my assessment of each goal (some may even be worth 0% of their grade — our provincial guidelines do state that teachers can decide that certain curriculum expectations will not be assessed, though they must still be addressed in instruction somehow)
• create (and edit, upload, link, etc.) the videos related to the learning goals
• create any advanced organizers (fill-in-the-blank sheets) I want students to fill in as they watch the video
• design not only practice work but also other additional in-class activities that support the students' learning of these goals
• actually do that assessing, recording of marks, and providing of feedback (marking never goes away, no matter what the model, right?)
• make time for students wanting extra help and reassessment on learning goals for which they want to boost their understanding / marks

Not all of the above is unique to flipped learning (or my own goals for it), of course, but this is an overview of what's on my mind when it comes to my courses. There is also of course other stuff of teaching on top of this -- accommodating special education needs, differentiating the course activities in any additional needed way, communicating with home, participating in the life of the school, carrying out any administrative tasks required, etc.

I know that flipped learning is not about the videos, but in my particular practice, video is an important part of it. I prefer to do the direct instruction through videos because I believe my students need to see and hear ME as they receive the direct instruction -- although I will leave the "why" behind that for now (potential future post topic?). But creating those videos, as well as the learning goals and all the other "me-created" stuff mentioned above, takes time, and I have not yet figured out when in my schedule of ongoing activities that video-creation time can best happen. With two kids at home (one of them only a year old, still nursing and otherwise pretty needy of my attention from the time I get him from daycare to the time I drop him off again) and a husband who works a fair commute away (and sometimes has evening meetings to boot), it's hard for me to find focused time to work undisturbed at home, yet the little one's needs mean I can't just stay long at school every day. I'm already trying to do what I can to avoid nights being too late and the days too exhausted, yet because I do believe flipping is well worth the initial time investment I am going to have to find a way to make it work.

(I did know this was all coming. I started the little one at daycare in early August, when he was 11 months old, planning to use the month to get some great pre-planning done. Of course he promptly got sick with a series of fevers that prevented him from attending daycare most days in August. C'est la vie in the world of parenting young ones, but they're also only small once...)

2. A need to learn how to use the group space in non-traditional ways.

Okay, I'll admit I have been a pretty traditional teacher. I have done a lot of the "chalk-and-talk, then-assign-textbook-or-worksheet-exercises" formula. As a science teacher, I have had my classes do experiments and computer-based simulations, sure. As a math teacher, yes, I've had my classes use manipulatives. I've also done some "hey, get in groups, write up one of your answers on a piece of chart paper, and let's see if we're all on the same page." But I feel like I still have a lot to learn about how to best use the group space, and figuring out how to best spend the time freed up by removing the direct instruction from the classroom takes planning time (and stretches planning brain muscles!) that I'm, again, still trying to figure out. So I'll keep asking this question in the flip community and keep interacting with more experienced flippers to see what you all are doing, and how I can learn from you!

3. Perfectionism

When I create my videos, I use Camtasia, and I edit out just about every "uh," "ah," or too-loud click if my mouth opens funny. While recording, if I don't like how I said something, I pause, then start again, knowing I can edit out the previous attempt. In contrast, one of my colleagues just started flipping this semester, and he says he doesn't even listen to his podcasts, lest he get too picky about them -- he just records and immediately uploads. His production time is obviously a fraction of mine, and that is no criticism of him. So part of my struggle with time is because of time I know I'd spend "perfectionizing" not only the videos, but every other "me-created" part of the process outlined above. This is an area in which I know I need to grow (or scale back, depending on how you look at it).

So there you have it. I'm coming back to teaching this year after a year off for maternity leave, and I think I'm doing OK adjusting overall. I'm not yet where I want to be, but hopefully my students would agree that we're muddling through this well enough together so far, and that once I do get us flipping someday hopefully soon, it will have been worth the wait. It may just end up being for review purposes for this semester's crowd, and aiming for a fuller flip next semester, when I'll have a simpler set of courses, but we'll see!

Problems solved by flipping

The next #flipblogs Twitter hashtag chat will be on Aug. 30 (8pm EDT). What's it about?

This is going to be more off-the-cuff and less polished than my other #flipblogs entries so far, because I think my thoughts here aren't any that need a lot of words. Here's a brief look at how flipping has helped me:

Actually teach the noisy class - those who would have been willing to listen to the lecture & annoyed by disruptions from less-interested classmates could get on with the learning by viewing the video - but surprisingly I found those who were often disruptive during a lecture were much more attentive to the video than they had been to me!

Multiply my efforts - sometimes I feel the need to clone myself if multiple students want extra help on multiple different topics from a unit. The videos are likely not enough, but they are a good starting point & a springboard into teacher-student discussions.

Absent students - the videos help those catch up who were absent, and those who are attending a suspension program offsite can more easily stay connected to the flow of the course

Absent teacher! - I unfortunately had to be away several more days than ideal the last couple of school years. Flipping helped keep the class on track when I was away and no subject-specialist supply teacher was available. I could either have the video projected (provided there was someone available to do the initial setup for the sub) or have the students use individual computers (provided the computer lab/cart was available).

Prelab demonstration - showing students what the performance of a lab looks like ahead of time, including pitfalls (and safety hazards) to avoid, to reduce the amount of time spent in-class on lab instructions (though some safety review in person is still important). Shorter lead-in time in-class means more time for the experiment (less rushing, greater level of safety, more thoughtful reflection on what they're actually doing and why).

Differentiated instruction - differentiation of pace of instruction -- no one has to feel he or she is holding back the class, or that he or she is being held back by the needs of others.

The tyranny of the curriculum/challenging math problems - chemical equilibrium calculations for titrations in particular can take a loooong time to go over, and there are many spots where students can trip up. Flipping involved topics allows students to process them at the pace they need -- there are steps they just need to stare at for a while & don't really need anything more from me other than processing time, and that time is best given in the individual space rather than spend group space time on it. Better use of time = less worry about how I'm going to "cover"/address the entire curriculum.

That's what I've been able to think of so far...

What's new this year?

A #flipblogs contribution

Here is the prompt for this post:

School here does not begin until September 5, so I thankfully have some time yet to keep thinking through the changes (though the panic is starting to set in). Here are some of the things I've been mulling over so far:

First, an imposed change: a new school!

After almost 10 years at my previous post, the complexities of my school board's staffing process have moved me to a new school for the upcoming school year. It remains to be seen how this will affect my flip.

Possible effects:

• My new admin team may be more or less supportive of the model than the team with whom I originally learned about flipping. Will I need to become more of an advocate for flipping, or will I find others already flipping classes at the school?
• My much-reduced commute may make it easier for me to produce the microvideos in a more timely fashion, without sacrificing as much sleep. Perhaps I'll even be able to find an appropriate space to do the necessary filming at school, and just save the editing for home.
• ???

Standards-based grading + the flip

I learned about standards-based grading months before but within the same year that I learned about flipped learning. I am ever striving to grow in both and make both easier for me to embrace. This year, I would like to make each video (or set of multiple videos, if needed) reflect a particular learning goal, rather than a section of the textbook, so that students wishing to deepen or correct their understanding related to a particular goal can more easily track down the material that would be most helpful for them to review. I'd also like to plan out ahead of time (i.e., now) which learning goals will require videos (and which I already know will require more than one), to act as a sort of checklist for myself so I can track throughout the semester whether I’m on top of video creation & posting.

In class

I have fallen into the rut of just having students do repetitive practice work in class. Yes, it's great that I'm there to answer their questions as they work on it, but...boring! I need to make the in-class portion of the course more engaging & worthwhile for students. Consistently bringing in the right choice of class activities will entice the students to get their video-viewing “homework” done before class, so they don’t miss out on the better part of the class while they're stuck doing a make-up viewing of the video. I've been working my way through the Flipped Learning Certification course, and I'm hoping the section of the course that deals with "what to do in class" will be inspiring here.

Video concerns

I know I need to make my videos shorter -- hopefully focusing each on a learning goal will help that -- and I need to be more cheerful and animated in them. I've often used a webcam to record my face in a picture-in-picture way while the larger area of the screen shows a PowerPoint or a document camera records what I'm writing out on the table surface by hand. I've noticed Jon Bergmann uses something in his certification course videos that I think is called a light board (at least, that's a term I've come across other flippers using, and it would make sense), and I'm wondering if exploring using one of those rather than pre-written slides may help...but don't I lose some ability to bring in visuals if I do that?

Thoughts on logistics

When I met with my new department heads one day in June, it came up that students at the school are familiar with Google Classroom, as well as using their school-board-provided Gmail address. I am not very familiar with Classroom, so I want to explore it some this summer to see if it is a good fit for what I want to do with my flip, or if I should continue to use other platforms.

This summer is the first time I have heard of the "in-flip," leading me to wonder if I should do the in-flip on purpose for the whole semester with one or more of my classes (as opposed to just during the initial training period of helping the students learn how to watch the videos well). I suppose this will depend on the kind of kids/classes I get.

Over to you...

I'm looking forward to reading what other #flipblogs folks are considering changing. Usually, we make changes because something feels broken, so I can learn just as much from seeing what you want to change away from as what you are considering changing to.

Addendum to the beginning of my journey: Step Zero

But wait...how did you know how to flip your classroom?

Whooooops. My bad.

I was so determined to finally finish my previous post after letting it collect dust for 4 years, I left out a key step -- as well as the acknowledgement of some key influencers. To be fair, though, I only engaged in this step a little before I jumped into Step 1; I went back to it the summer after I started my flip.

Still, before I could realistically try to flip my classroom, I had to engage at least a little in a crucial step:

Step 0: Educate yourself.

Listening to a few experienced flippers talk about what they did was certainly informative and inspiring, but what they presented was necessarily just a taste of the "why" and the "how," not a step-by-step instruction manual. In fact, as I've learned, there really is no one-size-fits-all, step-by-step instruction manual for flipping one's class, because there is all sorts of room for teachers to use the basic model in their own way. (Yes, I realize the irony of making that statement when I have outlined some steps in my last post and this one. Let's consider these general guidelines rather than detailed steps, shall we?) Even so, there are necessarily a large number of things to figure out before one can flip successfully, and so I took to the 'net to do some research before I did the write-up for my class that I mentioned in my "step 1."

Some of the sources I consulted before I tried flipping and early into my experiments with it are listed below:

1. Dianne Fitzpatrick's blog - http://fitzeehasflippedout.blogspot.ca/

Since Fitzpatrick had been one of our hosts during our visit to Peel, her blog was a natural first start.

2. Katie Gimbar - Fitzpatrick and Simona Matei mentioned Gimbar in their presentation to our team. Gimbar can be found on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Katie-Gimbars-Flipped-Classroom-182274291823666/, but the most helpful thing to me was her series of FAQ videos about flipping that can be seen here.

3. Crystal Kirch - Kirch was also mentioned as a helpful resource in Fitzpatrick and Matei's presentation. I sheepishly admit that at first I just got overwhelmed by Kirch's blog and thought it wouldn't be helpful to me at all...I was wrong, wrong, wrong! (Sorry, Crystal!) I am so glad I took another look at it the summer after I started trying to flip, because it is chock full of amazingly helpful stuff. Check out her blog at http://flippingwithkirch.blogspot.ca/.

Kirch's influence on my flipping goes beyond her blog. When I e-mailed her to ask permission to download some materials from her site for my own use and to share with a colleague, she was very willing to share anything that was posted, and suggested I also take a look at her actual course sites (the ones she used with students, vs. the teacher-oriented blog I'd been browsing). Those course sites made such an impression on me that I patterned my own course sites in much the same way in the following years. (I realize that when I set this blog up 4 years ago, I ended up patterning it after hers as well; I didn't really think anything would come of this space at the time.)

Kirch also pointed me to several Twitter handles I should check out run by other Canadian flippers, and she tweeted my own handle out to the #flipclass community to help me get connected to the support of that network. Kirch herself can be found on Twitter as @crystalkirch.

4. The #flipclass community on Twitter - admittedly, I kept missing the weekly hashtag chat, but the chat and otherwise searching for the tag found me a whole new family of helpful education professionals and organizations to follow. Thank you, everyone who's shared your thoughts in this chat -- we may feel vulnerable when we share, but as we all share, we all grow together.

5. Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams - the authors of Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. I'm also currently working my way through the self-directed Flipped Learning Certification Level - I course available through the Flipped Learning Global Initiative, and it is Bergmann who appears in each of the courses' videos. I'm a chem teacher, they're chem teachers, I was bound to like them :). Check Bergmann out on Twitter at @jonbergmann, and Aaron Sams at @chemicalsams.

As I keep growing (and getting too distracted to check in and then coming back to try to reconnect again), I keep finding new connections of support I can make to grow in my flipping. Some of my more recent connections are:

1. The #flipblogs chat that started up this summer -- see my first post for a little bit more info on that.

2. The Flipped Learning Slack Community -- I am very new to Slack, but the flipping community is as warm and supportive there as anywhere. Here's to seeing that community and the interaction there grow.

If I think of anyone else I've left out, I'll have to leave an addendum to this addendum, but in the meantime, if you're looking for resources, there are some links for you to check out!

The beginning of my Flipped Classroom journey

A #flipblog contribution...somewhat overdue.

I've always intended to start this blog with the tale of how my "flipped" journey began. This post has literally been years in the writing; joining the #flipblogs community has given me the incentive I need to pull it out of the Drafts folder, dust it off, update it, finish it up, and finally release it to the world to meet you all.

The topic for the August 2 #flipblogs chat was:

While this post comes too late to be part of that discussion, I did tell the community I would write up my response and post it "asynchronously." (I hope they will indulge me as I write more than "a few paragraphs.") It is, after all, the perfect place to start -- at the beginning.

How I was introduced to "flipping"

It started with a phone call.

In March 2013, one of my vice principals unexpectedly called me up during class and asked, "So, do you know who the funnest people in the school are?" He invited me to attend some professional development with him, our principal, our head librarian and our Student Success teacher. Honoured at being the only subject teacher invited (and amused at being invited to hang out with the "cool kids" for the day), I agreed to attend.

When I discovered that the PD would be about the "flipped classroom," I vaguely recalled having heard something about it before but didn't really know what it was about. I decided to go into the PD with a willingness to listen, though I'll admit I was somewhat skeptical.

On March 21, 2013, you might say my view of teaching...got flipped.

Our little group visited two different schools in the Peel District School Board. It turned out to be an intimate, exclusive event arranged for us by our principal, who had learned through her friendship with the schools' superintendent about the flipping that was going on in those schools and wanted to see whether this approach was something that our school could use as well.

Our first stop was Central Peel Secondary School, where Dianne Fitzpatrick and Simona Matei made a presentation to us explaining how they were flipping some of their classes. Looking back, there were three things that solidly impressed me about their flip:

1. Documented evidence of student buy-in.

Fitzpatrick shared with us some graphs representing her students' feedback at the end of a semester of flipping. I'm showing here the results we saw then, from January 2013 -- more detail is available in her blog post here -- but she has shared similar feedback from additional semesters on her blog:

WOW, I thought -- the students really like it! Of course, just because students like something doesn't mean it's good for their learning, but chances are they won't learn from an approach they hate, either. The research shows that there is a lot to be said for engagement, after all.

2. The potential to check in with every student, every day

Fitzpatrick and Matei shared with us in their presentation that flipping their class allowed them to visit with each student in the class every day. Given the research that emphasizes the role of the student-teacher relationship in a student's learning, this is huge -- could this put an end to quiet kids getting overlooked while more insistent students tap all the teacher's attention? Could this help break down walls between the teacher and resistant students?

3. She wasn't there...and they were working anyway.

Fitzpatrick was obviously not with her class while she presented to us -- they had a supply teacher. We visited her class partway through the period to find the students working hard on the assigned work anyway. Coming to class with the direct instruction already taken care of meant they didn't have to sit around reading from their textbooks or watching a movie as a class. Instead, they were able to jump right into engaging, whole-class activities...and they'd been able to develop the skills to engage in them well even without their regular teacher in the room.

Our second stop was at Castlebrooke Secondary School, where learned about the flipping Ve Anusic was doing with his math classes -- with such success that he had been featured in a CTV News clip. Through that clip, I again saw the extent to which the students were actually "doing stuff" in class, engaging with the material, and could see Anusic checking in and working with several of the students. Again, flipping seemed to greatly increase the potential for more one-on-one and smaller-group interactions between students and the teacher, as well as student-student interactions that were actually focused on the material.

So why did I start?

Honestly, all of the above may have been secondary to my reason to start trying "the flip." I, uh, may have started out of desperation.

In my grade 9 applied math class, the amount of energy I was putting into trying to maintain the students' attention during a lecture was getting out of hand. When work time came, many of them did work on the material, and asked questions, but the amount of time it took us to get through the direct instruction really ate into the time I was able to spend helping students. So...what if the students could get through the direct instruction bit themselves? Could that improve my ability to give each student the help that he or she needed? It was worth a shot. (I figured it couldn't hurt to try it with my grade 11 college classes, too.)

How I began*

Step 1: teach the students (and parents!) what flipping is, and justify it to them.
Both schools my team had visited had emphasized the need to actually teach the students how to watch the videos well (discouraging watching passively in a distracted environment, for example), but before I could even get there, I needed my students to understand what it was we were going to try. I set up a blog for each of my classes, and created a page on each linking to a couple of videos that described what the flipped classroom was all about. I also typed some details of how I thought we'd try it on the same page.

Our math department had a few carts of notebook computers available for teacher sign-out. One day, I brought the cart in, set everyone up with a wikispaces account, and set them to watching the videos and reading the information I'd posted about our upcoming flip. After going through all that, they filled out a survey for me, giving me their initial impressions of the idea. While there were a few concerns, overall they were very interested in trying it out.

That happened to be the day of parent-teacher interviews, so I was able to share with parents at the very start both the concept and (from the surveys) the students' reactions. The response I got from them was very positive.

I should note that since my principal was the person who'd initiated our investigation into flipped learning, and had also been impressed by the presentation, there was no need for me to touch base with my admin team before trying the flip, as teachers in other circumstances probably should.

Step 2: teach the students how to view the videos. 
I created a video outlining video-viewing tips as basic as "put your phone away...unless you're watching the video on your phone," "take notes," "close all the other tabs in your browser," and "don't watch the video in bed in case the math is so exciting that you fall asleep." (I tried to inject some humour, including a photo of me seemingly passed out on the couch with my limbs askew, laptop and papers falling everywhere.) We watched this video as a whole class, practicing note-taking as well as the ability to pause and rewind as necessary, then discussed the key points together.

Step 3: have students watch some initial content videos individually in class, to get used to the process.
I brought the cart of notebook computers back. They watched videos I'd prepared on the math topic of the day, asked me any questions they had, then worked on some practice questions on a worksheet.

Step 4: start assigning video-viewing as the new "homework."

Well, that was the theory. In practice, we had a lot of bugs to work out at this point in terms of student access to the blog and self-regulation. But hey, this is a blog about my first steps -- and I was on my way.

The highlight? Hearing one of my grade 9s exclaim aloud, shocked, "Wow, this is actually making sense to me!" An increase in student confidence just by changing the medium? Awesome :).


About the teachers mentioned above:

• Dianne Fitzpatrick is on Twitter as @LadyFitzee; you can read her 21st Century Teaching Blog at http://fitzeehasflippedout.blogspot.ca/.
• You can find Simona Matei on Twitter as @SimonaM1000.
• Ve Anusic is on Twitter as @MathManAnusic; you can find his education blog at https://engagethinking.wordpress.com/.

*[Edited to add: I really should have included a Step Zero in this post, acknowledging the research I did before I started my first experiments with the flip and thanking those who have influenced me along the way. To compensate for this, I have added a new post -- please see it for further acknowledgements of those whose humble sharing has made my own journey possible.]

Welcome to my #flipblog!

This is my blog about the "flipped classroom" -- so what does that mean?

An excellent definition of Flipped Learning has been posted by the Flipped Learning Network here:

Flipped Learning is a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter.

(image source: yuja.com)

In a traditional classroom, students often receive their direct instruction through a lecture given by the teacher in their classroom (the "group learning space"), and they are then given practice work and assignments they are supposed to do at home (the "individual learning space").

In a "flipped" classroom, the "flip" is that the lesson content students used to receive through lecture at school is instead accessed by them in some way at home (or some other "individual learning space," such as the library), and the classroom that used to be used for lecture is now instead used for practice and activities that help the students engage with the material and together deepen their understanding.

In many cases, the direct instruction piece for a flipped class is achieved by having students view and take notes on short "microvideos" on their own time, but this is not the only possible approach -- flipping teachers may also assign readings from a textbook, visits to a course website, or some other means of delivering the content. Whatever the source, viewing and taking notes on the material acts as the students' "homework." It may be accompanied by a couple of practice questions students can use to begin to assess their understanding, but no more; the "hard part" is reserved for the time spent in the "group space," where their teacher is available to provide guidance and answer questions in a more expert (and perhaps less frustrating) way than may be possible if students were to instead get "stuck" on a hard question at home and try to get help from someone there. Moving the direct instruction piece out of the classroom also opens up class time for some of the "dynamic, interactive learning" activities implied in the definition given above -- activities teachers in a traditional classroom bemoan that they have no time for because of the amount of curriculum they need to cover.

Okay, so...what's a #flipblog?

Shortly after I was introduced to the concept of flipping, I learned that one of the best ways to grow in my understanding of how to flip -- and how to flip well -- is to engage with the highly supportive community of teachers around the world who are already flipping their classes. It didn't take me long to realize that this doesn't simply mean passively taking in the experience of others; it also means sharing my own. Sharing my challenges and questions helps me explore solutions with the help of more experienced flippers (a fantastic bunch to begin with), but I have also been humbled to see that sharing my own thoughts is also helpful to others who are also exploring this flipping thing. And so, four years into my flipping journey, here I am, finally feeling ready to blog my experience to the world -- not because I am an expert, by any means, but because as I share, together we grow.

Andrew Swan first posted an introduction to #flipblogs in a post at FlippingAwesomeTeaching:

I have to admit, I'm a little nervous about what the response will be as I share my thoughts here. I also wonder how well I'll keep up with blogging once the school year actually begins. But hey, as we heard over and over in teacher's college, a habit of reflection is a must for any teacher who strives to grow and have an ever-better praxis, so here we go. I'll borrow one more image from Andrew Swan's post:

Time to take some more steps on this journey. Thanks for coming along.