My Flippin' Algebra One Experiment

I was recently given the opportunity to “flip” my Algebra 1 class. No martial arts or superpowers required. Flipping simply means switching the roles of homework and class work. Students watch short video lectures and take notes for the homework.  Then they solve problem sets based on the video lessons, usually collaboratively, in class, where their peers and teacher are available for help and support.  It went very well, especially considering the novelty and learning curve, both for the students as well as for me.  If you want to know more, read on.

After the seven weeks with my flipped Algebra class, 17 students responded to a survey that as a group they overall enjoyed the experiment, giving it a 3.4 on a scale of 1-5, where 3 was neutral.  Their perceptions were higher for enjoying the collaboration, 3.6, and they also believed that they had given and received more peer help, each 3.6, within the flipped format.  Because students retain 95% of what they teach, this is a very important piece.  I believe that they will retain this unit much better as a result of their teaching each other as they learned. The survey showed that they didn’t really enjoy homework or class work in either the flipped or traditional settings, so some things never change.

My own response to the overall flip would be more like a 4.9; the experience was extremely enjoyable and worthwhile from my point of view.  Students learned more, and ironically, I felt like I was a MORE active participant in their learning than when I had been more center stage in the lessons. It was a real joy to see two previously discouraged and tuned out students begin to engage much more during the flip, perhaps because they saw that help was more readily available.  I also got a couple of comments from students who liked that they were assigned more challenging problems during the flip. It was easier to differentiate the lessons, because I was able to stealthily adjust goals higher for some groups than for others.

The foundation for the unit in solving systems of equations was done the traditional way…with me teaching the lessons on solving systems by graphing in class. The students did some problem solving in class individually, and then were given sets of problems for homework. 

We did one flipped lesson before the official trial. Students were assigned a video about how to use their graphing calculators to find a linear regression.  This worked out some of the bugs for us and then the trial began.

The next 8 homework assignments were video lessons from Khan Academy, which has many hundreds of online lessons in various academic subjects aimed at students about grade 6 and up.  Links to the lessons were posted on Edline.net, our school’s intranet website.  Students came to class and were given examples to work on alone, then in pairs or small groups.

This class had only had occasional opportunities for collaboration prior to this unit. They would informally help each other and had several partner assignments and quizzes. But during this unit, they were held accountable to work with someone to find and show solutions together.  Because the instructional piece had already taken place, I was available to circulate among the students, answer questions, observe students and their work, eavesdrop on conversations, and catch and redirect them on errors or misconceptions.  The students reported, 3.4, that I had helped them more than previously.

An important advantage of my flipped class was that each student had reliable internet access at home.  Only one student had some issues, and that was only for a day or two.  Students without access at home would have been able to access the videos in our school media center, even if they had to do so after school.

This was by far the most difficult unit of our course, and yet the students did well on the summative assessment.  The median grade on the test was 86%, which was up from 79% on the previous unit test. 

Full disclosure.  Many of the students reported that they had completed the homework as often as in traditional units, but their claims belied the actual homework grades.  Homework completion actually decreased during the unit. The same 4 or 5 kids who had been neglecting homework for the previous months also neglected to watch most of the videos.  My best fix was to make them wait to start their problem sets, often meaning they lost their choice of work partner, until they watched the video in class on the Smartboard and showed me the notes they had taken.  This actually only took about 7-10 minutes and did not affect the pace of the better prepared students. 

The unprepared students would also have been wasting time (or worse) when we took 15 or 20 minutes to go over traditional homework.

All but two students said that they had taken advantage of rewinding and replaying the videos when they needed to hear/see something repeated.  I often have one or two students who get distracted or just need me to repeat something 2 or three times.  Loving the sound of my own voice as I do, I don’t mind repeating.  However, the 15 students who are ready to move on are often not as enchanted.

I fully intend to do some more flipping next year.  However, I will probably do more modeling and instruction on 2 of the key components of the flip.  One, students did not seem to really understand how to collaborate.  They sometimes tried to divide and conquer the problem set, rather than truly working together.  They complained about their partners at times, mentioning whether they “liked” the partner or not.  Secondly, I would want to set expectations for how to use the videos and take notes effectively.  I would also want to take advantage of more of the problem sets that are actually available through the Khan Academy web site.

Some of the lessons from Khan Academy were a bit too complicated, so I would also like to do a few video lessons myself for my classes next year.  But there is no need to reinvent the wheel with flipped lessons.   There are many good videos already available on Youtube and Teachertube.com.  I came across a really engaging and amusing set of geometry lessons from a hip young teacher named Tyler Tarver.  

The beauty of this flip is not that there was some cool fad or technology in play.  The real value in my book is that flipping paved the way for the much less sexy, but effective, low tech essentials in a classroom.  The students and I were relating to each other, sharing the roles of teaching and learning in the classroom.  There was engagement and excitement over learning systems of equations like I hadn't seen before. Geeky?  Sure.  But it was also very satisfying.

Trees and Woodchips

It is very hard for a grandmother to refrain from talking about those grandbabies, but you have to admit, toddlers really do say the cutest things.  Our 2 year old Liam has been providing constant narration of his own life for at least 6 months.   (Liam is pretty fluent in toddler French as well as English, thanks to my sister, his babysitter.)  He is constantly repeating and rehearsing what he hears, so we get to observe what is going on as far as his thinking is concerned.  And a healthy, nurtured toddler is a learning machine. Often, Liam’s seemingly logical, but erroneous conclusions are pretty funny.

Liam is fascinated with wood chips.  They are all over “his” park and he loves to move his hands through them, pile them up, flatten the piles and then re-pile them, and of course, to his mother’s chagrin, throw them around.  We were having some trees cut down last week, and on Friday, they left a tree half done.  So over the weekend, we had a 40 foot, 2 foot diameter pine tree trunk with no branches left on it.  (It was actually pretty cool looking, and some daring artist might have seen the makings of a totem pole or something.)  Anyway, I was explaining to Liam that the “worker guys” were going to come back soon and turn the trunk into wood chips.  Liam immediately wanted to share this new knowledge with his aunt. “Auntie Emily, come here.  You see that big stick?  It’s made out of wood chips.”

I am pretty sure Liam thought we could reassemble wood chips into a 40 ft. living tree, but maybe he just got his syntax, not his thinking, wrong. 

As I have been thinking about designing instruction both in this course and in my concurrent course, EDU623, I have been hearing all about the parts of instruction.  Some of the pieces are lecture, literature, discussion, questions, collaborative activities, media, assessment, objectives, practice, modeling, feedback, and correction, etc.  Most of these are frequently used tools in my kit as a seasoned K-12 teacher.  But you can’t just put the parts together and make something that is alive, the way a good lesson is.  A good lesson can grow something that reproduces.  It can help make the learner into a competent practitioner or even a teacher/trainer of others. 

Precious few of my lessons have been “memorable”.  Far more have been something like wood chips tossed around a park. I want to have effective lessons and the things I am learning this summer are helping me to understand instruction and lesson design on a deeper, more synthesized level.  For example, I am studying Robert Gagne’s Nine Events for learning from our EDU623 text.  (Gagne, Wagner, Golas, & Keller, 2005) 

Gagne says the nine pieces to a good lesson are: 

Gain Attention

Inform Learner of Objective

Stimulate Recall of Prerequisites

Present Stimulus Material

Provide Learning Guidance

Elicit Performance

Provide Feedback

Assess Performance

Enhance Retention and Transfer.

When these pieces are done well within a meaningful lesson or course structure, a lesson can come to life and even cause growth.

I don’t necessarily want my students to remember much about me, though I want them to remember having a sense that I cared about them, and did my job well.   I do want my students to remember what I taught them.  Sometimes when I run into one of my hundreds of former third grade students, I ask them, “Quick, 6 X 7.”  If they answer 42, I say, “I taught you that.”  More than the stuff I teach them, though, I want my students to be able to use mathematical thinking, follow steps, and plan their work, and to understand data that is presented to them in future courses and materials a little better because of my teaching. And I want the pieces of my courses to come together, to come alive, and cause true growth in my students.

Gagne, R., Wagner, W., Golas, K., & Keller, J. (2005). Principles of Instructional Design 5th Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

Do you ever feel like you need more "margin" in your life?

So everything was going just swimmingly on day 3 of EDU523, until my laptop wireless internet card malfunctioned. Thankfully, Dr. Bailey let me borrow her computer for a couple hours, so I was able to try my hand at taking and editing a photo of myself.  I used the dropper tool to fix my messy hair, and edited out the coat rack behind me in the photo.  Turns out, I don’t really need my hair brush, not for online photos anyway. 

I’d like to be able to edit out the clutter that has been running rampant in my house, yard, and personal inner peace this week.  Just too many things are happening at once. But they are “all good”.  Last night I had my house filled with my family, who came to visit our niece.  Meadow is stopping over at our house for a couple of days on her way from her home in Alaska to visit her mother in Sweden.  Meadow is quite a colorful character, and her name totally fits her: refreshing, Bohemian, anachronistic hippie. She lifted her bluesy, beautiful voice and shared some of her original songs with us.

I have been thinking about the 70/20/10 ratio, particularly about the issues that I am hearing my colleagues mention about students with reading and writing weaknesses.  I wonder in what proportion we learn these  skills from the three sources:  from experience, or from interaction with others, and from formal education. Obviously, the rudiments of language we learn orally from parents.  And the basics of literacy we usually learn from primary grade teachers.  But how did most of my peers learn to speak and write really well? 

How did I?  My parents both spoke good English, with only occasional slang.  Interestingly, although my father spoke French (Canadian) before he spoke English, his grammar and vocabulary were better than Mom’s.  Mom completed nursing school, so she had the better “formal” education.  Dad earned his associate's degree in business through correspondence courses.  Mom was an avid reader of non fiction and was a champion speller.  Dad did crossword puzzles.  I think he worked his entire life on increasing his English vocabulary as well as improving himself in many other areas.

My middle school English teacher gave me a good start in diagramming sentences and increased my understanding  of the structure of sentences.  But it was my amazing honors English teacher in high school, Mrs. Margaret Josephs, who had the greatest impact in my ability to communicate with my writing. 

She helped us to take our stories and essays and hone them until they were worthy to read aloud in class. It was wonderful when she would choose one of our pieces to read aloud with her melodious voice and inflections.  She made our intense efforts seem worthwhile. 

I read a devotional blog daily, and the contents of today’s post had to do with asking questions, and the impact that questions have on the hearer.  In summary, the idea is that questions have much more power than the answers.  They leave us vulnerable and humbled, and can help us to learn.  http://www.fischtank.com/   I am seeing that Bonnie and Jane, among other colleagues in EDU523 are both wonderful questioners, and better questioning technique is something I need to use more.  A good question can brings us deeper into the mind of another.  Questions can draw us closer.  Or, on the contrary, difficult questions in a strained relationship can separate us further. 

Have you seen that questions, even those left unanswered, can cause reverberations within ourselves that echo into the future?

 

My First Ever Blog Post

So this is my first ever blog post.  I am pretty excited about it, although I think I’m pretty late in the game.  It’s 2011.  After all, I’m pretty sure Elmo already has his own blog.   I wanted to think of a clever title, but nothing has struck me as yet.  I’ll keep you posted... Wait, that’s IT!

I have followed a couple of blogs for a few years, the first of which was written by our younger daughter who chronicled some of her experiences in medical school.  emilymedstudent.blogspot.org    As Emily got further into the program, her articles became fewer and farther between, but I remain her biggest fan.  (Emily graduated in 2010 and is now a second year emergency resident in Syracuse, NY.)

Day one of EDU 523 was a good one.  It was really nice to be part of a group of adults in a face to face class.   There were so many college and graduate level instructors there that I felt kind of like I had snuck into a faculty meeting.   
After having taken 4 or 5 online courses, it was interesting to hear the instructors talk about the teaching side of an online course. Ironically, the only course I will not be taking online at Post University is this course on Designing and Delivering Online Instruction.   Some of the concerns they expressed were that they were afraid students sometimes had a “surrogate” student take tests for them.  None of my courses have had tests associated with them.  I wish they did.  I much prefer taking quizzes and tests over writing papers and designing projects.  Really.  The instructors also talked about other kinds of plagiarism and I found out the university has some technological ways of detecting such things. There was some discussion about students trying to sneak late assignments onto a discussion board. 

It was such a natural extension of my Post University experience to begin to learn about an “instructor’s” perspective on Blackboard.  We got to play around in a “sandbox,” which really meant we got to begin to experiment with designing little pieces of an online course.  In keeping with the metaphor, we could “dig” in.  I needed to “sift” through some of the parts that didn’t seem to apply to the unit that was already beginning to “form” in my mind.   I could see that many of my colleagues were being exposed to Blackboard for the first time and that they were a bit more overwhelmed than I.

I am also enrolled in the course on Instructional design, so the ADDIE model of instructional design is very fresh in my mind.  The acronym refers to a linear progression of the following steps in design:  model of instruction Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. It is quite serendipitous to be taking these courses together.  Although I have taught K-12 for 17 years, I am finding many gaps in my own understanding of designing instruction.  And I also find that even the very basic things bear repeating.  It is often in the basics of instruction where we fail our students.  The following link contains much more information about instructional design and I would encourage you to turn to page 3 of the booklet and see the relationship that is suggested in one iteration of the ADDIE model. The evaluation step is sort of the hub of the wheel and there is the implication of revision in between each step.   http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED477517.pdf. (Gustafson, 2002)   I find that frequent revision of instructional design is necessary in this profession.  While we don’t want to keep reinventing the wheel, we do want to make meaningful improvements and adaptations for the changes in the road our students are on.

Gustafson, K. a. (2002). Survey of Instructional Development Models. . Syracuse, NY: ERIC Clearinghouse.

 It is so easy to see things from our own perspectives and forget WHO we are designing and planning for.  For example, the online portion of Post University courses usually contain planned redundancy in order to help the students find several ways to get to the information they need.

I liked hearing how much the Post instructors emphasized keeping in mind the needs of the students.