This is why I do the Flipped Classroom

I have been running the Flipped Classroom on and off for over a year now and while I have seen many successes, what happened yesterday really demonstrated how, when you structure it right, it really works.

My Honors Chemistry class is just the perfect combination of students:  energetic, open-minded, willing to try, outside-the-box thinkers.  I have been including more inquiry labs in their units, something I was definitely lacking in previous attempts at this.  In the one they are currently working (Gas Laws), I asked them to create a lab that measures the amount of CO₂ produced in the reaction of Baking Soda and Vinegar and compare that to the theoretical value that should be produced.  We are getting a lot of great ideas on how to measure the gas (measuring the volume of a balloon, water displacement by immersing the balloon in water, water displacement by bubbling the gas through water), none of which I suggested to them, all of which have had different results.

Since the materials where already out for the lab, I did the following demo for a group of the students trying to get them to explain it with gas laws.

After they came up with a good explanation, another student chimed in with "So can we do the opposite to get the balloon out?  Could we heat the flask and see if it inflates the balloon above the flask?"  Well, who am I to stop them?  So they set everything up and sure enough it pushes the balloon back out.  Unfortunately, because the mouth of the balloon can't hold on tight enough the balloon pops off.

So the same student says, "What if we blow the balloon up a little first, put it on the flask, and then heat it?  Could we get it big enough to pop the balloon?"  I stepped back, took a seat on my stool and got out of their way.  In hindsight, I wish I had my video camera ready.  The balloon got pretty big, but eventually the gas in the balloon hits an equilibrium point and the water condenses.  The balloon never popped because the gas pressure doesn't get high enough.

Now the door has been opened.  Today the students rushed in trying to do it again with a bigger flask and more water.  Then they did it with the same amount of water, but a smaller flask.  Then they tried with heating the baking soda and vinegar lab.  Nothing popped the balloon.  Now, while my lab benches are now white with baking soda and the room has a severe vinegar smell, if I had to do it all over again I would.  It was the greatest 2 days of unadulterated learning I have had in my career.

This is why I do the Flipped Classroom

I am just like you

I am just like you.

• I care deeply about my students.  I get involved in their lives so they know that I care about them as people first.  I attend their athletic competitions, their drama performances, their art shows.  I want to know who they are inside, not what score they are on a test.
• I work hard to develop lessons that engage all learners.  My students need to find a way to connect with the material to make it meaningful and I strive to find ways to make that happen every day.
• I am over-worked and under-paid.  The lights in my room come on at 6am and typically don't turn off until after 3.  After some family time and dinner I start the 2nd half of my job.
• I am constantly under attack from my elected officials because they feel like they know how to do my job better than I do even though they have never set foot in my classroom.
• I love my job!
• I bring passion and energy to everything I do.  I get excited over chemistry so that my students will get excited over chemistry.

So what about me is "intimidating"?

• Are you curious about the technology that I use in my classroom?  Then ask me to show you how to use it in your room.
• Is it my level of energy that I bring every day?  I do it to inspire others to do the same.  You hold yourself to a higher standard so your students have something to work towards, why shouldn't you do the same for your colleagues?
• Are you afraid that I am going to try to change you?  That is not my job.  If you are doing what's best for kids, holding them to a high standard, and challenging them every day then you are perfect just the way you are.  I am just doing it a different way.

Different is not bad.  You are different from me, but really I am just like you.

A great day

I had a really good day and I want to share what my students did today.  I was at #educon this past weekend and was fascinated by the focus on Problem Based Learning throughout the school.  The problem that I have been having is getting over the traditional methods of how I was taught and break out into the PBL world.  If it was Bio or Physics, I think the transition would be easier, but Chemistry is a different animal.  There are certain parts of the curriculum that needs to be taught by direct instruction, and yet SLA is doing it by PBL.  So, while there I picked the brain of a couple of the teachers and they really inspired me.  So, today it happened.  Let me describe the activity.

We just started the Gas Laws unit.  The best part of gases is it has a lot of real-world connections and tons of ways to demo the different properties.  So, I rearranged my room (on the right) to mimic a rigid container.  Then, as the students came into the room they picked a colored index card that had either H₂, CO₂, Scribe or ? on it.  What I wanted was someone to keep notes for me (Scribe), a gas with low mass (H₂), a gas with a high mass (CO₂), and then some added molecules that can be throw in when I needed to increase moles.

There are four properties that we needed to focus on:  Pressure, Volume, Temperature and moles.  I had the Hydrogen students jump up into the center and explained that gases act like billiard balls on a pool table.  Every time they collided with a desk they were to pat the desk to simulate pressure.  The students at the desks were to record every time a gas molecule collided with their desk.

My biggest concern is to keep the students moving at the same pace.  A brilliant friend of mine recommended that I find an online metronome and to have the students moving one step per click.  The metronome then doubled as my temperature because it was easy to increase or decrease the clicks which changed the pace of the students.

So, on to the activity.  The students wanted to compare pressure and temperature first so I started the metronome and they started bouncing around.  Slowly I increased the speed and watched a little bit of mayhem occur as the students continuously crashed into each other.  About a minute later I stopped and had the students sum up what they observed.  Immediately they saw the connection between the speed of the molecules and the rising temperature.  The students at the desks saw immediately the connection with pressure and several threw out that they were directly proportional.  I then started the molecules moving again but began slowing down the metronome to simulate the temp dropping.  It didn't even take the full minute before my pressure students said that they saw a decrease in hits.  One student even commented that not a single molecule struck his desk in the minute.  Of course, my scribe is writing the notes on the board based on her classmates comments.

Next they wanted to talk about moles so in come the ? students.  There were 9 in the middle and now there were 12.  Again, the pressure connection came out immediately.  Besides colliding with the desks more often, they commented that they felt that there was more chaos in the vessel as they collided with each other more often as well.  This demo was a little self-evident, but was important to reinforce visually.

So now came the tough part:  inverse relationship between Pressure and Volume.  When I was first planning this, I couldn't figure out how to make the volume change.  And then it dawned on me: moved the desks!  My desk students slid in the short ends and the gas students kind of panicked.  One asked where they were supposed to move, "we're collide with everything so much."  Did I just hear understanding?  So as volume decreased, sure enough the pressure increased.  My direct relationship student from earlier jumped right in to offer up the inverse relationship between pressure and volume.  

We are more than halfway through the period and the Carbon Dioxide students are tired of sitting and watching their classmates having all of the fun.  So Hydrogens sit and the heavier gas molecules step up.  But, there was a catch.  I needed to demonstrate to them how the heavier gas will exhibit slightly different properties because of the added mass.  Well, I can't make the students weigh 2200 pounds (CO₂ is 22 times heavier than H₂) so I load up every student with every backpack, book, purse, you name they had to carry it.  With Pressure still as our focus I changed the temperature and watched the heavy gases struggle to move around the "container."  Now the questioning here needed to change a little.  We needed to see the effect on pressure from the perspective of the gases versus the container.  The container noted that they saw no real difference in the collisions they were experiencing.  The gases, on the other hand, mentioned that they felt they were colliding a lot harder with both the container and other molecules with greater force as the temperature increased.  Combining the speed and the added mass definitely had an impact on the overall results.

This ran us pretty much to the final bell so I didn't have a chance to talk about how the students felt about the activity.  I tweeted with some students later and they commented that they really enjoyed class today.  I have to say that I had a blast.  It was so much fun watching the students physically demonstrate the concepts for the unit they were studying.  Those students who like the more formal notes still have all of the podcasts posted on my YouTube channel so no information is lost.  

Overall, I definitely want to do this again.  Could I do this every day like this? No way.  But, it definitely makes me question more of my semi-traditional methods for instruction.  Labs will need to be restructured so they start the unit and more information can be drawn from them instead of the labs reinforcing what I have already taught.

Sorry that this was so long, but I wanted to describe as much as I could so you could get a better feel for the lesson.  I would love to hear your thoughts on the lesson and your experience in PBL.