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.

EduCon Philly Day 1

I just finished up my first day at EduCon and I needed to share some of the amazing things that I saw.  I could go on for a very long post, but I want to group everything into three categories.

Leadership
If you have ever heard Chris Lehmann speak, you know immediately that he is an amazing educator.  But I want to talk about how he runs leads the school.

• Food
• There was food and drink everywhere.  I went into one classroom and I would say at least 2/3 of the class had some sort of drink bottle on their desk.  And yet, for some reason, this didn't seem to disrupt the learning that was happening and there wasn't a bug to be seen. (sorry, couldn't help the sarcasm) But what really struck me was lunch.  As we are on our tour, we noticed 6 students sitting and eating in a Spanish classroom and there was no teacher in there supervising them.  The students eat EVERYWHERE--hallways, lunchroom, classrooms, window ledges--you name it, there were students eating there.  The best part about it was the kids had the utmost respect for their environment.  When the lunch was over there wasn't a single piece of trash to be found and I didn't see a custodian anywhere.  Whether they were in the classroom or the hallways, these kids loved their school and it showed.
• Computers
• Every student is issued a Mac laptop when entering the school and they must pay an insurance fee ($85) every year to keep it.  Most of the computers were decorated with stickers, drawings, quotes written in Sharpie.  Most schools would freak out if the kids were "damaging" school property, but not this school.  They trust that the students will respect the computers and the students respond.
• His Office
• It is not often that I am caught like a deer in the headlights, but this one really threw me.  I was walking passed an office and a student I met called out to me from a conference room in the back.  I noticed a number of students in both the front office and the back conference room (probably 15 or so).  As I walk into the office, Chris Lehmann is sitting at his desk laughing with the kids around him.  That's right, I walked right into the principal's office without realizing it.  I was stunned by the fact that he welcomed me right in as if it was no big deal.  Now, let me mention something else about the office.  Chris' desk is where the secretary should have been and the larger space was used as a place for the students to congregate and eat or get work completed.  Anyone else have a principal like that?

Teaching

• Teaching Philosophy
• Everything is done for the kids.  There was no talk of working within the contractual time.  Everyone put all of themselves into building dynamic classrooms that were student-focused and learning by doing was at the heart.  Students talked just as much as the teachers did and the lessons were engaging.
• Attitude
• Everyone smiles.  Everyone wanted to be there, staff and students alike.  Students were helpful because they wanted to be not because they had to be.  Teachers gave up lunch time to sit and converse with visitors because they are passionate about what they do and want to share it with everyone.

Students

• Passion
• I need to tell you about Maggie.  I was wearing my infamous neon green tie, and after watching Diana Laufenberg's class, Maggie comes up to me saying how much she loves my tie.  She is going on and on about it and how I have to wear it for the entire weekend.  Later in the day, I am walking through the halls with a friend.  Maggie is about halfway down the hall and starts waving at me the second she saw me.  Then, at the end of the day, Maggie is the student who called out to me from Lehmann's conference room.  She comes running through his office and gives me a big hug right in front of him saying that we are friends now so it is OK to give me a hug.  That's passion.
• Dedication
• Every kid we asked questions of stopped whatever they were doing and gave us their full attention.  Most of the kids used their lunch time to collaborate with peers on a variety of projects.  None of the kids seemed stressed about anything they were working on and were eager to share their ideas regardless of what the topic was.  Even in the history class I saw, the teacher encouraged the students to make comments on a New York Times education page about the State of the Union, and she showed that one student in the class had already done it before being asked.  

What makes this school so successful is the fact that the entire school takes on the same mindset.  There is a culture of learning in everything the students do and it permeates into everything and buy in from staff, students and parents.  Every school could be like this if they wanted to and change the culture to make it happen.

It's happening again

I am a starter.  I rock the boat.  That is who I am and that is what I will always be.

Unfortunately, many teachers don't like my methods.  They like to feel safe and secure, and people who cause change seriously disrupt that.

I have seen much success through my methods.  This doesn't mean my way is the right way, just a different way.  What bothers me, and what sparked this post, is the teacher who feels the need to attack my methods.

http://goo.gl/t3Pyk

You don't have to like what I do.
You don't even have to like me.
But I'm not the enemy.

Listen to what I have to say with an open mind.  Maybe you try something new, maybe you don't.  But, let's, at least, work together to build something that works for both of us.  Something that is better than either of us could have created alone.

Is it too much to ask? 

Everything I needed to know about Leadership I learned from Ami James

http://goo.gl/JIUI7

One of my guilty pleasures is watching tattoo shows.  It started with National Geographic's Taboo series about tattooing in other cultures and then spread to Miami Ink on TLC.  I think my obsession comes from the fact that it is absolutely amazing how detailed these artists can make their drawings considering they are making it under the skin.  Ami James was one of the owners of the Miami Ink studio and is now on his own show called NY Ink.

Ami, hands down, is the worst leader I have ever seen.  Let me list off some of his leadership traits:

1. He has a violent temper that can erupt at a moment's notice.
2. He swears to make a point and puts people down during every argument.
3. He does not try to foster young talent.
4. He dumps his problems on his employees.
5. He hires his friends, then treats them like his employees, but wants them to keep acting like his friends.
6. He expects people to just do whatever he says because he is the "boss."

I think that's a pretty good start.  When you read the post title you probably thought I was going to show you a great leader, someone to aspire to.  Sorry to disappoint.  But, what I have learned over the years is it is almost easier to learn from the worst than it is from the best because you can stop doing something wrong, but sometimes it is hard to mimic the positive traits in others.

I want to talk about #3 for a moment because I feel this is Ami's worst trait.  He hired a woman (Jessica) to serve as his shop manager.  Now, typically a title like that means she is in charge of all areas of the shop and has authority over other members in the shop, but not the artists.  Jessica has a MBA and used to work as an executive in a bank.  She has expressed a desire to learn to tattoo and is actually a talented artist.  However, every time she tries to learn more, she is sent back to her "box" to deal with appointments and clients.  Jessica also has a temper and every time this happens she argues, complains and has a terrible attitude with everyone she interacts with.  Ami regularly complains about having too much work and not enough time to get back to Miami to see his family; this would be the perfect opportunity for him to train someone to take some of the workload off of him as well as reduce some of the hostility that flies around the shop.

Ami's shops are successful because of the fact that he is on TV and manages to get some of the best artists in the business.  He succeeds in spite of his failures as a boss.  Most schools (actually no school) would not survive under this type of management style.  School leaders need to hold themselves to a higher standard and be the leader they want to see in others.  Teachers need to remember to do the same because you don't need a title to be a leader.  If you want those around you to work hard and dare to fail, then you must do the same.

Walk the Talk!

My students as producers

Tonight's #edchat topic was about how to convert students from consumers to producers.  While many of the suggestions were great in theory, the main problem is the educators that are on Twitter represent a very small minority in the education world.  Too often we are combating long ingrained preconceptions of what is expected of both the teacher and student in the classroom.  It is tough to get students to become producers of learning when they have spent the last 10 or 11 years having barely or never done it.

So, with this in mind, I would like to share what my learners produced recently.  In a previous post, I talked about how instead of a test in the Atomic Theory unit I decided to let the students demonstrate their understanding of the objectives through a formal assessment.  I gave them about 2 weeks to do it and got some interesting results.  Most of the students created some sort of test (one even used the same fonts I used on a previous test so it looked like something I would actually hand out), and a couple did some research projects.  But the ones who really went outside the box are the ones I would like to share below.

The first started as a music video and kind of dissolved into just their own song.

These 2 girls made a scrapbook of information as well as a bundt cake in the shape of an atomic orbital with mini cupcakes for the electron configuration.

This student is an amazing artist and so creative.  This picture doesn't do her work justice.  She laid out all of the information in these mini posters.  I especially like the way she explained electron configurations, in fact I probably will put this on my wall and refer to it next year.

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This student took a spin on the typical Google Search Story and created a video about a conversation between Boron and Carbon on Facebook.  Really clever.

This last group was supposed to do an interpretive dance, but the thought of doing something so daring in front of 24 of their peers scared the stuffing out of them. Instead they created watercolor paintings of the different concepts.

Was it amazing, Earth shattering work? No.  But for their first attempt at formal assessments I was really impressed.  Looking forward to trying this again in the next marking period.