Moving Day

I want to thank everyone who has been reading this blog. It is time to get a more professional look to the site so this blog will be moving to

marcseigel.com

The site is still evolving as I figure out what objective I want it to serve. My blog posts will be posted there and I hope you will continue the journey with me.

Speak up more

I was in a session at the ISTE Conference 2015 where George Couros was speaking about having an innovator's mindset. If you have never seen or heard George speak, you need to ASAP! He is the Tony Robbins of education. He is lively, entertaining, funny, and extremely on point as to what we need to change in education. During his presentation, he posted this on the screen:

This picture looked a lot better on my phone than on this blog. It says: What if every teacher tweeted one thing a day that they did in their classroom to a school hashtag, and they took five minutes out of their day to read each other's tweets?

What impact would that have on learning and school culture?

He goes on to say that we would never see a worksheet because no teacher would post 'hey, look at this amazing worksheet my students worked on at their desk!'

But would that eliminate worksheets from the school? You would see amazing things happening around your school every day. You could look at that hashtag and say 'hey, that looks awesome! I could totally use that in my classroom.' But, more importantly, your will look at those worksheets and think 'I could totally do better than this.'

Now think about how the school will change over the course of the year with this shift in mindset. We would be pushing our colleagues and our students to raise the bar because we will have a 'I can do better' mentality on everything we do.

We need to speak up more as educators. We need to blog, we need to tweet, we need to take pictures of our classrooms and the great things that are happening in them. We need to inundate the digital world with all the positives that are happening every day.

Pretty Good

I want to share the following poem published by Charles Osgood in 1991.

There once was a pretty good student,
who sat in a pretty good class,
and was taught by a pretty good teacher,
who always let pretty good pass.

He wasn’t terrific at reading,
he wasn’t a whiz-bang at math,
but for him education was leading,
straight down a pretty good path.

He didn’t find school too exciting,
but he wanted to do pretty well,
and he did have some trouble with writing,
and nobody had taught him to spell.

When doing arithmetic problems,
pretty good was regarded as fine.
Five and five needn’t always add up to be ten,
a pretty good answer was nine.

The pretty good class that he sat in,
was part of a pretty good school,
and the student was not an exception–
on the contrary, he was the rule.

The pretty good school that he went to
was part of a pretty good town,
and nobody there seemed to notice
he could not tell a verb from a noun.

The pretty good student, in fact,
was part of a pretty good mob
and the first time he knew what he lacked was 
when he looked for a pretty good job.

It was then when he sought a position
he discovered that life could be tough
and he soon had a sneaky suspicion
that pretty good might not be – good enough.

The pretty good town in our story
was part of a pretty good state,
which had pretty good aspirations,
and prayed for a pretty good fate.

There once was a pretty good nation,
pretty proud of the greatness it had,
which learned, much too late,
if you want to be great,
pretty good, is, in fact, pretty bad.
The Osgood File, Charles Osgood, CBS, as quoted in Ann Landers column, New Jersey Herald and News, October 5, 1991.

I actually read this poem as part of my graduation speech in high school. I feel it is probably more significant today than it was in 1991. Are we settling too often in education? Are too many teachers choosing the route of 'flying under the radar' rather than draw administrators into their classrooms? Are too many students hiding their talents because it is easier to go unnoticed than to deal with praise?

We are standing at a precipice in education. We can choose to turn back and take the safe route or we can leap. Me? I have no interest in being 'Pretty Good'.

I want to be great!

What does it mean to be social?

I was running a professional development session on the Flipped classroom and I asked the question "what 20th century skills are still important in today's classroom?" One of the participants raised his hand and said, "kids today are not social. They need to learn how to look someone in the eye and have a conversation." Being the pot stirrer that I am I immediately responded with "can a person today have a good job and be a productive member of society without being able to do that?" Some members of the group immediately exclaimed no. Others gave a 'well, sort of.' And some were just not sure because you sort of can in today's world. You can literally never leave your house and still be a productive member of society.

Without leaving your home, you can:

• order groceries online
• work from home
• talk with friends and family all over the world both by phone and video
• date
• have meals delivered
• play games
• buy clothing
• have your dry clean only clothes cleaned
• pay your bills
• vote
• learn a new language

More and more people are working from home and never have in-person meetings with members of their company. Or, like my sister, some start their own company in their living room and have employees that are in different states.

Typically, when we say 'being social' we mean to interact with other human beings that are physically near us. We fault people who are staring intently at the screen on their smartphone and are missing the world around them.

But what if they are staring at a part of the world that isn't around them? What if they are watching a video from the ISS? Or watching their niece who lives in a different country take her first steps? Or watching their mother blow out her birthday candles when they couldn't be there because of work commitments?

What if the world around them isn't meaningful to them and they are trying to immerse themselves in something that is?

Another question I asked the group was this: how many of you growing up had friends that were more than 50 miles away? Zero hands. None of the 30 people in the session had friends that were more than 50 miles away from them. If I asked that of my students I guarantee that a few hands would be raised. Why? Skype, Face Time, Google Hangouts. Teenagers today are able to stay connected to their friends and family no matter where they are in the world. More and more of my students are staying together with their high school boyfriends/girlfriends after they go to college than ever before because of the ability to stay in close contact no matter where they are.

We are very quick to attack today's youth because they don't meet our societal norms. Maybe it's time for society to redefine what it means to be social.

Teaching outside the curriculum

Last week, I attended our spring NHS induction. At this event, each senior member of the club has the opportunity to honor a staff member who they felt was a mentor to them over their 4 years of HS. It was an honor to be selected by one of my former students and even more so to hear the amazing things she said about me in her speech.

Some of the stories were very moving. Two students talked about their art teacher who they referred to as Mom; one student talked about how the teacher created a safe place for her to visit; four students spoke about their coach and how he taught them to be better men; one talked about a substitute teacher and the impact he had on her. But I think the most emotional speech was given by the young man who spoke about how hard high school was for him, how he probably wouldn't have made it through the four years without his history teacher. This teacher taught him lessons about life, taught him that no matter how tough life seems his spirit is tougher. I got the distinct impression that this student might have just dropped out of school altogether if he hadn't had this particular teacher during his sophomore year.

Through every speech, the same thought ran through my head: where are these life lessons in the curriculum?

We measure a teacher's effectiveness based on his/her ability to complete a curriculum. But where in the evaluation process is mentoring young people? Is there a way to quantify that? If a teacher was a mediocre instructor, but found a unique way to connect with his students and help them find meaning in school, shouldn't that be used in measuring his effectiveness?

Maybe we need to take a closer look on what the term "effective" really means.

School Leader Magazine Article

I was asked to write an article for School Leader Magazine--a magazine published by the NJ School Board Association. For those of you not a Superintendent or BOE member in NJ, I wanted to share my ideas with you.

Let’s Stop Talking About Flipped Classrooms and Start Talking About Flipped Learning

A chemistry teacher describes how he refined his approach to a flipped classroom
By Marc Seigel

I will never forget the exact moment that I became complacent.

It was October of 2010, my tenth year in education. I walked in on a Monday, sat down at my desk, opened the folder of my laptop that contained all of my PowerPoints, opened the one pertaining to the unit I was starting that day, and suddenly felt like I was punched in the gut. You see, I hadn’t spent a single minute over the weekend preparing lesson plans or even thinking about what I was going to be teaching that day. My instructional routines had become so automatic and my grasp of the content so precise that I didn’t even have to engage my brain to produce a lesson for the day. My classroom was generally running on autopilot. I knew at that moment that something needed to change and it needed to happen fast.

It just so happened that about two weeks later, I was skimming a publication from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and stumbled across an article about two chemistry teachers (Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams) in Colorado who were using videos they had posted online to teach content to their students. About two years prior, I had begun recording example problems on an interactive whiteboard using a video camera and posting them to my website, but they were only there to supplement what I was already doing. I never considered recording my entire lesson for my students to watch. My students commented how helpful it was to see those problems a second time when they were at home so why wouldn’t seeing an entire lesson help them? So began my flipped classroom story.

Flipped Classrooms: 101 A “traditional” flipped classroom centers on the idea that lectures normally given in class are recorded and posted in some form for the students to watch for homework. The videos might be posted to YouTube, a teacher website, copied to a flashdrive, or burned to a DVD. A typical 45-minute lecture could be boiled down to about 10 or 15 minutes. Students would take notes, just like they would normally do in class, then come to class ready to engage in something to reinforce the material they learned the night before.

This is exactly how I began my first flipped unit. I chose a fairly easy unit (since I teach chemistry, I chose writing and balancing reactions), something with which my students had always found success. They would go home, watch the videos I recorded using Camtasia Studio from TechSmith and posted on my YouTube Channel (http://bit.ly/seigelchemistry), come to class, and do the homework they normally would have done at home. It was fantastic! Every time a student began to struggle, I was right there to answer his or her questions. The students wouldn’t go more than a few minutes being confused and would immediately get right back to getting their work done. I still gave the same checking-for-understanding quizzes I had always given, the same labs, the same tests. The only thing that changed was where the homework assignment and the lecture happened.

The best part about this method, for me, was students could move at their own pace. Some students would watch all of the videos in one weekend, show up on Monday and just plow through all of the graded assignments. Some students would have the laptops open on their desk (at the time we had Dell mini-laptops, but I now have a cart of Chromebooks) and watch the video as they completed the homework. Some failed the homework assignment even though they took good notes, went back to the videos in class, and had the opportunity to fix the mistakes they made. None of this would have been possible in a traditional model with me controlling every aspect of the daily routine.

This system worked really well. But then I soon realized things were starting to unravel. Since everyone was completing the same homework assignment, and different students were moving at different speeds, slower students figured out that if they just wait for the faster students to complete the assignments, they could just copy their work when it was returned. Also, students who were not good at managing their time in class properly, fell far behind (sometimes weeks behind) and were turning in an entire marking period’s worth of assignments on the last day before grades were due. This last situation caused a tremendous amount of work for me and meant that the students were not getting the timely feedback they needed to be successful.

Once again, things needed to change, and fast.

Stop Focusing On Classrooms and Start Focusing on Learning Those educators who have been successful with a flipped classroom have begun to move to a flipped learning approach. Both are centered on the essential question: What is the best use of my face-to-face time with my students? However, it is the mindset that is different.

• Flipped Classrooms allow students watch lectures at home and engage in homework in school. Teachers guide students through a series of worksheets or more traditional activities that help them reach objectives and gain the knowledge necessary to pass assessments.
• Flipped Learning allows educators to use a variety of teaching methodologies to help students reach a learning objective. (www.flippedlearning.org) Rather than focusing on the content they need to learn, students are engaged in activities that teach both content and skills that are necessary for success. The classroom is a dynamic and collaborative environment where all levels of learners are supported.

So, what does this dynamic, collaborative learning environment look like? Well, that’s the beauty of flipped learning--every educator customizes it to fit his or her school, students, and personal abilities. Some teachers use pre-made videos on the Internet; some make their own. Some are the only teachers in their building/district flipping; some are part of an entire flipped school. Some teachers use only their traditional assignments; some allow the students to design their own work. This is not a pre-packaged curriculum--something you just order from a company and everything you need is already inside. Let me tell you what a typical unit looks like in my flipped environment.

One unit my students learn about is solutions. On the first day, the students will participate in a guided-inquiry activity called Introduction to Solution Making (http://bit.ly/seigelsolutionmaking) in which they will learn about calculating concentration of solutions by making two cups of fruit punch. There are no procedures other than for them to make two cups of fruit punch the way they like to drink it. After they make the drinks, they read farther down and it tells them to use the mass of powdered drink they measured and the volume of water they used to calculate the concentration. This is when they realized they didn’t measure anything and have to start again.  Note: While learning how to calculate concentration is the main learning objective, students learn more through their mistakes of solution making. At the end of the activity, the students are free to drink their solutions while they watch the instructional video about calculating concentration (which is linked in the Google Doc of the lab).

The video on concentration is embedded in a Google Form. Below the video are three self-check questions for the students to complete at the conclusion of the video. These questions are modified questions from the unit test and align to the district quarterly assessment. When they answer the questions and hit “submit,” a tool called Flubaroo provides both the student and the teacher feedback on the student’s understanding of the material, and he or she can ask the teacher questions about any errors or misconceptions and get the immediate assistance they need.

Students now move through a series of both required and optional assignments for the unit, which have been detailed on an assignment chart distributed on Google Classroom and on the first day of the unit. (bit.ly/seigelsolutions) While some assignments are labeled as required, I have given the students the freedom to either supplement or replace these with assignments they have designed. This gives all students the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding in ways that better suit their needs.

The Future of Flipped Learning Is Now The flipped model does not only apply to teachers and students. Administrators can flip faculty meetings or professional development by giving teachers something to read or research in advance and then engaging them in discussion and activities when the group comes together. Advisors can flip club meetings. The culture of learning has changed for students and schools. When the accumulated knowledge of the human race is sitting in your pocket, teachers no longer need to be the sole source of content knowledge, but rather, need to direct students toward ways to find their own understandings of how to use that content appropriately.

Teacher Appreciation Week

I have a student who is basically mute in my class. I want to say she has said a total of 20 words all year. Through March I was only able to ask her yes and no questions because she could shake her head otherwise she would just cast her eyes down until I eventually gave up. However, being the stubborn person I am, I would go out of my way to say hi to her every time I saw her, compliment her art work when I visited her art class, and give her a huge smile. April saw a break when she finally said hi back.

This week, for Teacher Appreciation Week,  I received the following from her:

There's a lot of things I could say right now. A lot of cliches to justify this and the things I do every day. But all I am going to say is this:

Thank you. Thank you for being brave enough to write this. Thank you for making me cry.

I really appreciate it...Honestly!