First Day(s) of School

One of my unwritten goals for this year is to make a post every week. The idea that I want to pursue for the TED Ed Club is to help others see the awesome that is around them every day. The truth is I have awesome students and we do awesome things in the classroom so I want to share that with everyone.

This was the first week of school. My oldest son entered 2nd grade and every year he comes back and tells us he doesn't remember anything he did that day. When he entered Kindergarten, I remember him saying that the entire first day was him listening to his teachers tell the class the rules: where to sit, where to stand, when to talk. As he spoke all I heard was 'Sit. Stand. Speak. Good boy.' This year I vowed not to make class an obedience lesson.

The first day of school is a clean slate. I can be anyone I want. I can be the person I was last year or I can completely recreate myself. I chose the latter.

On the first day, I told my students that I didn't want to talk about procedures or grading or a syllabus. I talked about learning and my expectations for them and their expectations for me. I talked about my experience at the Google Teacher Academy and how it changed my life. I did a lot of talking, unfortunately, but they did a lot of smiling.

My classes are very different from each other. I think my Honors classes surprised me the most. I talk about my bungee chairs and how I encourage the class to make the classroom their learning space, to be as comfortable as possible. One of classes just stared at the chairs as if I told them they could sit on a bed of nails all class. My other class stopped me, asked if I was serious, and the second we broke for the activity, began pushing each other out of the way to get to the chairs. One student didn't make it so he sat on top of his group's desks, happy as a clam.

Colleagues came up to me on Friday and told me how their former students who have me told them how excited they were for my class. That makes me feel good, that they actually heard what I was trying to tell them. But on the 2nd day of class I wanted to be sure. I ran a PollEverywhere poll and asked "What was your biggest takeaway from last class?" Obviously each kid took something slightly different away, but here is a screenshot of my favorite:

I wasn't going for fun, but many realize that they will learn chemistry, they will learn new skills, and that they actually have to work. The ball is rolling and now I just need to keep this momentum going.

Content vs Skills: refocusing our attention

When I started teaching, my philosophy was to cover, at least in some part, all of the topics taught at the college level of a freshmen chemistry class.  If I am truly teaching a college-prep course, this idea makes sense.  But, this year between the loss of time moving to block scheduling, time lost due to Hurricane Sandy, and refocusing my attention on teaching to a final exam I didn't create, I have really had to cut out what I feel is important content that is taught in college in order to get my students better prepared for the end of the year examination.  When doing all of this, I keep saying "when will my students ever need this?"  It is kind of bizarre hearing that phrase said in your own head instead of coming out of a teenager.

I have been trying to make class more focused on the activities and less on the videos.  This has occurred partially through guided inquiry and guided PBL activities.  But, as is the case with most science classes, the activities still just reinforced the content that they had to learn through the videos instead of the activities driving the learning.

I decided to make a change.  Starting in the unit on Solutions, I gave a starter activity that walked them through the process of making a solution and then walked them through calculations that are required for calculating the concentration.  Once they have the foundation, then they watch the video related to the topic. After watching the videos, the students would then come back to the lab to complete an extension to the original activity.  Here is a link to the document.

It is very much a work in progress, but I am hoping it will shift the students away from relying on the videos and myself to give them the content they need.  It also makes the class time more about DOING chemistry and the videos more about preparing for the tests and exams.

Now that I think about it, maybe part of the shift needs to be more like the structure of chemistry labs in college:  a "recitation" that is just strictly content based and a lab that actually has the students using the content.

I have to think more on this.  Your thoughts?

I'm tired

I'm tired of the term "Flipped Classroom."  Besides the fact that it is a mouthful to say, no one seems to like it.  Apparently no one likes the idea of having the students more engaged in class with less HW to do outside of school.  No one likes the idea that the teacher, by no longer taking up time to lecture, no longer the focus of the classroom, is now free to converse with students for longer periods of time.  No one also seems to like the idea of experimenting with new teaching methods, but rather would prefer to judge them based on articles and blog posts on the Internet.

So I am tired of using the term Flipped Classroom to describe what I am doing.  When I cut my students' workload in half by using this method, I got attacked.  When my students began to do more inquiry labs, which require more time on everyone's part to develop, people questioned my methods.  When my students' grades in class began to rise and the lowest anyone earns is the grade that they want to earn, I am told I inflate grades (despite the fact that my students complete 3 times more work to get that grade).

So I am going to just use the term #LEARNING.  Maybe it will involve #flipclass, maybe PBL, maybe lecture, maybe discovery, maybe Mastery.  It might even have a little bit of a lot of things.  But no matter what method we choose to use, it will be about my STUDENTS  and their LEARNING.

Now that's something I can't get tired about.

Chapter 1: The day my teacher lost his mind

I had some zany teachers and some who really knew how to make you laugh. I had some who were phenomenal instructors and some who really knew how to inspire. But I never had a teacher like me. Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong decade and other times I am glad I am teaching now. It is absolutely the most exciting time to be both a student and a teacher as new ideas and methods of instruction are constantly being invented. With that said I would like to present my latest entry into the book of crazy.

My current principal has a lot of potential as an administrator:  he is young, energetic, open to new ideas, willing to admit he doesn't know everything, and wants to do more.  He has budgeted for 60 ipads (plus carts) in next year's budget.  When he told me this I was excited for him on the outside, but cringed on the inside.  My district has had some turmoil in the past and that has caused many of the teachers to close their doors and just do their own thing.  While there is a lot of good things happening in the district, there is little effort to share and even more resistance to change.  Often, when schools make large technology purchases such as this, there are 2 outcomes: 1) everyone is super excited and fighting over who gets to use it first or 2) and far too often this is the case, the technology sits in a storage room collecting dust because no one knows how to use it properly.  I cringed because I was thinking of the SMART board that has been moved to science storage room because no one wants to take the time to use it.

There has been a lot of talk about ipads in education on #edchat.  All of these people would not be sharing resources and ideas if they didn't have some merit so I have been trying to follow along.  I have noticed some very interesting apps (doceri, screenchomp, educreations) that would make my life as a teacher easier and also some that would allow students to demonstrate their understanding of the material (voicethread, prezi).  Looking at all of this made me realize that I can talk about the benefits of the ipad all day, but if I don't have proof of how it can be used in my classroom right now, I will never convince my colleagues to use them.

Which brings me to the latest chapter in my book.  I cannot afford an ipad so I borrowed one.  For the entire month of January my students will be allowed to "rent" my ipad during class with the intention that they are using to demonstrate why these are important learning tools that should be in every class.  I say "rent" because they will be paying me in experiences (ok that sounded less corny in my head).  Every time they use the ipad they will be adding to a Google Doc about what they used, how they used it and what they learned from the experience.  This is going to make professional development on the devices so much easier as I will have the students' words to back up what I am saying.

I have no idea if this is going to work, but I have to try.  I am just too afraid of the 90s happening again, where schools dumped money into things that ended up being thrown out or sold because no one was using them.  My students have said they want more of this type of technology in the school.

Why not give it to them?

I love it when they get it

I introduced the Mole today in my Honors Chemistry class.  For those of you who don't remember HS chemistry, the mole is a generic term that represents a specific amount of a substance, specifically 6.02x10²³ of a substance.  To put the size of this number in perspective, if you were to collect 1 mole of pennies and distribute those pennies equally to every human on the planet, each person would receive approximately one TRILLION dollars.  It's a lot of stuff.

My honors class is unlike any class I have in that they try to distract me from teaching by asking me complex questions related to the topic.  So, after I shock them with the above example, one student starts asking if you laid the pennies end to end, would it stretch around the world.  I said it would probably stretch around the world a few thousand times.  This answer was not acceptable for her so I told her to get the netbook out and look it up; Google the dimensions of a penny and the size of the Earth and figure out how many pennies you would need.  Just to prove me wrong, she rushes over, grabs the computer and is off working for the next 15 minutes.  (FYI, I was way off.  1 mole of pennies would wrap around the Earth approximately 899 TRILLION times)

After a few minutes I am talking about how to calculate the mass of 1 mole of a compound and a different student wanted to know how many moles of water are in a human being.  Not knowing how much water is actually in the human body, I told her (surprise, surprise) to Google it.  She picks up her iPhone and starts her search.  Unfortunately she ran short of time and energy before she could figure out an answer.  Turns out they only have percentages of water content listed on sites and not grams.  We needed a bathroom scale to actually measure someone's weight.  Guess what I am bringing in tomorrow!

I don't really care if they can calculate the number of moles of sodium in a sample.  What I do want is for them to be inquisitive, to know that they are free to ask questions, to know they are free to ignore me and work on something that has more meaning for them.  I want more days like today.

I think I did something right

So, it happened again.  Actually it happened twice.

I gave my students time to work on their post-lab questions during class.  One of the questions was "Prior to its discovery on Earth, how did scientists know Helium existed in the sun?"  Some students asked me questions trying to discover the answer and gave them the guidance to come up with it on their own.  But there was one group of students all looking around one person's paper and they hadn't asked me a single question.  I wandered over to find them intently reading something on one student's phone.  It turns out the reason they weren't asking me any questions was because they simply googled the discovery of Helium.  The article described the entire method of using a spectroscope to break down the light from the sun which is exactly what we were doing in class.

During the next period, my next class was presenting their Animoto videos for the element project.  I always like to give a small award to the video voted best by the class.  So, I passed out little strips of paper and had everyone write down their vote.  As I am collecting the votes, one student says "Mr. S, why didn't you just have us text our vote to polleverywhere?"  I had them use their phones earlier in the month, but it never occurred to me to use them for this.

Today made something abundantly clear to me:  give them the right tools and get out of their way.

Can you put a price on learning?

There is a limited amount of technology in my classroom for anyone to use, let alone students. I only have three netbooks, but I always keep them charged and have told my students repeatedly to use them if they want to do a search for something I was discussing.

I have 1 student whose computer has been broken for weeks and he still has not filled out the first day of school info sheet on the website.  So, I turned on the netbook, plopped it on his desk and had him complete the form.  I move on with the lesson and I notice that about halfway through the period he still has the computer open and is staring intently at the screen.  There's no way that it is taking him 20+ minutes to fill out this questionnaire, so I swing over to see what he is doing as the rest of the class is copying some notes.

In the course of the lesson on the atom, I mentioned that you can put a halogen lightbulb in a microwave and it will glow from the microwaves excited the atoms.  He heard this and decided to look it up on Youtube.  Well, that video led him to a series of videos of people microwaving different materials and explaining why the material that it was made of smoked or conducted electricity or glowed.  He was fascinated!  When I asked him what he was watching, he got so excited and started describing to the class what happened to a CD.

Can he write shorthand notation for identifying protons, neutrons and electrons in an atom? No.  Was he excited about learning and engaged for the entire period? Absolutely.

So, what was the more important lesson he learned today?

Awesome #2

I thought since my first Awesome post was about things non-education related, that I should jump back and talk about a couple of things my students do that feel awesome.

#3  When former students come to visit
I love it when graduates come back to visit, even if it is students I was not particularly close to.  It is amazing the transformation they go through in the 1st year of college.  Last week some of my former students showed up randomly and one ended up spending nearly 2 hours just chatting with me during my classes.  He is not really that different than when he left, but his confidence level is so much higher.  He just went on and on about the different things he was doing, the people he was meeting and even the places he was traveling to.  I was only his teacher for 1 year, but I am proud of the man he is becoming.

#4  When a plan comes together
One of the philosophies of the Flipped Classroom is to increase peer teaching to allow the teacher more interaction with all members of the class.  In my classes, there is much more collaboration than there is peer teaching.  But, in one class I have three guys who just fight with each other over who has the right answer.  And when I say fight, I mean disrupt the entire class as they argue back and forth as to who has the best method for solving the problem.  Normally, you need to squash this kind of behavior, but after the argument they sit down and explain the solution to each other.  It is so amazing to watch this sudden shift from combatants to teacher to combatants again.  I love it when a plan comes together.

An unexpected benefit

I have been using the Flipped Classroom for several months now and I have found tons of positive aspects to it.

• my students feel more relaxed in class as they are learning the material
• the pace of learning is completely student driven.  If they want to work on chemistry they do; if they need to study for something else, they do that instead. (has been great for the students are are also taking AP Exams this week)
• everything is done collaboratively.  None of my students are islands and they all seek out each other when they are struggling rather than always turning to me.
• labs are more spread out so I can focus my attention on the few students performing the lab rather than managing an entire class at once.
• more interaction with all of my students because I am not lecturing anymore.

These are things that most people who have done the flip have said.  But something happened recently that I didn't fully expect and it shows one of the other benefits of this design.  I was diagnosed with walking pneumonia on Monday and the doctor prescribed 2 days of rest, along with a host of antibiotics.  Unfortunately, my appointment was at 3:30 in the afternoon.  I had no sub plans for the next two days because I was fully planning on being in school when I left on Monday.  Now, most teachers panic in a situation like this because how are they going to continue instruction, give the students meaningful material AND keep pace with the curriculum so close to the end of the year?

The Flipped Classroom to the rescue!!  I came back after two days absence and not a minute has been lost in my class.  Students had been watching podcasts and completing work just as if I was in class.  The only exception was they were not able to ask questions while I was gone so I got bombarded at the beginning of class (why don't they ever use their email?!).  Learning takes place on the students' schedules not the teachers in the Flipped Classroom.  The fact that learning still took place when I wasn't there demonstrates on the focus has shifted in the room.

Decisions, decisions

I teach sophomore level chemistry and my students are working on Slam Poetry in their Honors English class.  This assignment has been all they really had been talking about all week.  Thank goodness I run a blended learning model with my Flipped Classroom otherwise I would have been wasting my time trying to teach last week.  Now, I have no idea what Slam Poetry really is.  My students tried to explain it and my wife says Rap music is slam poetry, but that really means nothing to me.  All I got out of the explanations was that it is poetry that is usually negative, but with an uplifting idea at the end, and it doesn't have to rhyme.

Well, one of my students decides to write hers about how her teachers are stifling her creativity.  She goes on and on about how she wishes her teachers would let her learn about things she is passionate about, about how school is nothing but grades and society believes that high marks equals intelligence when really students can just cheat or extra credit their way to the top.  I read her poem, stepped back and wanted to applaud her.  I told her that, besides the fact that she is going to anger her teacher because the poem basically says the teacher is boring her and forcing to do assignments she hates, that she has found the exact topic that major educational reforms are trying to make.  School needs to be focused more on learning than on completing assignments.  I continued to talk with her and her friend about how teachers disguise creativity in projects by letting the students pick their partners or the method of presentation, but they said the real creativity comes from picking the assignment itself. 

So, I posed them a question.  Justin Tarte likes to make very philosophical educational comments on Twitter and his blog and a few weeks ago he made a comment about whether we, as teachers, believe that if given the choice of whether to come to school or just learn at home that students would voluntarily come to our class to learn.  Well, I presented this idea to these two girls:  if given the choice would you come to school or just learn whatever you want at home?  One girl said flat out that she loves to learn and would come to school because she is required to attend.  But when I reminded her that she is no longer required to actually enter the building and can still learn, she didn't know which one she would choose.

The student who wrote the poem (and I have asked her for a copy to post here so keep checking back) said immediately there were only 2 classes she would actually come to school for, mine being one of them.  (I find this funny as the beauty of the Flipped Classroom is you don't have to be in the classroom to still learn the material.  The classroom is for the 1 on 1 interaction with the teacher)  Both students agreed that they wanted to be inspired; they wanted a teacher who was going to motivate them to take their learning to the next level. 

This last comment threw me.  Do I inspire students to take their learning to the next level?  I know I have strong instructional technique and I try to be innovative to keep the material interesting, but are my students just going through the motions in my class or are they motivated to do more?

I would love to hear how you are inspiring your students and how they inspire you.