For my most recent Tuesday Newsday, my students read about a school in Florida in which a teacher gives no grades.  She only gives feedback.

I asked them to imagine what that would look like at our school.

Their answers were largely summed up in this sentence: "We would feel less stress without grades, but we wouldn't know how we were doing and no one would care about learning without the stress of the grade."

I was a little shocked that they were SO unable to envision a world without grades, even with an example of how this fantastic teacher gave extensive feedback and the kids in the class talked about learning more in that system.  

It's no secret to them that I don't like grades that much.  I really don't like the hundreds of emails from students asking how to earn back one point on x assignment so they can get an A.

I try and not talk about grades at all.  The question "How will this be graded?" usually gets A Look, followed by my head collapsing into my hands.  They've learned not to ask that.  But that doesn't mean they don't think about it.

Oh, they do.

For the past few years, I've been trying to figure out how to spend less time working.  This has been mostly for my own sanity, but also so that I have time to pursue other projects.

Now I've succeeded, more or less.  I don't work on school stuff on weekends unless I want to.

And I'm not doing it by reducing the rigour or number of essays.

Want to know how?  Read on.

Trimester 3 is about persuasion techniques, so I decided it was time to properly use Newsela. 

Newsela is a web-based program that allows you to change the lexile level of an article and assign it to students.  Some also have writing tasks or quizzes, but the main benefit is the ability to customise for a class, or even for particular students.

It's also kind of fascinating how they take real articles from real news sources and level them down - the changes they make tell you a lot about how textual complexity is measured.

But back to Tuesday Newsday.  Every Tuesday this trimester, I give students an article that covers a controversial issue.  There was whale captivity, class size, getting rid of grades, and this week, whether video games are good or bad for teenagers.

Students read the article in pairs, and come up with the main idea.  Then I have them make a list of pro/cons and each take a side.  Then their puppets debate each other in a short video.

This gives students LOTS of practice finding the main idea and coming up with compelling arguments.  Something I've learned from Jon Corippo is that students need lots of repetitions on skills they find challenging.  Tuesday Newsday gives them that repetition with specific feedback.

And I've found that students actually like it - if you do a good job picking the article, it's fun to create an argument, and obviously puppets are fun.

With a shorter article, you can do this in 30 minutes.  It takes about 45 most days.  The key is to keep it fun so it doesn't become another boring task you have to force them to do.

At CUE, I made an offer that if anyone wanted my curriculum, I would give it to them.

Now, I didn't have it in a sharable format, but that didn't stop me from making that promise.

So I spent my first day off in a while to put it all together - it was actually really helpful, since for the first time in almost my entire career, I know what I'm teaching next year, and it's the same class as this year.

Most of the people I work with in the #flipclass community share the feeling I have about TeachersPayTeachers: that it's exploitative of teachers who are desperately trying to improve their practice.  We work in an industry that has become so much more powerful by the huge amount of free education available on YouTube and the internet.  And yet we lock our work behind a paywall so we can make money off of other teachers?!

Why don't other people think that's as messed up as I do?

So here's my part to break the culture of pay-for-lesson-plans.  I'm sharing my entire course for free.  If something you've heard me talk about isn't there, please let me know and I'll add it.

A lot of what's on this document is my original work, but I've also used work from my colleagues, both in real life and on Twitter/Voxer.  That's another reason why I find TPT so repellant.  Ideas aren't birthed in our brains without being nurtured and fertilised by the work of others.  How can you monetise an idea that has come from hundreds of other people?

I urge you to give your curriculum away for free as well.  We get better when there is more collective learning that's open and available.

Enough talking.  Here's the google doc with my curriculum.

If you have ideas for improvement, please let me know.  If you see something you think we can collaborate on, please let me know.  My hope is that this is helpful for teachers trying to envision what (one version of) 1:1 flipped instruction can look like for real.

During class today, I tweeted this picture of my students doing a grammar lesson I stole from Jon Corippo.

So I guess I need to share.

So I just came back from CUE in Palm Springs.  Andrew, Sam and I presented not one, not two, but three times together.  Sam also presented another session on top of that.  Crazy.

Pretty much all of the rooms were full.  

Wait, I have pictures.  The first room had 150 seats.  All of which were filled 30 minutes before we were scheduled to start.

Finally, after another ten minutes and people sitting on every available space on the floor, we decided we were going to start.  Twenty minutes early.  So we did.

This was a new presentation for all three of us - I've only properly been a 1:1 teacher for the past year, so I shared a few things that I do in my classroom, and so did Andrew and Sam.  I think it was helpful.  I hope it was.