Over Spring Break, I read Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning, which does what it says on the tin: teach you how to learn or teach anything more successfully.

Clearly, that is something really useful to my life.  While there are lots of principles from the book I'll be implementing, I've been focusing on one strategy that they say is very clearly tied to moving information from short to long term memory: retrieval practice.

The concept, in its most basic form, is self-quizzing.  The way most people study is they go over a list of topics, and run through them once or twice. Maybe you make flashcards.  And as soon as you've gotten them right at least once, you figure out know them and move on.

But that's not knowledge.  That's the illusion of mastery.

So how do you know if you really know something?  By simulating testing conditions and forcing yourself to work harder to pull the information from memory.  Practically, that means closing the book or the laptop and going back through the concept and asking yourself questions to test understanding instead of basic recall.

That is such a powerful concept that I decided I was going to implement it immediately with my 6th graders. 

The problem that immediately surfaced is that I run a student-centred PBL constructivist classroom.  There isn't direct instruction.  There isn't lots of factual information. 

Or so I thought.

It's hard to change classroom practice, especially for those of us who have been teaching for 10+ years.  And there are always shiny new "innovative" tools offered up as the Thing That Will Save Education.  Like radio.  And the VCR.  And laserdisk.  And the SMARTboard.  And 1:1 devices.

Behind the drive for having the newest or coolest app or edtech tool is the same instinct that drives most good teachers: How can I do this better for my students?

Honestly, the most innovative thing I do is get out of their way.

My goal?  Total invisibility.  At least from an outside perspective.

Planning is an issue with which a lot of first-time flippers struggle.  Hell, it's something with which every teacher struggles.

It's also one of the biggest objection for teachers new to flipping.

There's no getting around it: creating flipped videos takes a lot of time.

That's why I don't make many videos.

The main reason for that is because I'm no longer the disseminator of knowledge and content in my flipped class.  I have my students do a lot of it.  Does that feel lazy?  Sometimes.  But I fight that (just like the other feelings about how I'm failing at various aspects of my professional life) for a simple reason.

Because the principle behind it is sound: The person who does the work does the learning.