There are exciting things happening.  And not just on my vacation.  But I'll start with those:

1. I got to meet Karl Lindgren-Streicher!  In person!  In Seattle!  Not just on Google+ hangout!  We spent a fun day talking Flipped Class and General Life Topics of Interest.  I also got sunburned...at a beach...in Seattle.  Will wonders never cease?  And since Karl and I live, like, fifteen minutes from each other, we will certainly be doing that again....although next time, probably closer to home.

2. Andrew and I have some big, big ideas to debut soon.  None are really ready for Prime Time, but the afternoon I spent with Karl yielded some amazing things when Andrew and I debriefed.  Yes, this is totally vague and general.  But you'll all know soon enough!

3. Blank White Page has gone meta.  I'll talk more about this as we get the site built, but Andrew, Karl and I have been working on our VERY OWN BWP project.  Since Andrew has never been to the Pacific Northwest, we were talking about what the armpit of California looked like (the answer? Corning).  Then we realised that instead of describing it, I could just start texting him pictures along the way - the BWP question was "What is the West Coast of America like?  How have those places shaped who you are?".  And thus was a BWP Satellite project born.  So when I met Karl in Seattle, he gladly offered to join the cause of "Show Andrew the West Coast" and the project went from "fun distraction" to "a whole new level of awesome."  We will be cataloging and posting this project when both Karl and I get home.

4. With Andrew's encouragement, I've started writing some creative non-fiction.  It has been really rewarding and I want to (again, as always) publicly thank him for not only encouraging me, but making the first draft of what I wrote readable to someone who is not in my head.  Writing is something I gave up on years ago, and it's been fun to remember all the reasons why I loved writing so much.

Here are some NON-vacation updates:

1. The Research Paper Writing series is pretty much done!  I'm still editing the final conclusion videos (and I'm half done!), but all the prewriting, drafting, and introduction videos are posted to our YouTube channel.  We think they started getting better around video 4, but we're proud of the progress we've made.

2. Next on the agenda is the first in our flipped reading strategy collaborative video.  We will introduce a writing strategy and then walk through a text and a literary analysis essay.  That series will start soon...as soon as we can get a functional wifi connection and some time.

3. We have posted another Conversations in Flipped English video on YouTube.  This time, it's about keeping the humanity in flipped English class.  The first in the series is found here (on Content vs. Process flipped videos).  We hope you find them helpful!  Here is our ENTIRE Flipped Professional Development archive as well.

4. As we finalise our plans, we will be posting the first unit plan Andrew and I plan to teach (that we wrote together).  It covers the basics on technology, what a flipped class is (for students/parents), reading and writing basics, blogging, working in a collaborative group, using peer feedback and group evaluation to develop norms, etc.  It's in (near) final draft, so you should see it here soon.  It is our intention to post our curriculum material and videos for free, so that as many teachers as possible can see that English is flip-able, and is something they can do without throwing out everything they've ever done. 

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That's about it for now.  I'm looking forward to a few more days on the road, then the Flipped Class workshop in San Jose on the 2nd (and meeting Crystal Kirch in person, finally!), followed by a mini-retreat to have some time in solitude, then coming back rested and throwing myself into preparing for school!

I have loved reading all the comments from people here, and I'd also love to hear any questions you have about flipping English, or topics you'd like Andrew and I to cover in our next Conversations video.  And I really hope you all are having a beautiful summer, which is at least as full of family, friends, and fun as it is of flipped class work. :-)

A few hours ago, something happened.  Well, a lot of things happened, but this is one relevant to this blog:

I sat down to work on a few things (like the video on content vs. process videos), and I saw that Jon Bergmann wrote a blog post about Andrew and me and the videos we're making.  

I just don't have words for something like that.

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There are some experiences that words just fail to capture.  Like ion lucidity.  Or ubuntu.  Or friendship.  

And there are some friends who don't just get close enough to see your metaphorical demons, they help bring in the light to chase them out.  I am blessed to have those kinds of friends.  I realise I write about them a lot.  But they remind me that there is nothing so dark that it can't be walked through together.  

And that's something I never want to stop writing about.

******

Something else I never want to stop writing about is music.

There was a long period in my life where I intentionally did not listen to music.  It wasn't that I didn't love music; it was that music has a transformative power to reach beyond what is rational and cognitive and grab you in the inner being.  And there have been times in my life, where being ripped out of the rational world and into the inner being was just so painful that I couldn't allow it to happen.  I needed those worlds to be separate, so I could maintain some semblance of order.  

So my iPod was abandoned and I filled my commute with words - NPR, podcasts, whatever.  I told myself that it was about being a "life-long learner" and that I was "modelling learning for my students."  And I was straight-up lying.

Those days and circumstances are long gone, thankfully.  And now that I have both musical friends AND emotional health enough to access my iPod again, I've discovered new music, like Mumford and Sons and The Avett Brothers.  And when I say "I've discovered" what I mean is that my friends have assisted in that discovery process.  Sometimes with youtube links randomly thrown into conversations.  Sometimes with long lists of albums I have to buy "RIGHT NOW" when I ask for a single recommendation.

Both of my new-found bands have the ability to hit what Andrew and I call "physical resonance" - you don't understand it, but you GET it.  Like, at such a deep level that you feel it.  And every time you try to capture that feeling so you can try to explain it, it eludes you, taunts you, escapes your grasp.

So here's a part of song by the Avett Brothers called Salvation Song.  I'm posting it not because I have something to say about it, but because it physically resonates with me right now.  I don't understand it, but I get it.  And that's enough.

And I would give up everything 
No, this is not just about me 
And I don't know a plainer way to say it, Babe 
And they may pay us off in fame 
Though that is not why we came 
And I know well and good that won't heal our hearts 

We came for salvation 
We came for family 
We came for all that's good; that's how we'll walk away 
We came to break the bad 
We came to cheer the sad 
We came to leave behind the world a better way 

*******

As teachers, we could make those last four lines our mission statement and not miss much that's important.  

We all start off believing that we can do good and that our small presence will impact the entire world.  And most give that up within five years, leaving the profession for something that doesn't demand such a high price.  Few people are willing to be so consumed by something that has so few tangible rewards...and I totally understand that.  But I don't GET it.

There is little about my life that does not connect to my classroom.  There is little about who I am at a fundamental level that does not reflect my choice of profession.  It has a high cost in time, energy, and emotion.

But here is the payoff: I love what I do.  I love the long hours.  I love the intensity and overwhelming nature of the start of school.  I love February, where my students inevitable fall apart and I'm there to catch the emotional shrapnel.  I love June, when I send them out into the world with what I've taught them (and which is never enough) to live the life they choose.  

And I love the way in which it opens me up to other people getting involved in my "mess" - both professionally and personally.  There are few professions that allow for the kind of honesty and intimacy that are possible in education.  Students trust us with their mess and we are blessed that they trust us enough to be vulnerable.  What happens in the classroom, especially in a flipped classroom, is meta-rational.  It is beyond what can be described in words.  Like good music, or friendship, what we do in our classroom cannot be captured in mere words.  It is, as my friend puts it, concerted chaos.

And we invite in that chaos, knowing that bringing order to chaos is a privilege reserved for us, and something that we may not understand, but we GET.

And that's enough.

I don't know a single teacher who hasn't, deep down, wondered if they were doing a good job.  I don't know a single good teacher who doesn't think that constantly.

Some doubt that more than others.  In fact, some of the best teachers believe that they are failures, and wonder if they even should be in the profession at all.

I stake no claim for being a great teacher; I've never been happy with the job I'm doing in my classroom.  For years, I've masked it with a completely fictitious act of over-confidence or with a tendency towards perfectionism (the socially acceptable form of always feeling not-quite-good-enough).  But deep down, it's there.  Lurking, rearing up whenever I feel most vulnerable.

It's the blessing and curse of the reflective teacher: you are always thinking about how to make your classroom better, but you're always struck by just how far you have to go before you are where you want to be.  It's an exhausting place to be in, emotionally, physically, and professionally.

And while I don't trust teachers who say their class is perfect, I also don't trust teachers who say they are doing a bad job.  Because here's the thing:

Learning is messy.  Teaching is messy.  Life is messy.

When we hide that, we hide the reality of who we are and what we do.  In a weird way, we have to show how much of a mess we are to show what a good job we're actually doing.  And in a flipped class, if your class is not a little chaotic then it's not truly student-centred.

Part of the partnership Andrew and I have built is on the premise that we never "hide the mess" - from each other or from our students.  We believe that it's essential to show students how we fail and then try again and then fail again and then eventually (maybe) succeed.  We want them to see us fail because it shows them how NORMAL it is, and that the acceptable response is not to give up, but to get up.  To slip and not be buried.  To fight and not be defeated.

In any educational movement, including the flipped class movement, there are people held up as "experts," but here's what I have learned: there are no experts.  We are all constantly learning, and if we stop learning, we stagnate.  And if we stagnate, we become irrelevant and ineffective...which is death to the classroom, and certainly does not an expert make.

While I see the value in there being people who are willing to put their information out there (I am a blogger who claims to know something about teaching in a flipped English class, after all), I think it's also vital to stop perpetuating the myth that they are (and I am) doing an amazing job and should be revered and held in awe. 

Put even more bluntly: if you don't show me your mess, I'll assume you're lying or irrelevant.  Because the mess is there, whether I can see it or not.

Some of us have been lucky enough to have had some of the mess cleaned up by years at good schools.  That's where I'm coming from.  I went from being a broken teacher, disillusioned with teaching and with everything that wasn't about the relationship between me and my students, to someone who was suddenly a valued and respected colleague.  It helped me clean up my metaphorical living room, even if the rest of my house was still a mess.

But San Lorenzo was the school that taught me how much I had to give and how much I actually stole from my colleagues by not sharing with them.  It was there that I first learned that in the act of sharing your curriculum, you actually are sharing your mess alongside your ideas.  And when it isn't thrown back in your face, but rather taken and made better just by the act of sharing and collaboration, you start to wonder why you held back for so long.

There is a concept very close to my heart that drives at this same idea.  It derives from the Bantu word, "ubuntu."  It is the South African driving principle that affirms that, "I am who I am because we are." People are people THROUGH other people.  There is no such thing as being alone.  We are all interconnected, and as such, we must act accordingly.  We may not see the ties that bind us together, but that doesn't mean that they are not there.

In America, we've never really had this concept, let alone valued it the way my South African friends do.  In fact, it's so foreign to us that we are genuinely surprised when people make choices that are not in their own self-interest.  And yet, according to ubuntu, acting in the interest of others IS acting in self interest, because when someone else is exalted or esteemed, we all are exalted and esteemed.

On the flip side, when one teacher is disillusioned and broken, we are ALL disillusioned and broken.

And that is the state most of us are in.  Is it any wonder that schools are so broken and students are so disillusioned?

And yet.  By showing all of you the mess underneath my thin veneer of competence, I'm hoping to give you some hope that by embracing the mess that is our lives and profession, we can become something better together than we can alone.

Andrew and I named this blog Ion Lucidity, partially as a joke.  

But we were recording a few nights ago, and suddenly, it didn't feel like a joke anymore.  As weird as this sounds, it became the exact phrase we needed to explain what had happened in a single moment.

I'll back up a little bit.

We had spent hours planning a complicated shoot that included topics on which neither of us are experts.  When we started filming, my physical exhaustion and his mental exhaustion was palpable.  I can hardly watch the footage because of how present that exhaustion is.  

After about 20 minutes, we did our typical stop and check-in to see what else we still needed to cover.  And we did something that we do far more than work:  we just talked as friends.  It was an attempt, for a few minutes at least, to try to hold on to our last bit of sanity.  Through that conversation, it became clear we needed to start the recording over from the beginning (this is something that happens regularly in our partnership...which explains the many, many 13 GB Camtasia files on my hard drive).

So we started over.  And that's when it happened: we reached Ion Lucidity.  The ethereal moment when we went from exhaustion to clarity, solely through the act of conversation and collaboration.

Here is something I know: We are so much better together than we are alone.  By working together, we have ideas that are better than any either of us had alone.  It starts from incoherent rambling and flowers into something neither of us expected or imagined.  

And not only are we lucky enough to work with each other, we have been so fortunate as to find other like-minded educators to share our mess with us. 

But what I barely understand is that they care so much that they refuse to leave it that way.  They jump in and help figure out how to make the mess visible, and by doing so, exorcise it for good.  To loosely quote the Avett Brothers,  they love me for the person I'll become, not the person that I am.  That is something beautiful and incomprehensible.

Here is something else I know: the only word other than Ion Lucidity that makes this concept make sense is ubuntu.  

And here is what I believe more than anything: There is a magical quality to collaboration that allows you to be so much greater than the sum of your parts.  It allows you to see what was obscured when you tried to view it alone.  It pushes you beyond where you could ever imagine going.  It supports you when you feel like you will be crushed under the self-doubt and failure.  It reminds you that you are never a failure...it is just your mess becoming visible.

And it is there that we are most powerful: When your mess is visible to the world, people recognise their own mess in the midst of yours and it becomes okay to show theirs too.  And by the simple act of sharing, you are living ubuntu; the ties that bind you to everyone else go from being invisible to being so obvious you wonder how you've missed them for so long.

And you wonder how you ever lived without seeing them, because your life is so much more rich and full than you could have ever imagined.

Call it collaboration, call it Ion Lucidity, call it ubuntu...it doesn't matter.  It replaces that deeply held belief that you're not doing well enough with something even better: the realisation that when you AREN'T good enough, there are people who will love you anyway, and will help you be far better than good enough.

I've been in a frenzy of collaboration in the last few days.  First, I participated in a webinar with other English/Social Studies flippers: Troy Cockrum, Andrew Thomasson, Karl Lindgren-Streicher, and moderator and blogging-flipping-extraordinaire, Math flipper Crystal Kirch.  Kate Petty tried to join us on video, but due to technical difficulties wasn't able to be there the whole time. She did participate in the comments and wrote up some blog posts afterward that were really helpful to clarify and crystalise the thinking behind flipping English. 

We screencasted the entire webinar so anyone could watch it.  Here it is!

I've also been working intensely on a definition for what Flipped Humanities is and should be.  Andrew Thomasson and I will be recording a video about it soon, based on the five page (in-progress) collaborative Google document we developed with Karl Lindgren-Streicher.  

It's one of the coolest things I've done.  Karl and I started it with nothing, and within an hour, we had argued (in different colour text, obviously) back and forth and clarified our thinking and come to something that I think is the most clear and well-composed definition I've seen.  It's about 90% there, and still needs some work, but you'll hear more from Andrew and me about that soon.

It also came out of the debrief we had after the webinar and a conversation that started on Twitter the day after the webinar, and included Kate Baker, as well as the others mentioned above.  

Working with the people I've been blessed enough to meet through Twitter and the Flipped community is making me a better teacher, and giving me SO many great ideas and projects that it's just staggering.  I want to publicly thank everyone I've mentioned so far, for making me a more reflective teacher and helping me bring my ideas to life.  I also credit you guys for most of those ideas because they wouldn't exist without the collaboration we've shared.

More than anyone else though, I want to thank Andrew for the role he's played in my life the past few weeks.  It is an intense privilege to have him as a collaborative partner, and I have learned so much from him, both professionally and personally.  I can't say thank you to him enough, really.  None of this would be possible without you, homie.

Something else Andrew and I have been working on all week is the video Jon Bergmann asked us to make describing our collaborative video process.  We shot the original footage on Monday.  On Wednesday, after spending about 15 hours editing, not to mention the original 3 hour shoot, we decided it wasn't good enough and started over...even though it was VERY late in North Carolina.  That footage can't even compare to the original.  It's so much better, probably because we did what we do best: make an explicit plan, then ignore that plan and just talk to each other candidly. 

Then, with a TON of help from Crystal and Karl, we edited it into two videos:

1. The basics of what we're doing:

As well as the longer and more complete video that covers 

2. The applications and pedagogical underpinnings of what we're doing:

*******

I'm looking forward to the next series Andrew and I have planned: writing an analytical essay.  We will also start making some flipped reading videos as we start to plan our year of curriculum.  

So that was my week.  

Spending it with the Cheesebucket Posse makes it pretty much the best week ever.

And if I haven't convinced you that you need to be on Twitter, go back and read every entry tagged with Andrew Thomasson.  Then tell me why you want to miss out on potentially creating this kind of awesome collaborative partnership.  

If Twitter scares you, let me know WHY and Andrew and I will make a video that addresses those concerns.  Seriously. 

ETA: here's what Jon Bergmann thought of the video.  He was the one who asked us to make it, so it's totally relevant.

Can Jon Bergmann write a blog entry about our video?  Seriously?

I don't know if I can handle how awesome that is.

If you're interested in attending the Flipped Class Webinar, where Troy Cockrum, Andrew Thomasson, Karl Lindgren-Streicher, Crystal Kirch and I talk about the future of flipping English and History, you should check out our google document.  It has all the information you'll need to attend, and it includes a list of questions that we've generated from conversations, blog comments, Tweets, etc.  

This is a crowd-sourced event, so feel free to add your question to the list!  If you do add a question, it would be great if you could include your name and/or twitter handle so we can credit you.

As always, it will be a great conversation with a lot of dynamic and innovative teachers.  We hope you can join us on Tuesday, 10 July at 5 PM PST.  If you can't join us, then I'll be (hopefully) screencasting the whole thing and posting it to our YouTube Channel.

Here is the link to the google doc.  Here's the full document if you can't/don't want to access it:

Language Arts/Social Science Webinar
This event will take place on 7/10 at 5 PM PST

The presenter line-up is:
Troy Cockrum (@tcockrun), 7th-8th ELA (St. Ignatious, Indianapolis, IN)
Cheryl Morris (@guster4lovers), 11th-12th ELA (Redwood High School, Marin, CA)
Andrew Thomasson (@thomasson_engl) 11th-12th ELA (King’s Mt High School, King’s Mountain, NC)
Karl Lindgren-Streicher (@kls4711), 9th-10th Social Science (Hillsdale High School, San Mateo, CA)
Crystal Kirch (@crystalkirch) 9th-12th Algebra 1 & Pre-Calculus (Segerstrom High School, Santa Ana, CA)
Kate Petty (@techclassroom) 12th grade ELA, ELD 1 (Trabuco Hills High, Mission Viejo, CA)

Discussion Questions
How does an English teacher flip their class?
What does flipped reading instruction look like?
What role do the CCS play in flipped pedagogy?
How can we learn from/work with other subject area teachers to figure out how to flip English?
Does Explore Flip Apply work in English and history?
What kinds of skills make good videos and (if any) which should remain “unflipped”?*
How can collaborative videos make flipping English more reasonable?
What kinds of project based learning can you do in English?
How can WSQ (Watch Summary Question) & SSS (guided note-taking packet) be used in ELA?
What colour hair do you think Crystal Kirch has?
Any other questions you’d like to add for our consideration can go here:

VOTE FOR YOUR FAVOURITE!
Question/Poll is found here: http://tinyurl.com/ELAflip

Link to Webinar is here: 
http://www.anymeeting.com/WebConference/default.aspx?ip_ek=FlippedEnglish1

Technology Notes:
--You should run AnyMeeting out of Firefox, as Chrome and Safari seem to have issues.
--Before the meeting, you’ll need to create an account and do a system test (http://www.anymeeting.com/webconference/systemtest/AnyMeetingSystemTest.aspx)
--If you are unable to get into AnyMeeting, Crystal will be checking the hashtag #ELAflip and taking questions from there
--We will make every attempt to record the session and host it on YouTube afterwards (at least on the ThomassonMorrisInstr channel)

TECHNOLOGY BACK UP PLAN:
If the AnyMeeting site crashes for any reason, we will switch to Google+ Hangout and we’ll add the link on Twitter (hashtags #flipclass and #ELAflip) and our blogs, as well as on this document.  You will need stream through YouTube using the link we send out.