I keep expecting this project to fail.  Turning over the final month of class to my students is something that scares me.  I actually have had a few mini-panic attacks about planning for that class - until I remember that I'm not planning for them anymore.  My job is just to show up, guide, and get out of the way.

Right now, I have a full class in the computer lab.  They are all working.  Every one of them.  Considering what text to use, preparing presentation notes, writing questions that will engage discussion, and preparing the assessment that will judge whether or not they presented effectively.

And that's the issue that came up at the start of class.  

One of my students asked: "Do we have to make this about humour?"

My immediate reaction was no, because humour can be drawn from nearly every subject.  But then I realised: I shouldn't be the one answering the questions.

If the students are truly taking responsibility, they need to decide on the answer to that question.  It sparked a debate, where they finally decided that, so long as it was different enough from what we've done so far, they could have a broad mandate as to potential topics.

Then I reminded them that they would be the ones assessing each other.  So the discussion transitioned into being about how they would do that in a fair and equitable way.  At first, they were scared.  

Would I override the students, should their grade not be fair?
What if their presentation was intended to be funny but wasn't - would they fail?
What if they aren't confident presenters?  Would that matter?

So I just kept turning the conversation over to them.  I told them I had no intention of overriding grades, unless something went really, really wrong.  And that I didn't expect that to happen.

As we continued to talk about how they should assess each other, I realised something I should have done from the beginning: 

They need to write the rubric.

Here's what they said about how to assess these activities:

• Grades can't be based on whether or not it's funny. 
• Grades should in part be about authentic passion towards and effort to clearly communicate the subject
• Grades should measure what the audience learned, not what the group thought they were teaching

It was one of those moments you don't believe actually happened.  Did my students just articulate clearly the philosophy that Andrew and I set out to implement?  Where the letter grade was far less important than the amount they learned, and where the motivation for learning would be student-driven, not teacher-driven.  Where they were graded on mastery, not completion.

On Thursday, they will write their rubric and we'll make final decisions about how that all works.  

I know a lot of good teachers who would have realised all of this a lot sooner - they would have immediately asked students to develop a rubric, manage discussion, sign up for presentations, etc.  But I'm new at this.  I ran a more traditional teacher-centred classroom for a long time, and the times I tried to get my students to take responsibility for their learning were spectacular failures.  

Flipping my class gave me the tools, the equation, the alchemy of collaboration - and that allowed me to change my class entirely, to the point that my students can run nearly a month's worth of class sessions on their own.

My job is to sit back and get out of their way.  

And you know what's most exciting?  

I get to learn from them.

I have developed a metaphor for what it's like to work at my current school.

We are all swimming, desperately trying to keep up with the pace of the water, until that crest is almost within reach...so we swim faster, try to keep our head up, barely a breath away from drowning.  Students, teachers, administrators, staff members...all of us, together.

But although it feels like the ocean, when we look up, we realise that we're in a wave pool, not the ocean.  And we're the ones controlling the waves.

So we complain about being exhausted, frantic, unable to keep up, while we dial up the intensity of the waves in the pool.  Worse yet, we look around at our colleagues and see them swimming faster than us, so we turn up the intensity a little bit more just so we don't fall behind them too.

But the end result is that we all drown.  Or we wish that we HAD drowned so we could stop grading papers, get a few more hours of sleep, just BE with our friends and family without thinking about all the prep left to do.

So, to ask my buddy's favourite question, who are we really serving here?

I had two kids burst into tears (unrelated to my class) on Tuesday.  Neither wanted to talk about it.  Neither wanted to ask for anything special - not even a pass to the restroom.  They wanted to tough it out, be strong, keep on going.  

Why?  Because they assume that THEY are the problem.  They assume that everyone else can just handle the load - everyone else can stay up until 4 AM doing homework every night for weeks, participate in sports and extracurriculars, stay awake and engaged in school, make it through the minefield that is high school social life.  

They assume that real life is what happens after high school.  They are there to "pay their dues" before they go on to do what they really love.  They've been told "Be Awesome in Everything OR YOU'RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH."

And when they can't be awesome in everything, the only thing left is the belief that they aren't good enough.  And when we don't replace that erroneous narrative, it only embeds itself more fully into their psyche.  When they believe that they are nothing more than a letter on a report card - a letter that is never, ever good enough - how can we possibly expect them to act as responsible, rational, creative, independent learners?

Because when students have always defined themselves based on what they do (and often, what they fail to do), they have no idea how to work in a class that asks them to somehow engage out of who they are.

All the things we flipclass'er believe in creating in our classroom: an emphasis on higher order thinking, self-directed learners who have a choice about content and product, students who value their education and work towards mastery of a concept instead of engaging the prevalent tendency towards point prostitution*...

...all those things are impossible when our students are fighting the pace of the waves that threaten to drown all of us.

And you know what?  We can't be the kind of teachers we want when we live at that pace either.  

Okay, here's my mea culpa: I am not the kind of teacher I want to be right now.  I got scared.  I bought into the culture of fear - when enough people tell you you're going to drown just like them, you eventually sigh in resignation, then try to push your tired arms into sprinting for just a few more lengths.

Like every other story I write on this blog, part of the answer is having someone to stand on the shore, waving a giant handmade sign that both encourages me to keep swimming, and reminds me that the power to turn down the wave is in my control.  

Someone who reminds me that who I am is good enough, even when I feel like I'm barely mustering a C.  Someone who burns my report card because what we're trying to do is not something that is measured in letters.  

No.  What we're doing is measured more in the number of students for whom an hour a day in my room is more of a refuge than a deluge.  It's measured in visible improvement in writing.  It's measured in academic conversations that take on a life of their own.  It's measured in the students who stop asking about their grade, and stop defining themselves by the letter that appears on their report card.

It's measured in transformation.  

And there's not a standardised test in transformation.

But nothing and no one can be transformed when the wave pool is drowning us all.

So for now, I'm turning down the speed and inviting my students to do the same.  Some people probably think they'll start floating and take advantage of it, or without me to push them, they'll just abdicate responsibility for swimming and they'll drown.  

But you know what?  I think that who they are is good enough.  

And I hope that who I am, and who we are, is good enough to help them when they forget that they are not defined by a letters: the ones that appear on a report card or ones that arrive in the mail from their dream school, their safety school, their last chance school.  

And maybe someday, we will all finally decide to leave the false safety of the wave pool for good, and head to the Real Ocean.  

The Real Ocean is where Real Life happens, and the waves can't be controlled.  

It's where our students will try to swim on their own, probably for the first time.   Where letters don't matter.  

And where Who They Are is all there is.

I'm ready.  

Who is with me?


*thanks to my flipclass friend, GS Arnold, who coined the term in a recent #flipclass chat 

How many of us put conscious thought into our teaching persona?  

Last year, when I had a student teacher for the first time, I had to seriously reflect on who I am as a teacher and what influences have forged that persona over the last nine years.  

Some are good influences:

--team teaching with my (at the time) best-friend who taught the same course in the adjoining classroom for the same period.  Stealing her mannerisms for comedic effect, then never un-stealing them.

--sharing a room with a beautiful, wise, collected veteren teacher my first year.  Watching the way she pushed her students and yet communicated how much she valued them as human beings.  Taking her way of fielding questions - "hmm", thoughtful pause, eyes to the ceiling, rock back onto the other foot, finger to mouth, gather thoughts, smile, respond (usually with a question, instead of an answer).

--being young, inexperienced, and scared because I had no training and little classroom experience.  Seeking help from everyone who would listen so I could do better for my students, and stealing their best ideas.

Some were not so good:
--moving from a school where students loved me and valued what I had to offer, to a school where students were suspicious of me because of my colour and vocabulary.  Shutting part of myself down so they wouldn't hurt me any more than they already had.

--finding wonderful teachers who were talented and far more structured than I ever had wanted to be...and stealing their structures to hide behind when I couldn't make my students care, either about me or the curriculum.

--adopting a brand new mindset where I wouldn't have to show them who I was or of what I was capable, intellectually or pedagogically.  Hiding behind "every student every day" because if I did little whole class instruction, I wouldn't have to prove myself publicly.

**

As I write out that list, I see that all the things about my teaching persona that I see as positive, were in my first three years.  And all the negatives are in the last six.

And the last six years have all but obliterated the gains from my first three years.

And therein lies the central narrative, the central problem, the central struggle of this year, and in fact in my whole life:  I don't know who I am.

I'm struck by the fact that in the first three years, arguably my most successful years, I was just stealing pieces of other teachers' personas (EXCELLENT teachers though they are).  And yet, that was more me than what I showed in the following six years. 

Frankly, these last six years have been about adding artifice.  Creating layers to make sure that there was always a strong public persona.  I spent six years forgetting that what is important is who I really am, as well as the dignity, value, and worth I have to contribute to my students as their teacher.

That is even why Flipped Class appealed to me.  Video is the perfect medium for me to hide behind.  Hell, collaborating with my new BFF** is a way of hiding - we teach together, so there is less attention on either of us individually.  I find comfort in being part of a team - less risk, less pressure on me individually, and someone to steal from full-time.
 
And yet, paradoxically, it is only as a member of that amazing team that I finally saw myself as I really am.  Part of that is down to having someone there, in the middle of all your mess, stripping away the layers of BS, until what is left is just...you.

And here's the most revolutionary idea yet:

What if the point of collaboration and friendship was NOT to fix each other, but rather to move to the place where nothing needed to be hidden?

Hiding never made me a better teacher, a better collaborator, or a better friend.  And by flipping my class, I was hiding.  So now, all of those problems and that artifice is being purged - the intense pressure we've been under in the past few weeks has burned away everything unnecessary, leaving only what is actually me.  That is a scary place to be, and it has been an extraordinarily painful and revealing process.

And through that process, the alchemy continued: my individuality, once revealed, did not drive Andrew's personality out; instead, finding what it means to be myself leaves much more room for him, both to find what it means to be himself, and for what it means for us as a collaborative partnership.  

So I may not use the Zunin Reflective Pause, or the Genevieve Voice, or the I'm Drowning Please Save Me Colleague! mannerisms, but I've found the part of me contained in each of those positive thefts.  Even the negatives were redeemed through this crucible: I've embraced the structure I learned at San Lorenzo without losing my vulnerability.  I've accepted my own racial and educational background and the ways in which I am shaped by factors within and out of my control.

And I've continued down the flipped path with Andrew.  And I still occasionally steal his quirks and phrasing, and I still regularly defer to him (because he's smarter than me!), and I enjoy being part of the team, rather than standing alone.

But there is a way to be a flipped teacher AND be myself.  There is a way to be a Andrew's collaborative partner AND be myself.  There is a way to embrace the things, both positive and negative, that I've experienced and yet move forward.

Because those things may explain me.  

But I refuse to let them define me.

What defines me is deeper than what I do.  What defines me is deeper than how I teach.  

I am defined not by the experiences, the mistakes, the failures, the successes, the things I've done, the things done to me.  

I am defined by the choices I make.  By the person I am underneath all the artifice.  By the communities and people I love and who love me.

And that is incredibly freeing.





***see tweets below for context.

Last week, I wrote about the struggles Andrew and I are having with our Flipped Classes.  We have several plans underway to deal with those issues.

One is to talk to people smarter than us.  There's a great chance that some of that conversation will end up being in a video we can share publicly. 

One was to start, or prepare to start, new units, none of which we had ready beyond a vague description and texts.   The overwhelming nature of the number of preps we have that are totally brand new, along with the sheer number of students (I have 155! I've never had that many! I now know all their names...after six weeks!) means that grading and planning are really overwhelming.  More on that in a bit.

But the Real Change needed to happen with us.

For Andrew, we instituted more structure.  Instead of giving students self-paced work time, we put routines in place and drew it back to only semi-self-paced.  The desk arrangement changed.  The new unit was put on hold until we could make sure students had learned all the things they needed to learn in the first unit.

But my Special Skillz are in implementing routine, structure, lesson planning, and classroom management.  So we worked to get those in place.

For my students, it was mostly about me and the personality I wasn't allowing to show in the classroom.  I realised just how little the kids knew about me.  That may not seem like a big deal, but in a flipped class built on collaboration, it was killing everything I was trying to do.

Just how much that was affecting my students became clear when I did a simple activity with them.

I wrote a short memoir this summer, and part of it was based on describing photographs in a way that built a narrative.  So I pulled a piece of that as a model for an activity my Essay Ex class was doing.  I didn't tell them it was mine at first.  I was shaking I was so nervous about it.  If it hadn't been for Andrew, I would have never shared it.

And they had nothing bad to say.  They said it was beautifully written and the imagery was great, and that it showed depth of emotion.  And I was scared to death to tell them it was mine.  It felt...weird.  When I told them it was mine, they were taken aback.  I could tell that even that small thing raised my ethos as a writer, and made me a Real Person instead of a benevolent taskmaster.  Several students, for the first time ever, stayed behind to talk to me after class and ask about the picture I had written about.

*****

For many reasons, sharing my personality with my students is not something I do much of anymore.  Sure, I joke with them and show genuine interest in them and give them advice when they ask for it.  But they don't know much about my personal life.  I love them, and they like and respect me.  But they don't know where I went to college, why there are posters and art from South Africa covering the walls of my room, or why I occasionally wear an migratory engagement ring on various fingers. 

And that's not good enough.

That's not how I started my career.  I'm not saying I told them everything in my personal life, but I did tell them stories, and shared my own hopes, dreams, aspirations, etc. with them.  

And when that didn't go down well with certain people at my first school, I was forced to reevaluate how much I told students about myself; as a result, I retreated into a persona I didn't much like - a Sage on the Stage, who could answer any question...as long as it wasn't personal.

And now that I've reevaluated again, I can see just how much all of that was really hiding - people told me I was "too close" to my students and I was so afraid of that being true that I made it Not True. 

I'm not saying that our job is to air our issues in front of our students (nothing bothers me as much as a teacher who forces their stories on bored kids who are pretending to listen intently so they can check Facebook instead of doing class), but they need to know us and invest in us personally.

One of the things I am most grateful to have learned from Andrew is that relationship is the centre of everything we do.  Our work together is built on a solid foundation of friendship, and without that friendship, we wouldn't be attempting something as crazy as team-teaching from a continent apart.  And one of Andrew's many Special Skillz is that relationship is the heart of his classroom.  He is an amazing creator of classroom community.  His students love him, and you can feel that in his classroom, even just through Google hangout.  He makes them feel valued, cared about, and respected.  And he doesn't do it by becoming their BFF or talking about his personal life ad nauseum.  

He is just himself.

And his encouragement (both to share my writing with my students and in general) and friendship has taught me so much about how to build community in my flipped class.  It's not the same as when I first started: at 21, I didn't know exactly what was over-sharing and what was under-sharing.  I didn't know how to be myself and be their teacher.  So I just stopped being myself just in case I accidentally "did it wrong."

And Andrew has taught me how to do it right.

And you know what?  When I changed, my class changed.  

Now, my students have always been intrinsically-motivated, high-achieving, genuinely fun kids.  Which just proves how much I am the problem.

And here's the most amazing thing:  I just so happened to find someone who had all the Special Skillz I lacked, and who lacked many of my Special Skillz.  And we just so happened to both have the same educational goals.  And we just so happened to decide to throw in our lots together before we knew just how much we needed each other to become better teachers and better people.

And we just so happened to start to model in our own lives exactly what we want for our students: a collegial partnership that gives you what you need, even when you didn't know you needed it.  A collaborator who is good at everything you're not.  A friend who is not scared to tell you the truth, even when you really don't want to hear it.

I had no idea how isolated and lonely teaching had been until it just wasn't anymore.  

****

Now, I'm not saying we have things figured out.  It's a long road, but I feel like we've finally stopped searching for the trail and have found purchase, not only on A trail, but on the RIGHT trail.

And we had some absolutely amazing days in class.  Here's a brief description of what we're doing in each class, with some links.  As always, take and use, but please credit Andrew and I if you do.


SAX Playlist
(that's what is sounds like when you say Essay Ex too many times, short for Essay Exposition)
Students read three atypical narratives: 1) How to Become a Writer (fiction), 2) Under Water (creative non-fiction), and 3) In the Ruins of the Future (expository).  They found repeated words, which we developed into pattern groups, and used those to analyse the features of a narrative.  They are now preparing for a seminar on the questions (available on the playlist in the documents that go with each text).  Then they will look at some descriptive/observation narratives and do the same.  It will culminate in them writing their own atypical narratives.

Language of Humour Playlist
We finished reading most of David Sedaris' book Me Talk Pretty One Day, and watching several episodes of South Park to determine how comedians take something that is Not Funny and turn it into Very Funny.  We watched Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail and blogged about how they used the toolkit we developed.  Each class did an inquiry unit to figure out what made something funny. (3rd period 6th period)

Now, we're reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and comparing it to the Radio Drama to figure out how characters are created in different mediums.  We will also read Good Country People and figure out how to create vivid, funny characters.  They will end the unit by writing a narrative with vivid, funny characters, and will translate it into two different genres to show how genre shapes a text.


American Literature Playlist
We just started Their Eyes Were Watching God.  A book I had never read before.  Or taught.  But that Andrew LOVES.  So far, we have been focusing on two things: literal plot and the role of women in the novel.  Andrew and I did our first close reading on video, where he talks intelligently and I smile and nod a lot.  I love teaching this book because it's something that Andrew is genuinely passionate about and that came out in the video for sure.

I also have recorded myself reading (not that I'm great at it) so students can get used to the dialect used.  All those videos are in the playlist.   At the end of the unit, students will be analysing characters in the novel in a full-length literary analysis essay.  We will also be doing a Socratic Seminar fairly soon to discuss the view on love and marriage and sex in the text,


If you made it this far, well done!  I'm not sure how I end up writing so much every time, but there's just so much to talk about.  I really, really love what I do.

Other cool stuff I'll write about eventually:

• all the guest blog posts we've written lately and have coming up
• visiting the Twitter HQ and working with a committee to help the local PBS affiliate come up with best practices for using technology in the classroom
• the webinar we're doing for Mentor Mob about collaboration
• the upcoming Flipped Class Open House
• presenting about Blank White Page at CVCUE with Karl Lindgren-Streicher and Andrew (Andrew virtually, of course)
• getting to go to NCTE's national conference in Vegas with 5 members of my department
• ideas for flipping novel units, now that we've actually started doing it
• profit?

Over twitter the past few days, a lot of us have bemoaned the fact that our students 
Just. 
Aren't. 
Getting. 
It.

They fight back against the newness of flipclass, they fight back against the demand that they take responsibility, they fight back against the level of thinking we ask them to do, or they just fight because they don't know what we want of them.

And as frustrating as all of that is, they are not the problem.

We are.

I can't tell you about your classroom, but I can tell you about mine, and a little bit about Andrew's, because those are the only two I've seen from experience.  The "we" and "our" from this point on refers to both Andrew and I.

The problems:

1. We jumped in full force.  Our students went from knowing nothing about us or our class to being full flipped mastery, Explore-Flip-Apply, student-centred, higher order thinking, asynchronous, etc.  Since we were both new to the school, we couldn't even pull on our former students and our ethos to protect us from the backlash against everything we were doing.  So we just assumed they would trust us.  And many did, but some didn't.

2. Lots has changed from the first day.  We didn't have enough organisation, especially around how we managed/used technology.  They were confused and frustrated, and arguably still are.

3. We had curriculum, but it was in progress and brand new to both of us.  We didn't know what to expect when we were planning over the summer, so we did our best.  But there were SO many things we couldn't have expected or planned for.  So we were/are unprepared.

4. We forgot just how much we know and have gotten used to.  Our kids had never blogged, used Twitter, had two teachers, watched videos for instruction, used backchannels, used Edmodo, etc.  Every time we talk about our flipped class with newbies, it reminds us of how much we take for granted, and how unique our class really is.  But we didn't give our students the same schema so they feel lost, confused, and frustrated.

5. We want them to love our class and how we teach it.  And when they don't, it makes us question if we're doing the right thing.  Which makes it worse.

6. We didn't scaffold them up to the release of responsibility - we just believed that they would "get it" along the way.  Even though we were teaching skills slowly, and building their technology skills slowly, we still expected them to be able to keep track of their work and progress.

***

Yes, our students bear some fault.  But it's still our responsibility.

I don't know what the answer is, except that we are the problem.

The honest truth is that there are some things that are more important than what happens in our classrooms.  And without going into too much detail, we have had a lot on our plates outside of our teaching.

But This is the Truth:

• Our students need help to see the roadmap we've written.  They can't see the connections, and they can't understand why things have to change.  But they trust us to teach them what they need to know.  And they keep turning up.  So we need to do better.  We need to be better.
  
• There is no situation beyond redemption.  We always have another chance.  If we have a bad day, our kids will give us another chance, so long as we are honest and transparent with them.  It's never as bad as we think it is, and never as good as we think it is.  And each day starts new.

• Teaching, just like friendship, is a commitment.  We can't just give up because we don't feel like it. When it gets difficult, we have to press in to our community.  And we have to trust that our community will help us, even when we don't know what we need.

And so the only way we can find our way out of this mess is by working together.  We need to find ways to introduce our students to the radical shift in educational models.  We need to find a bridge from the factory model to the student-centred, higher level thinking flipped mastery asynchronous whatever that we're heading towards.

So if it's a mess in your room, and your students aren't able to take the responsibility required to function in a flipped class, let's start a conversation.  We don't have any answers.  

But we believe that together, we can make it work.

Andrew and I have worked incredibly hard this year to make our team-teaching a success.  We spend hours planning over G+ Hangout, or in Google Drive documents, and we are pretty proud of what we've accomplished.  None of the material in our first unit was anything we had ever taught (with the exception of one of the short texts each).

We also believe in open source, free materials for teachers.  We do not intend to ever sell our materials.  We want to give them away for free with the caveat that you give us credit for the work.  We, by no means, want to present the material as if we think it's perfect - it's not.  There are lots of changes we will make when we teach it next (since we both have new students at the semester, it will be January-February when we teach it again).

But for now, here is the unit - complete with planning documents and links to every assignment, text, grading rubric, and warm-up.  If something is listed but doesn't appear, let us know and we'll fix it right away!  Almost all of the links are through Mentor Mob, since that's where we store our student playlists.

I hope you find it useful.  It's been amazing to plan and teach, and we hope that others can use some of the ideas we have developed here.

Here is the information from the document linked above:


The Master List of Unit 1 Resources
Andrew Thomasson and Cheryl Morris

Planning Documents:
Original Unit Plan (with full assignment descriptions, although a bit different from what we ended up teaching)
Skills Map (Thomasson’s iteration)  
Morris’ iterations: 1 2 (Morris modified her maps from the main document)

Playlists:
Weeks 1-3 (Morris)   
Weeks 1-2 (Thomasson)    
Smoke in Our Lights (both)    
Weeks 3-6 (both)

Unit Goals:

1. Introducing students to the technical processes they need for the class
2. Easing them into the flipped class part - how to watch video, how asynchronous instruction works, how mastery grading works, etc.
3. Familiarise them with the patterning strategy and why we use it
4. Making inferences based on evidence
5. Constructing a definition, both in narrative and informational writing
6. Collaborate with peers on a variety of tasks, and differentiate that from doing Group Work.

Essential questions:

• What is a flipped class, and how does OUR flipped class work?
• What goes into a good definition, and how does that differ based on genre and purpose?
• What is the best way to collaborate, and how is that different from cooperative learning/group work?
• What is a pattern and how do those patterns build meaning in a text?
• How do you access meaning beyond the literal/surface level?

Since our classes are asynchronous much of the time, this is mostly a suggested pacing, and is close to our actual pacing.  It took Morris six weeks, with about 240 minutes per week (11th-12th graders), and it took Thomasson four and a half weeks, with about 450 minutes per week (10th graders).  Please use any resources freely, so long as you give us credit for our work.

How do we get students to take responsibility for what they are learning, rather than expecting us to help them every step along the way?

It's a hard question to answer because I believed that I never had to have anyone motivating me to do my schoolwork.  

But that's not entirely true.  There are many times (even now as an adult) that I act much like my students who would be on the "not taking responsibility for learning" list.  So I tried to find patterns.  Here's what I came up with:

1. When I feel as if my time is being wasted, I stop caring.
2. When the instructor proves to be incompetent, either in content knowledge or in adequate preparation, I stop wanting to listen.
3. When there is open disdain or resentment towards me/the class/the audience/the subject/the organisation, it shuts me down.
4. When I don't get enough time to process, I stop "playing school."
5. When I don't see the relevance to my life or practice, I tune out.
6. When I am personally overwhelmed by something wholly unrelated to school, I disengage. 
7. When I am not treated like a respected colleague and peer, I fight back or I give up.

Are those the reasons my students don't take responsibility for their learning?

I had to honestly ask myself these dangerous questions (and I encourage you to as well):

• Do I prepare enough to make it feel like class time is productive, rather than wasted?
• Do I present myself in such a way at to make students think I believe I know everything and am the sole/main source of learning in the classroom?
• Do I treat my students as peers in learning, rather than as passive recipients of knowledge?
• Do I give them enough time to process and reflect, and help them understand how what they're doing is relevant to their lives?
• Do I take good enough care of myself that I'm healthy and able to do my job effectively as much as humanly possible?
• Do I use my authority to shut them down?  Do I make them feel like they aren't as good as me because I am the one with her name on the door?

Sometimes, I do a good job.  Sometimes, I don't.

***

The thing I think Andrew and I haven't done well enough this year is helping students see the relevance of what we're doing, and how it is helping them learn important skills.  

We started this unit with these goals:

1. Introducing students to the technical processes they need for the class
2. Easing them into the flipped class part - how to watch video, how asynchronous instruction works, how mastery grading works, etc.
3. Familiarise them with the patterning strategy and why we use it
4. Making inferences based on evidence
5. Constructing a definition, both in narrative and informational writing
6. Collaborate with peers on a variety of tasks, and differentiate that from doing Group Work.

And these were our essential questions:

• What is a flipped class, and how does OUR flipped class work?
• What goes into a good definition, and how does that differ based on genre and purpose?
• What is the best way to collaborate, and how is that different from cooperative learning/group work?
• What is a pattern and how do those patterns build meaning in a text?
• How do you access meaning beyond the literal/surface level?

So those were great goals and essential questions, but none of the instructional design matters if I'm not creating a classroom where students are responsible for their own learning.

***

So I need to change.  These are my answers to my own questions:

• Do I prepare enough to make it feel like class time is productive, rather than wasted?

Most days, I am prepared enough to make it through that day.  But the last few weeks, we haven't been planned far enough ahead that I could LET students work ahead.  Which meant wasted class time.

• Do I present myself in such a way at to make students think I believe I know everything and am the sole/main source of learning in the classroom?

No.  I believe that I've presented myself as someone who is learning alongside them.

• Do I treat my students as peers in learning, rather than as passive recipients of knowledge?

Yes. I've even had days where students suggested doing something related, and we've changed the plan.  Some of those were the best days.  I believe that I have as much to learn from them as they from us.

• Do I give them enough time to process and reflect, and help them understand how what they're doing is relevant to their lives?

This is the one that hurts.  I think I give them time to process, but there have been times when I've cut off a discussion because we needed to move on.  I also haven't let them reflect enough to make meaning of everything we're doing.  I haven't convinced them that learning how to use a blog is useful.  I haven't convinced them that patterning is helpful.  This is the place I need to focus for the next unit.

• Do I take good enough care of myself that I'm healthy and able to do my job effectively as much as humanly possible?

I want to say yes to this.  I'm pretty sure Andrew would say no, that I'm not.  Working on it.

• Do I use my authority to shut them down?  Do I make them feel like they aren't as good as me because I am the one with her name on the door?  Do they feel safe, emotionally and academically in my class?

I think I'm doing okay on this one.  There is always room for improvement.


***

So here's what I've decided on why students not fully taking responsibility:

1. We are not always planned enough to let them work at their own speed.  We need to plan more so students can work ahead.
2. They don't understand why they are learning what they're learning.  We need to show them exactly what they're learning, because they are actually learning a lot.
3. They need more time to process, which means less synchronous work.  The end of this unit has been on collaboration, so a lot of it has been at the same pace.  But not all partners work at the same pace, so one group inevitably finishes early and another is still working after the bell.  This will change in the next unit.
4. They don't see how everything connects, or where it's going.  That was intentional, but I think it was the wrong decision.
5. They aren't reflecting enough on their own learning process and progress.  In the final assessment, there will be a reflection to help address this.

So in the next unit, those are our key focus areas.  If you have ideas that can help, please let us know!

Coming soon: our entire first unit with all the resources we used for six weeks of a high school English flipped class.  We will publish EVERYTHING.  For free.  We're really excited to share it - we're proud of what we've accomplished together in this unit.

Every year, I have the same anticipation leading up to the school year.  There are unlimited ideas and possibilities.

And then we hit week 4.

And I'm suddenly aware of how much less I can actually do than I wanted and planned to do.  And that silences me. 

So I stop blogging, just in case someone can read in between the lines at how much I'm failing.  

I stop going on Twitter, just in case someone asks me how things are going and I have to tell the truth.

Colleagues stop me in the hallway, and I tell them that "I'm fine" - which is a total lie.  Because I can't tell them the truth:  I'm afraid that what I'm doing isn't good enough.

I start hiding.

I ignore the evidence that learning is happening and that students are making connections between what we're doing and what I want them to learn.  I ignore the opinion of the person who knows my classroom and curriculum better than I do and believes in me far more than I believe in me.  I ignore the parents who left my room on Back to School Night telling me how "inspired" they felt and how "exciting" it was to hear about flipped class and blank white page and all the other amazing things we're doing.

I ignore all of that.  Because the voice in my head keeps telling me it's Not. Good. Enough.  And that voice turns into a chorus of every bad experience from my eight previous years in the classroom - from overbearing principals, to judgemental colleagues, to critical students.

That's The Narrative.  The voice in my head that repeats every negative thing anyone has said about me, my classroom, and my educational beliefs.  The voice of colleagues who never ran out of things to complain about.  The voice of administrators who just didn't get what I was doing.

The Narrative says that I'm failing.  And for eight years, I had no idea how to stop it.

But now I do.

****

Now, I don't think a reflective teacher can ever stop believing The Narrative entirely, because it comes with wanting to do a great job and knowing that it is impossible.  The classroom has too many variables, there is too little time, and there is always too much we want to do.  We want to change the lives of our students.  We want to make a difference.

And we do.

But life change doesn't happen overnight.  It's a series of small decisions, small actions, small words.  And when we show up every day and put our heart and effort and time into teaching our students everything we can, we change their lives...in small increments.  Trust and community are not built overnight, and no amount of wishing or planning can make them appear.  

The only thing that can build trust and community is love.  Love for our students, love for our curriculum, and love for our profession.  It is the only thing that can change anything.

Love is the only thing that can stop The Narrative.  

I know that sounds a little like I'm singing Kumbyah while holding hands with fairies and dancing around Stonehenge.  

And frankly, I don't care.  

Love is wanting your friends and colleagues to succeed so much that it's more important than your own success.  And paradoxically, having so many people to root for has made me more successful as a teacher than ever before.  And with that many people cheering for me, I can't hide.  

Having so many people on my team means that it's impossible to let The Narrative win.

I have colleagues at Redwood who check in on me to make sure I'm okay.  Before Back to School Night, I had over half the department come to see me to give me advice and see if I needed any help.

I have students who work hard and make me want to work even harder.  Who write about the tragedies that shaped them in a completely open and honest way.  Who can't quite believe that I really mean what I say about there being "no anxiety" in my classroom.

I have administrators who go out of their way to understand what I'm doing and support me so I can continue to do my job.

I have friends in the #flipclass community who give me advice, send me resources, and offer support when I need it.

And best of all, I'm team-teaching with Andrew Thomasson, and he won't let me fail.  He also knows me well enough to see when I'm letting The Narrative take over a little too much and he Won't Let The Narrative Win.  The impact Andrew has had on my classroom and my life is a little ridiculous.  It's been postulated in the #flipclass community that we may even be the same person.  

I can't help but be overwhelmed to have so much support, especially in a profession where isolation is just the accepted reality.  I have never had so many people cheering for me.  All of those things are small decisions that people make, and that adds up to a transformation in who I am as a teacher, as well as how much power The Narrative has over me.

When you have that many people who care about you, it's impossible to close your door and pray that no one notices how much you're failing.  

So it's time to Flip The Narrative:

You can't do this alone.  And when you're not alone, and you have people who love you and root for you, you can't fail.  And when it feels like you are ready to give up and shut up and admit defeat, you look at all the small decisions people have made to show how much they care.  And that's enough to keep going.

In the Flipped Narrative, we all win:
Our students get the best version of us we have.
Our colleagues get the passion and excitement we have for our classroom.
Our PLN gets more resources, more support, and more of us.
And we get people to help us recognise all the small decisions we make every day, and how those decisions are a far better measure of our success than The Narrative would like us to believe.

So flipping my classroom really has changed my life...in small increments.  

And it's Not Over Yet.

The way Andrew and I have been teaching is new for our students.

It's new for us, for that matter.

It's not the Teacher Lectures and Student Studies the Textbook paradigm.  And our students really struggled with the transition.

So I decided to ask them what they were learning in my class.  We've been working on these three playlists.

I wasn't expecting much because it really seems like they weren't "getting it" and making the right connections.

Here were the results for the topic:

What are you learning in this class?  What do you think we want you to know/be able to do?


Wordle (all classes combined)

Original notes from the 1st period discussion:

Sorry it's not super legible.  The check marks indicate when another group said something that was already up there.

I'm really proud of them.  

They ARE learning! :-)

And if those next 179 days are as amazing as the first two, it's going to be a hell of a year.  

I didn't start off by telling them about the flipped classroom.

I didn't even start off by showing them a video.

We didn't use much technology.

I gave them a Blank White Page, and they wrote questions on one side, answered one question from me (Who are you?) on the other, and took two pictures.

And the coolest thing that happened was that by 3rd period, kids came in talking about how excited their friends had been after leaving my first two classes.  I had numerous colleagues, including several in the SPED department, tell me that kids had raved about how good my class was.

And that was just the first day.

Today we had LOTS of technical difficulties, but we managed to work through most of the playlist I had set up.  I even have some kids done with it entirely.  Like completely done.  With all 10 assignments they've had over two days.  And no one is behind.  Work ahead, but don't get behind is working.  So far.

I will post more thoughts when I have time, but I seriously can't believe that they pay me to work at this school.  Unreal.