Well, day one is over. I learned a lot about Flipped Classrooms today. Here are a few:
1. Kids take to the flip much more easily when you start with it.
2. Teaching tech skills up front make a huge difference.
3. True self-pacing is really cool. Some kids finished three assignments, some finished seven.
4. In-class feedback and giving differentiated lessons ad hoc is really fun, and caused a lot of important skill building
5. I didn't plan enough for my top students. And I didn't plan for how low my low students are.
6. I really prefer the Flipped Classroom model to traditional.
7. Instead of counting tardies/absences, I gave them a simple system: you need 20 hours each week. When you've reached 20 hours, so long as you've worked consistently and followed my directions, you're done. It was amazing how much more responsible they became when they had control.
8. Self-pacing makes for far fewer complaints than usual in summer school.
I decided to make the theme of summer school Resilience, to carry through the project we were doing at the end of the year. So the first unit will be all of us doing all the assignments. I'm also aiming towards the common core standards here - everything we do is aligned with the CCS, but also with the assessments that are coming down the pipe. So here are the first assignments in the skill sequence (there were other assignments about mechanics, grammar, and getting to know them):
1. Essay on resilience including research on people who show resilient (Write to examine and convey complex ideas through selection, organisation and analysis of content; conduct short research project to answer a question or solve a problem)
2. Reading on resilience (Determine central idea of a text and analyse its development over the course of the text)
3. Reading from Holocaust survivor's narrative (Determine an author's point of view or purpose in a text and analyse how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view or purpose)
4. Re-writing that narrative from another perspective (Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences)
5. Revising narrative after getting feedback (Use technology to produce, publish, and update writing products)
Now I need to figure out what to do next. :-) With those skills in focus, I think I know the general direction at least.
1. Kids take to the flip much more easily when you start with it.
2. Teaching tech skills up front make a huge difference.
3. True self-pacing is really cool. Some kids finished three assignments, some finished seven.
4. In-class feedback and giving differentiated lessons ad hoc is really fun, and caused a lot of important skill building
5. I didn't plan enough for my top students. And I didn't plan for how low my low students are.
6. I really prefer the Flipped Classroom model to traditional.
7. Instead of counting tardies/absences, I gave them a simple system: you need 20 hours each week. When you've reached 20 hours, so long as you've worked consistently and followed my directions, you're done. It was amazing how much more responsible they became when they had control.
8. Self-pacing makes for far fewer complaints than usual in summer school.
I decided to make the theme of summer school Resilience, to carry through the project we were doing at the end of the year. So the first unit will be all of us doing all the assignments. I'm also aiming towards the common core standards here - everything we do is aligned with the CCS, but also with the assessments that are coming down the pipe. So here are the first assignments in the skill sequence (there were other assignments about mechanics, grammar, and getting to know them):
1. Essay on resilience including research on people who show resilient (Write to examine and convey complex ideas through selection, organisation and analysis of content; conduct short research project to answer a question or solve a problem)
2. Reading on resilience (Determine central idea of a text and analyse its development over the course of the text)
3. Reading from Holocaust survivor's narrative (Determine an author's point of view or purpose in a text and analyse how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view or purpose)
4. Re-writing that narrative from another perspective (Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences)
5. Revising narrative after getting feedback (Use technology to produce, publish, and update writing products)
Now I need to figure out what to do next. :-) With those skills in focus, I think I know the general direction at least.
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