On Monday at about 5:05, I noticed that Andrew and I were getting tons of notifications from Twitter. He and I had spent the day on collaboration tasks for our upcoming school year - we recorded a bunch of videos, built a slide deck for his TED Talk, and redesigned our course website to build a space to house the workshops we've taught over the last few years.
I looked at him and panicked because we forgot about the Twitter chat we have moderated for almost two years. But what happened was sort of magical, and reminded us about the values we've worked on building in this community during our time as moderators.
By the time we arrived on scene, people had created questions and decided on an order for who would ask them. They had basically built a lesson plan in the first few minutes they were left alone. Now, we're all teachers, so we are all used to writing lesson plans. But I've never seen something like this before: when the "teachers" were gone, the students identified their needs, figured out who could help facilitate, and then they went to work.
This past year, I actually had something like that happen when I had a sub for a few different workshops I was leading. My students explained the sub plans to the guest teacher, and then they divided up the work and were so efficient that the sub notes were full of praise for their industriousness and for how genuinely nice they all were. This is a group of 9th graders that mostly have serious behavioural issues and get in trouble in most of their other classes, and have records longer than you could possibly imagine. And because of the flipped classroom, they took charge of their education to the point that I was made redundant at times.
And that is an amazing problem to have.
We wish we had missed the chat on purpose to create this experiment, but it was a total mistake on our parts. However, just like good flipped class students, the teachers in the chat took over the lesson and made it work for them. They even ended the chat with suggestions for what to do in our next chat.
Andrew and I couldn't be more proud of the community we've helped create. It's one of the best communities on Twitter, and it's a true privilege to call this group of people colleagues.
If you want to go back and see the chat and how it played out, check out the archive of one of the moderators of the impromptu chat. And thank you again to all of the amazing teachers who made Monday night a success.
We will see you all next week. And this time, we'll show up.
I looked at him and panicked because we forgot about the Twitter chat we have moderated for almost two years. But what happened was sort of magical, and reminded us about the values we've worked on building in this community during our time as moderators.
By the time we arrived on scene, people had created questions and decided on an order for who would ask them. They had basically built a lesson plan in the first few minutes they were left alone. Now, we're all teachers, so we are all used to writing lesson plans. But I've never seen something like this before: when the "teachers" were gone, the students identified their needs, figured out who could help facilitate, and then they went to work.
This past year, I actually had something like that happen when I had a sub for a few different workshops I was leading. My students explained the sub plans to the guest teacher, and then they divided up the work and were so efficient that the sub notes were full of praise for their industriousness and for how genuinely nice they all were. This is a group of 9th graders that mostly have serious behavioural issues and get in trouble in most of their other classes, and have records longer than you could possibly imagine. And because of the flipped classroom, they took charge of their education to the point that I was made redundant at times.
And that is an amazing problem to have.
We wish we had missed the chat on purpose to create this experiment, but it was a total mistake on our parts. However, just like good flipped class students, the teachers in the chat took over the lesson and made it work for them. They even ended the chat with suggestions for what to do in our next chat.
Andrew and I couldn't be more proud of the community we've helped create. It's one of the best communities on Twitter, and it's a true privilege to call this group of people colleagues.
If you want to go back and see the chat and how it played out, check out the archive of one of the moderators of the impromptu chat. And thank you again to all of the amazing teachers who made Monday night a success.
We will see you all next week. And this time, we'll show up.
@guster4lovers @TracyWernli @buddyxo @PaulSolarz You've been quoted in my #Storify story "August 4 Flipclass Archive" http://t.co/l5dMJ6IKB8
— David Prindle (@dprindle) August 5, 2014 
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