EDU@YourBest

Q: How do you eat a whale?  A: One bite at a time.  It doesn't much matter where you start on any big project or adjustment to your classroom.  The reality is you will likely not use the first thing you create or first change you make as learning is a process and you won't know where the road leads or the skills you need until well after you have set off. This is why making a second one of anything takes far less time and frustration than doing it the first time, you figure out a more efficient methods using newly acquired skills. It is a bit ironic that as teachers we forget so often what it means to be a learner. 

Take time this summer to find something "important" in your classroom or teaching that needs a little tending to grow to a more full potential. Knowing that summer allows for professional growth, we need to also make that growth a priority and set aside time among the other priorities for summer. Join Me for Ideas #2 in our All Flipping Summer series.

I enjoy my job, most of the time, but I also look forward to summer. As a teacher I spend 9 1/2  months of the year balancing 150 teenage personalities on the ends of sticks and trying to move them from one place to the other in a positive and productive direction. I am exhausted, and summer is the opportunity for me to recharge, rejuvenate, and reload. To be clear, my job is not the first thing on my priority list for this summer so here is the first idea for making the most out of your summer. Let's get started with idea number 1.

In this episode I try and think through a potential policy change for next year. 

I am beginning to look ahead at a few adjustments for my classroom next year.  I have signs up in my classroom that forbid the use of cell phones, tablets, digital watches, etc. These signs are up not because I am anti-technology, but because the school where I teach is 1:1 with Chromebooks making the other devices mostly redundant.  

This quick episode tells the story of how a BBC podcast by Tim Horford helped me realize a few things about flipped learning. I have found what many others have realized, flipped learning required a rethinking of the whole learning ecosystem.  43 minutes between bells is no longer a constraint.  Location is no longer a constraint. Uniformity need not be a constraint. Flipped and blended learning allows us to re-think classrooms and re-imagine education. 

In this episode, I give my answers to the three questions regarding "practice" brought up in our Flip Fails blog series.  This blog is available here as a podcast, but is also available on www.flippedlearning.org in traditional blog format. 

In the Flip Fails #4 I ended with a list of concepts that my failures had forced me to reflect upon.   Here are the first three as they popped into my head while writing.

1. How much skill practice does a student need to become proficient?
2. What type of skill practice is most effective?
3. Where/when is practice effective?

In this episode we make progress addressing the problem of practice. 

In this episode we continue our Flip Fail series and set the course for the next few entries.

If I sum up all of my many failures in my first semester or 18 months of flipping my class I would have to say that I failed to go far enough.  I don't mean that I feel I didn't use enough technology or that I didn't use enough weird teaching methods. What I mean is that I was not willing to open my eyes wide enough to reflect on many of my very basic practices and beliefs that I had carried for the first 12 years of my teaching career.

In this episode we continue our Flip Fail series and set the course for the next few entries.

If I sum up all of my many failures in my first semester or 18 months of flipping my class I would have to say that I failed to go far enough.  I don't mean that I feel I didn't use enough technology or that I didn't use enough weird teaching methods. What I mean is that I was not willing to open my eyes wide enough to reflect on many of my very basic practices and beliefs that I had carried for the first 12 years of my teaching career.

In this episode we talk field trips and all of the other things that take students out of the classroom.  We also try to figure out a few aspects or measurements that can be used to make this time outside the classroom as beneficial as possible.  Join us in The Teacher's Lounge.