Batter up… to the podium?

About fifteen years ago, I joined a church softball team.   My position was right field, the spot long-coveted by weak players who pray the entire game, dreading that a fly will veer so far toward the right field fence that the center fielder will not be able to dash over and snag it for the team.

No, I was not athlete.  I hadn’t played ball since I was in elementary school and could be talked into shagging baseballs out in the cornfield for my older brothers.  But I decided that my daughter who was taking Algebra II again needed to see her mom fail at something.  And what could be more public and humiliating than to fail at church softball, in front of people I would see on a regular basis and who would sympathetically cluck at me, rather than curse, when I struck out or jogged breathlessly to first base if the impossible actually happened and I hit the ball?

 

Probably like most people, I had spent the majority of my adult life engaged in activities and interests where I showed some proficiency.  And that expertise is what so deflated my daughter as she struggled with a subject she was not naturally gifted in, even though she was a “gifted” student.

I remembered my softball days today as I began searching for Socratic Seminar articles on overcoming the fear of public speaking for my handful of anxious students.  The tips in each article were essentially the same as those in the student text, so of not much help.  I cannily switched my search to YouTube, but with little success there, either.  I found ads or motivational TedTalks by coaches who clearly worked with highly proficient players.

That’s when I remembered another anecdote about my daughter. 

A few months ago, she shared with our writing critique group how she sometimes pauses the “Perfection Tape” that plays in her head when she begins a new piece:  She tells herself to create the worst piece of writing she possibly can.  Once that is on paper, the revisions come easily.  She has given herself permission to do a poor job; therefore, in her mind, it is acceptable as a first draft.

Her strategy is like when I tell my students to circle words they cannot spell.  It gives them permission to get the content onto paper and ignore conventions for the drafting stage. 

That’s when I had it:  I will schedule time for my Speech students to give the worst speech they can imagine.  Maybe we will even come up with a rubric for it. We could take the official speech rubric and negate it in as many ways as possible.  Then each student will have two minutes to try to outdo each other in the worst speech possible, as their first speech.  Of course, it won’t be graded, but it will allow them to mess up… and in a huge and public way, and with an appreciative audience.  Their second speech is bound to be better, now that they will have done their worst.

If it turns out the way my softball experience did, it will be an opportunity for nervous students to realize that even though we can sometimes look silly and inept, we can always improve.

Flipping success... or not

 

                In our faculty meeting, my new principal mentioned a study hall goal sheet that one teacher had brilliantly devised.   I decided to use that idea, too.  At the beginning of class, my study hall students in grades 9-12 must fill out a goal sheet for that day, so they are focusing on their homework during our time together and also building time management and organizational skills. At the end of the period, they check if they accomplished those goals and set new ones for that evening based on their leftover goals.   We talked about it as a devise to build their "Executive Functioning Skills."     Check out this freebie on TPT.

 

That leads me to consider the number of my students in my other classes who did not get their flipped assignments done last week.  Two students completed the flipped assignment in one class of sixteen students, and only 58% completed it in another. In my Speech classes that are open to all students in grades 9-12, three-fourths of the students completed the assignment. 

Those numbers make me wonder about the correlation between students’ success in a flipped format and their executive functioning skills.  If students are not organized or cannot manage their time well, I am thinking that the engagement value of a YouTube video, a Survey Monkey  survey or choice-related activity, no matter how entertaining or useful, will not magically create students who complete and submit all of their work. 

Granted, one reason so many did not complete the work could be because our delivery platform had changed over the summer, and I constructed a couple of tasks in a way  that might have been confusing for students who were not inclined to click more than twice.  But I wonder if another cause is that these basic students may have rarely been engaged or successful in the past.  So why should they be now just because the assignment is posted online?

Many years ago when I began teaching general education upperclassmen, I eliminated most homework other than long-term projects.  I found that these students, so used to little success in school anyway, simply did not do their homework.  Rather than their failing and learning nothing, or my being angry  every day or trying to swim upstream to create a completely new set of values for them, I switched my instructional model to be deeper with less homework.  We worked in class on chunks of text, instead of attempting to tackle the full text- which most weren’t reading anyway.  I left the remainder of the text as dessert for those who wanted more.  I used this same approach with success more recently in a school with higher poverty and where there was more trauma and drama in students' lives.

This morning, I posted a discussion on Flipped Learning Network  to see how others are using flipped formats with basic education students. Please join the conversation to share your successes and challenges with this population.

 I think I will also administer an anonymous survey on Monday and Tuesday to find out why some of my students didn’t complete their work on time.  If my survey reveals what I suspect- that they just didn’t care about doing the work for any number of reasons, then next week, I will have to entice them into the flip.

If they don’t have the organizational or process skills, that’s an easier fix.

First Day: Huzzah!

Well, I survived another first day of school... and in a new corporation. 

Being on block schedule helps somewhat.  My mouth isn’t as parched and paralyzed as it would have been if I had spoken to six or seven classes today instead of only 4 and a shortened homeroom.  And I was able to implement a few slick tricks that made my first day terrific.

First was the fantastic seating chart idea that my former colleague Kristi Shipley shared via Shawn Churchill.  It takes a little time initially, but, boy, does it save time in the long run.  I'll be using it all year.

The basic idea is to use small sticky notes with each student’s name on the blank seating chart.  Then when several students don’t show up, or someone transfers out of your first period section and into your third, you can simply peel off the sticky note and replace it on the other seating chart.

The second really cool trick relates to the interest inventory I administer every year to uncover my students’ strengths, challenges and interests.  This year, because my students have 1:1 devices, I created the survey using Google Forms, part of Google Drive. This program allows you to create a survey, and then it collates the answers into a spreadsheet.   My first questions asked students to enter their names and which section they had my class.  Then the questions about preferences, work and study habits, and interests followed.  Because the students had entered their names and their class period in the form, I can easily sort their answers on the spreadsheet and have all the responses from a single class within seconds.

What a handy way not to have to shuffle through sheaves of paper, and to sort information or create groups to differentiate in my classroom!

Because the diagnostic writing assignment is posted on My Big Campus, I brought home very little work today.  I will simply access it online tonight or tomorrow before I see the class again.   

IMHO, that is where teaching is headed: Teachers will be investing more careful prep time up front in pretesting, and designing purposeful tasks and activities that help students achieve in new media as they work their way through material and inquiry projects in flipped versions of classes.  This approach allows for more individualized pacing and scaffolding.

What new approaches are you using during the first days of school?  How are you using the flipped classroom model this new school year?   What successes or challenges can you share?