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.