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.   

That leads me to consider the number of my students in my other classes who did not do their flipped assignments last week.  Two students completed the flipped assignment in one class of sixteen students, and only 58% completed it in another. In contrast, 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 SurveyMonkey  survey or choice-related activity, no matter how engaging, 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 confused students who were not inclined to click several times.  But I am wondering if another is that these basic students may have rarely been engaged or successful in the past.  So, they may think, why should I be now  just because the assignment is posted online.

Many years ago when I began teaching general education upperclassmen, I quickly 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 homework.  Rather than my failing them all and having them learn nothing, or my trying to swim upstream to create a completely new set of values for them, I simply switched my instructional model to be deeper with less homework.  We worked in class on chunks of text, instead of attempting to tackle it all- which most weren’t reading anyway.  Then we analyzed and interacted in class with the text we had read, and I left the remainder of the text as dessert for those who wanted more.

This morning, I posted a discussion on http://flippedclassroom.org/ to see if there is any research taking place about the success of flipped formats with basic education students.   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.