My Own Personal Mystery Box

After watching the two FlipCon13 keynotes, I was definitely in a mindset primed for discussing teaching pedagogy.  Here was the downside of watching the sessions in an archived format...missing out on all of those great conversations that must have been taking place at the actual event.  A couple of the other sessions I've watched so far touched on pedagogy a bit, though, thereby contributing to the evolution of ideas for face-to-face time in my classes.  The session on Peer Instruction led by Faulkner and Warneke focused on methods these two math teachers use in their classroom to facilitate group problem-solving connected to new concepts introduced in their homework videos.  Their model is based on the work of Eric Mazur, who I'd actually first heard of via a podcast by American Radio Works last summer.

Here's the link to the transcript and podcast if you're interested...
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/rethinking-teaching.html

I remember being excited at the time about the possibility of creating powerful questions for my students that could elicit their misunderstandings, but I needed more concrete examples regarding what this would look like in my classroom.  The presentation by Faulkner and Warneke helped a bit in this area.  These gentlemen begin each math class with concept quizzes constructed of mostly multiple choice questions.  Their students use clickers to answer the questions on their own first, discuss their answers with their "pod" of classmates, and then change their answers as necessary.  They have seen substantial gains in student test scores since adding peer instruction into their classes.  Faulkner and Warneke also shared what I thought was an ingenious idea:  Embed questions within your videos and use the student answers as a "pool" of distractors to draw from when designing your question sets for peer instruction.  I currently use peer instruction in my classroom in a limited and somewhat casual manner.  I can see how being more intentional in its implementation could fit in with Musallam's "mystery box" approach to learning.  Peer tutoring would allow for more student exploration and learner-directed discovery.

Ellen Dill's presentation about student choice also helped me to consider part of Musallam's presentation regarding Explore-Flip-Apply, this time in the context of learning styles.  Dill teaches foreign language classes in which her students choose seven projects throughout the grading term to "show what they know" for the objectives in each unit.  The project might be cooking a favorite meal, writing and performing a song, or simply completing the standard worksheets that go with the unit.  The main idea is that the students have a CHOICE.  Dill presented all of these choices as options in a menu of learning styles.  I have seen research stating that teaching to various learning styles doesn't necessarily help students learn better.  An example of one of these studies can be accessed at the link below:

http://chronicle.com/article/Matching-Teaching-Style-to/49497/

In Dill's presentation, however, what resonated with me was the idea of student choice, which can be independent of learning styles.  This would fit perfectly into the "Apply" stage of Musallam's Cycle of Learning.  Once students have explored the problem and gathered information to explain or answer the problem, they are ready to take their newly-acquired knowledge and transform it into something personally meaningful.  It seems to me that this is when they transition from simply learning to remembering.  We all know that students remember new information better when it is relevant.  I feel like I could use a version of Dill's learning styles projects to inspire students to create in-class artifacts that redefine their new learning in a uniquely individualized way.

The remainder of the sessions I watched were less about learning pedagogy and more about the tools of the trade.  I ended Chris Koder's session thinking more about if I want to give students guided notes to fill in while they watch my videos.  I learned that Marc Seigel is the guru of Google Apps, and although I have been using Docs and Forms for awhile in my classes, he convinced me I need to take the plunge and integrate them into my videos.  Knowing that my students will all be getting iPads soon motivated me to watch the presentation by Malatlian and Porazzi-Sorrells, and although I wasn't looking for a new way to make my videos, I can definitely envision using Explain Everything instead of Camtasia for select lessons in the future - thanks to this session!  

**One side note regarding technology: Although I love using it and know that it can be very powerful in the classroom, sometimes I'm overwhelmed by all the options out there. I want someone to tell me, "This is THE BEST software for creating your videos, so use this one." I don't want umpteen million choices for screencasting apps - please just give me ONE that does everything I want!**

In summation, I finished watching these sessions with more questions than answers: How is my classroom going to run on a daily basis? Should I continue to give my students quizzes on the videos? Should those quizzes be incorporated into peer instruction? How am I going to write high quality questions for those peer review quizzes? What will my videos look like if I'm taking the "mystery box" approach? What are some science mysteries that could get my students excited and curious? Could personalized student projects truly be designed to hit on the course objectives, yet be flexible enough to adapt to student interests? And, most importantly, what would be the best way to get all of this great information to my fellow district teachers and administrators so that I'm not the lone "crazy" at my school? I'm starting to feel like my future classroom is my own, personal mystery box right now. Following Musallam's Cycles of Learning: I've got lots of questions and motivation - now it's time to take what I know and make it personally relevant.

Miyagi and Me

Before watching Jon, Aaron, and Ramsey give their keynote speeches for FlipCon13, I was entering this summer with the goal that I would improve the videos I have created so that students would be more motivated to watch them.  I flipped all of my classes (Biology, Ecology, College Biology) for the first time last year, and although the students were initially excited about and appreciative of the the new learning format, by the end of the year the novelty had worn off and some stopped watching the videos all together.  I had this idea in my mind that if I could make really exciting, funny, engaging videos, all of my students would be glued to my lessons and learn everything they needed to know.  I guess I was channeling Field of Dreams...

*From http://artgluttony.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/dress-for-the-job-you-want/

My thoughts were, "If you make those videos really, really awesome, those students will WANT to sit down at their computer, iPad, or phone and watch them every night."  But I couldn't fit that on my picture above.

Then I watched Keynote #1 of FlipCon13 (via the archive), and I started to get an inkling that flipping my classroom wasn't all about the quality of my videos.  Jon and Aaron's presentation focused mostly on their evolution of thought through their years of flipping.  They too simply started with videos, which then became more professional, which gave them more flexible time in class and started them thinking about mastery learning, and now their focus is tying differentiated learning into the flipped mastery classroom.  I am starting to realize that videos are simply a tool to open more time in your classroom, at which point you can really start making headway with your students' learning by incorporating various learner-centered strategies.  The videos themselves aren't meant to get your students excited about your class content - your class time can now be used to get your students excited about your class content.  Imagine that!  

During the presentation, Aaron did a short demonstration that really resonated with me.  He pulled out his phone and asked Siri (or something similar) to find the electron configuration of oxygen.  In seconds, he had it available on his phone.  He explained that once this would have been a question he'd ask students on a test, but questioned if this type of information should be the focus of education anymore since "facts" are now so widely accessible.  My own classes have already been slowly evolving away from the memorization of facts to an emphasis on the process of science.  However, this part of the presentation brought things back into focus for me.  How can I balance the expectations of standardized testing, which are predominantly based on discrete facts, with a need for my students to be problem-solvers in the unknown future in which they will find themselves?  As Jon and Aaron stressed, we are giving our students tools that can be applied to a variety of situations - not training them for a specific job.

More foreign to me was Jon and Aaron's discussion of mastery learning.  I've tried to incorporate mastery learning into my classes in the past, but it hasn't been very successful.  Mostly this has been due to low student motivation.  Jon and Aaron reminded me of the power that these strategies can have if implemented successfully.  They described how their classrooms revolve around standards-based objectives, and students show their mastery of these objectives according to a rubric.  I think I'm only a few steps away from a mastery approach for my classes.  I already rely heavily on formative assessment in my classroom.  Also, students don't get a grade on a science notebook assignment until they have reached 100% correct, and all students are required to make corrections on their quizzes and tests.  Finally, all the teachers in my district (including me!) have created learning objectives for each of the units that they teach.  I order to fully implement a mastery classroom, however, I just need a little more help with the organization of the process.  I remembered that I own Jon and Aaron's book and should probably reread it this summer to help with this!

Because I have been "attending" FlipCon13 by watching the archived sessions, I was able to watch Ramsey Musallam's presentation immediately after Jon and Aaron's.  This is when my thoughts on flipped learning were transformed the most.  Ramsey delved into the murky world of student motivation, which I realized has been the missing piece from my classes over the years.  He challenged teachers to think of our content as a "mystery box" that has the potential to excite our students as they uncover its secrets.  Ramsey played a TED clip of J.J. Abrams describing how all great movies hold back secrets at the very beginning and slowly reveal them to the audience as the movie progresses.  Ramsey suggested that this is should be a model for student learning.  At that moment, everything clicked in my mind.  I don't need to make amazing videos to engage my students in the content; rather, I need to facilitate student access of the content as they develop their own questions in regard to these "mysteries."  I am fortunate as a science teacher to work with content that naturally lends itself to "discovery learning."

I especially connected with the example that Ramsey gave from The Karate Kid.  Mr. Miyagi allowed Daniel to  flounder for awhile before jumping to his aid.  He provided Daniel with some instruction in karate after the need had become apparent to Daniel, and then Daniel took those tools and transformed them into something all his own.  Ramsey described this cycle of learning in his own classroom as "Explore, Flip, Apply."  I need to be a Mr. Miyagi in my classroom, instead of a Kevin Costner (another reference to Field of Dreams...just in case I lost you there).  I'm going to put a lot of thought this summer into what "Explore, Flip, Apply" is going to look like in my classroom.  Maybe I'll even tape a copy of this photo by my desk to remind me where my focus needs to be...