Year in Review

Well, the best of intentions did not pan out obviously last year, and here I am a year and more later remembering to check in with my blog site and see how to work it. So I will review my year of flipping my classroom here as best I can. 

The issues I faced fell into a couple of categories that I will talk about first, as these will need addressed and I do have some ideas on how to handle them better this coming year. 

First I dealt with several Technology issues.                                                   

1. Students not remembering their passwords...I can work on doing a bulk upload with an excel file and assign passwords to all my students at the beginning of the year, they can change their email to a valid account after signing on. This way I know their passwords and can look them up when they do forget. With Middle Schoolers that is simply bound to happen I believe. 
2. Moodle is on our school server and at the start of the year there were several issues when the server crashed and my students could not access Moodle to see their assignments or do their homework...I do have the whole year built at this point, so I would have time to upload links to videos and copies of other assignments to Edmodo as a backup internet site for students to use. Also, our district did upgrade our server at Christmas and is doing so to our Moodle website this summer, so I am hoping this will not be such an issue this year.
3. Students not being able to get videos to play or files to open at home due to needing upgrades on their home computer system... I am going to set up the Moodle so that students have more time to get their work done, having deadlines that are earlier for work, so that everyone should have the work done by the day I want them to use that knowledge in class. So the only issue will be getting students to try things at home early and if they have an issue they will have time to come in at lunch, or work during class time to get caught up with their classmates in time to meet the deadline. 
4. Students not having internet at home and needing time in school to get that work completed...I already tackled this issue this year staying after school 4 days a week almost every week for any students who needed to use school computers, spending my lunch time in the classroom, and coming in early to be available to my students. The parents overwhelmingly appreciated and loved me being available for their student to get that extra time with me when needed all year long. It was tiring but I plan to keep it up.

Second was homework issues still, even though the assignments were easier to do for the students, some just simply do not ever do homework for any class.

1. Students not doing homework and getting low grades in class... this year our school is starting an After-school Learning Lab (ALL) that is for students who are failing in any class to stay that whole week after school and get all their work caught up. It will also be a study skills time, and a time to get current homework done. So my students will have to stay for this if they do not do their classwork and homework and their grades fall
2. Students not doing homework well or completely... I plan to spend some time at the start of the year, and repeat the process if I see a need during the year showing students what good completed homework and assignments look like. They will have opportunities to 'fix' their assignment that is substandard on these days and get to turn in something that is well done. 
3. Students not doing their work well, or on time and slowing down other students...this year I plan to let students know they can work ahead on the week's work and if they do they will get to do an enrichment activity at the end of the unit that will be both fun, and give them more practice for the quiz or test at the end. Some students will get to this assignment all the time, others will have to finish the other work first and will run out of class time. They will not get a zero for this special assignment, they just will miss out on enjoying it. So in my class by the end of each week, there will likely be students working on different things around the room and I will simply be supervising them, that they do get something done that hour. I hope this peer pressure will cause more and more students to get their homework done, and be ready to participate with this enrichment activity as the year progresses.  

So those were the main issues, on to the successes. 
I did really like the Moodle website set up and options it gave me for organizing the assignments into sections, adding graphics to draw in my students and send out bulk emails to families reminding them when work was due or events were coming up. There are features on Moodle that I have not used much yet and want to work with more this coming year as I have time. 

My students who were doing their homework all the time shared that they really liked doing the videos and other readings at home rather than having to finish something difficult that they might have had trouble with. They liked that we did more labs and hands-on experiments in the class time that was freed up for those kinds of activities. They wanted to include more technology assignments, like having to build their own powerpoints or videos too. That would mean giving up more time to projects, as those types of assignments take time to put together. So the flipped classroom does give me time to do different types of assignments in class and I really like that. 

I found that doing one video a week was plenty for my middleschoolers, many are coming from elementary schools that give almost no homework and the amount of homework they are getting in 7th grade is taking time for them to adjust to. Also, I needed to have some way of knowing if they watched the video or not, and one extra assignment for me to grade each week added a lot of work for me as the teacher, never mind the time it took to create and upload that video. In science we learn a new concept and then spend some time with it, so I couldn't really see how to make more videos each week anyway, unless I broke the video down to one key point and maybe only 2 minutes in length instead of 10 minutes and covering a complete chapter. I think I will keep things the same, as it worked well. My top students were able to keep up, though they told me they did have to work at it. I need to remember I am not their only teacher assigning homework each night.  

I am one of three 7th grade science teachers at our school, and the only one trying the flipped classroom model. We do teach differently as teachers, but we were doing a lot of the same lessons and activities as we share ideas well as a department. When it came time for our benchmark testing, my students consistently scored higher as a group compared to the other two teams of students.  This is only the first year trying this so I will have to gather more data over time, but these initial results are very encouraging. I saw better class scores from my students too overall this year compared to previous years, and the main change I made was flipping my classroom, using the videos for introduction of new topics as homework. 

This summer I am working up new lessons that incorporate more of the Common Core literacy skills that I am responsible for as a science teacher, and streamlining my lessons more to better benefit my students benefit. I have researched how to better teach vocabulary and deeper reading skills to my students and plan to use that knowledge throughout the year to improve my teaching.  I also studied the value of reflection pieces both for me as a teacher, and my students and see this blog as a reflection spot for me to use better in the coming year.

So for this coming school year, which begins on August 5th for my students, I do hope to make time each week to reflect and share how my teaching goes, the nuggets of wisdom I learn, and to honestly share both my failures and successes in Year Two of Adventures in Science class! 

Maura