Last week, I was able to go to a fabulous professional development offered by my District. Of course, there was some good incentives...breakfast, lunch, and an iPad. I wasn't going to miss this one! I heard of a Flipped Classroom and I didn't know what to expect. Our wonderful presenter (April) asked something that really hit me....what is the best use of my class time?
How can I effectively teach with the CONSTANT interruptions during a typical lesson. You have the same ones in your classroom: bathroom, no/wrong notebook, no/dull pencil, children chatting, not being ready, and on and on. All of those distractions makes my direct instruction time so long, and I know that my students are distracted.
Flipping the classroom sounds like a way to make my classroom time more productive because the students already heard my guided math lesson. Now it is time for them to get to work, with all of the foundations covered at home. My next unit was fractions, and I decided to dive in ASAP. State testing is also coming very soon, and I needed all of the class time to work with my students on their questions and misconceptions.
I looked up tons of videos for flipping the classroom, and I found a good one to use right away (thanks Ms. Munafo). I posted them on the school's website and I explained to the kids what I wanted them to do. Each student gets a worksheet to watch the video as homework. I included a family connection and added a place to write a secret question that I will present in the video, to guarantee that kids really watched the video. My first video doesn't have one, but I will make sure all of my videos have one from now on.
To accommodate the growing library, I started a separate website.
Now they go home to watch the assigned video and come prepared to class ready to work. In class, I will spend time working with each student on their own questions, ideas and practice questions. The first day, I finished before the time was up. I didn't feel rushed or overwhelmed. Just really tired from the constant moving around the classroom (but that was a good tired)
As time allows, I will be posting more of my own videos for hopefully all of the fourth grade math curriculum. My goal to have videos for Grades 3 and 4, then all of my subjects for both.....here's to the future.
Now the first 3 videos have been watched and reviewed, I gave them a short quiz today on how much they have learned. Fingers crossed....
Denise
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