As the semester begins to wind down, I think about the goals I set forth for myself at the beginning of the MAET program here at MSU. As I began to learn more about the process of “flipping” the classroom, I realized that there was so much more to it than I had been previously informed of. It’s not just showing videos for homework and doing the homework in the classroom; it is about changing the process at which students learn and attack problems. For me, as a math and physics teacher, having students watch and learn on their own was an interesting experience on many different levels. First, I had to make sure I had all the videos loaded correctly, and second, I had to share the lectures with my students. Throughout this process I have learned that at the present time I do not care for the assignment of watching the lectures at home. At the high school level, the students lack accountability and find other things more important than completing their lessons. However, I found that students like the videos as review of the material rather than using them as a part of the initial learning process. As a result, I have created a LMS site that serves the purpose of transforming my physics class into a hybrid course.
Now, onto the fun stuff. My thought process of creating a “flip” based model classroom was one that was brought to me by the administration. They had me read Flip your Classroom and I bought in to the idea of changing the culture of my classroom. I found a few videos, explained the process to my students and even practiced taking notes while watching the videos. I then assigned watching the videos as homework for my students so they could learn more about it as well. I had realistic views that the implementation of this process would not go about without any kind of hitch, however, I did not foresee the lack of high-speed internet access as one of the problems. While most of my students do have access to high-speed internet or smart phones that allowed them to watch the videos, there were a few of them who were unable to watch them. Our school has very limited access with computers since we only have two computer labs, one of which is a full-time classroom. The other lab can only be accessed when the media center is open. This severely limited the amount of time that the students could watch the videos here at school was a detriment to the process going smoothly. We are in a rural district so going to the local library was out of the question as well. The lack of computer usage time had me deflated until I realized how much the students benefitted from having access to the videos at home for review or missed lessons. I realized that I would need to use the computer lab as a resource and make sure I plan far enough in advance to give my students the chance to access all of the videos. Through the process of CEP 820 I have turned the underutilized videos into a hybrid classroom. I now get to see my students watch the videos and their thought process after they have learned the new material.
This approach has had both advantages and disadvantages. The major advantage is that students get to learn and work at their own pace. I have a mix of different learners in my classroom, like most, and the ability to watch the video as many or as few times as they want was a big help to them. My students had the ability to pause the video when they would normally fall behind in a normal classroom lecture. The way the students approached the practice problems seems different in the way that they could replay the video when they were solving a similar problem. The disadvantage was the lack of discussion about the lecture. Although they still discussed the lesson, they lacked the spontaneous connections that are made when they interact with each other in a typical classroom setting. This reminded me of Bloom’s Taxonomy and caused me to criticize myself in the regard that I am not pushing my students to a high enough level. They were getting the basic ideas down, but they were not critical of their own work. I think this fed from a lack of discussion so as the semester went on, I made sure that I started to integrate questions that pushed my students farther up on the Taxonomy chart. That leads me to where I am now.
I have created two units on www.MyHaikuClass.com for my physics students but I know that I can still do more for them. I teach three other classes and want to begin to slowly integrate those units into a hybrid classroom model. I like this idea because students have the ability to learn and discover at their own pace while I have the opportunity to walk around and answer questions that are not covered within the video. With the current state of the school community I believe this gives me the greatest utilization of the classroom and internet. I know that there is room for improvement and someday this will be a great resource for my classroom. As Benjamin Franklin stated “Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
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