Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Experimenting with the Mastery Flip..

In the fall of 2011, I piloted 1 class with the flip classroom.  In January of 2012, I decided to roll it out with all four sections of 8th grade science and not only that (at this point, I must have lost my mind), I decided to try to the mastery flip technique.  I am not going to lie, I spent most if not all of my Christmas break in 2011 assembling the pieces of trial run.

Since my school district is not 1 to 1, I had to be creative and design a way that could work for my classroom.  I was able to sign a laptop cart out for every Monday and Friday during the course of the unit.  I would have loved to have allowed students to try self-pacing, however with the lack of computer access, I struggled with a way to accomplish this. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!  Each week of this unit was designed around a content standard.  I asked students to have the video(s) watched by the time they came to class on Tuesday of each week.  I gave students one week's notice for each of the videos.  Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday each week we did interactive and sometimes very physically active labs that I pulled from different resources like Project Wild or Project Wet and some that I designed on my own.  I selected each of these labs for their inquiry components and connection to that week's theme.

On the Friday, students chose how they wanted to demonstrate what they understood from the week.  They could choose to take an objective test or they could create their project by themselves or teamed with 1 partner.  I created the objective tests using the senteo clickers, so no grading was necessary on my part.  The projects I graded on a scale of learning levels from mastery to unacceptable.  I asked students who created a project to post their project on a class wiki by the end of class on Friday.  If any students finished their quiz or project early, they could begin working on the mastery project or they could use their class time to watch the videos for next week.  A lot of the flipped classroom is about allowing students to make choices that help them understand themselves as learners.  Students know better than me of what is going on in their life and if using their class time to watch the video is their best choice, then I say, "Watch the Video!"

The mastery project was something students would continually come back to throughout the course of the unit and use it to extend their learning around a singular topic area that they would keep stretching and learning about.  This mastery project was set-up around the class wikispace where students would write in the style of nonfiction fiction.  Students would write about accurate facts about an animal of their choice (our unit was ecology) in the context of them as field researchers "seeing" these things for the first time.

I was amazed at how much stronger these students understood the concepts compared to past years.  They also retained and applied the concepts so much stronger.  I was blown away...it was awesome!

However, it wasn't all roses.  I have now added three more sections of students to this process and I did feel some backlash.  Many students are used to the sit-and-get method and did not want to put in the work.  Or as middle schoolers sometimes did, they would put in the work, but complain about the process.  As a teacher, it did make me question whether or not this was the right thing for these students.  But, I couldn't ignore the results of how much better the students were understanding the concepts!

For the next time that I try the mastery style, I will be tweaking somethings.  I think many students chose the objective tests because they thought it was the "easy" way out.  However, there grades saw that objective tests weren't always easy.  I think I would add a layer with the objective tests for the next time.  Perhaps, having students correct the answers that they got wrong and explain what the correct answer is.  I might also ease up on the depth of the mastery project.  I mildly altered the assignment from the pre-flipped days, but I may need to ask myself, "What is really important?"  I may want to simplify a few of the requirements to make sure that students do not feel too overwhelmed to succeed.

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