{"id":4616,"date":"2014-06-20T09:58:24","date_gmt":"2014-06-20T14:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/?p=4616"},"modified":"2014-06-20T09:59:55","modified_gmt":"2014-06-20T14:59:55","slug":"flipping-and-going-in-circles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/?p=4616","title":{"rendered":"Flipping and Going In Circles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Moving student learning out of the classroom will require better formative measures of competency and content acquisition.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Summer is the time for reflection in the life of a teacher. \u00a0This year I stumbled upon something interesting; I found myself at a nexus of several teaching styles:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I teach a general biology course in a traditional time-allocation model.<\/li>\n
  2. I teach an AP Biology course with significant aspects of a flipped classroom.<\/li>\n
  3. I teach a Biotechnology program that is primarily student-directed.<\/li>\n
  4. I participate in a master\u2019s program that is 100% online learning.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In having access to a representative cross section of the current time-usage models, I noted that the primary struggle in moving learning outside the classroom walls and into a flipped or online model is continuing to obtain evidence of student learning without regular direct student interaction.<\/p>\n

    Assessment is Hard.<\/em><\/p>\n

    At first this observation is not particularly noteworthy, because all teachers must measure student learning frequently.\u00a0 Informal assessment of student progress occurs constantly in a traditional classroom.\u00a0 Bell work assesses retention from previous lessons.\u00a0 Prelabs assess existing knowledge and preparation for an experience.\u00a0 Teacher monitoring and student conversations provide information on class progress during an experiment.\u00a0 Summative tasks such as writing samples and future applications provide guiding information moving forward.<\/p>\n

    The problem in moving to a flipped classroom or an online class (which is really just flipping a classroom 100% of the way) is losing access to all of the easiest methods of assessment.\u00a0 Bell work is no longer sufficient for assessing extended learning occurring since the last meeting.\u00a0 Informal conversations provide some information, but are not enough evidence alone to ensure an activity occurred outside of class time.\u00a0 This leads to some of the greatest complaints from students in online\/flipped environments.<\/p>\n

    \"Too<\/a>

    Too Many Students’ Online Course<\/p><\/div>\n

    \u00a0<\/em>If a Student Learns Alone in an Empty Room, Does She Make a Sound?<\/em><\/p>\n

    Online classes are notorious for superficial assignments, rote repetition, and unbalanced workloads.\u00a0 These problems arise as supervisors clamor for evidence to support grades.\u00a0 A professor or teacher can show a dozen forum posts about inquiry as evidence the students learned about inquiry.\u00a0 The difficulty, as any teacher can tell you, is learning requires more interaction with the material than simply making required posts on a topic.<\/p>\n

    It seems too many flipping teachers are relying on superficial tasks (read-quiz-repeat or two-dozen-papers-done) because the most valuable learning behaviors are difficult to measure.\u00a0 A class can read a passage and have a meaningful discussion and a teacher can know those things happened because they witnessed them in a room.\u00a0 How else can you ensure such behaviors happened online without required forum posts?\u00a0 As a result, online or heavily flipped classrooms revert to all the same learning behaviors seen in classrooms 100 years ago.<\/p>\n

    This problem leads to lots of \u201cevidence\u201d, but little legitimate learning!\u00a0 We must as teachers have the courage to provide tasks to students that promote critical thinking and student ownership, and spend our time finding measurements that are strong evidence of a learning trajectory<\/strong> to reach a single point, rather than many superficial measurements along a linear path.<\/p>\n

    Do Digitize Strong Practices, Don\u2019t Force Digital Practices<\/em><\/p>\n

    The solution to real online learning is two-fold:\u00a0 make quality classroom experiences accessible to students alone at home, and measure their competency on those tasks after-the-fact.<\/p>\n

    The first struggle is one not easily solved.\u00a0 There exists an experimental design course in my master\u2019s program, and I dreaded this course.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t fear it for difficulty, but for quality.\u00a0 How could forum posts alone help me refine my experimental design skills at a graduate level?\u00a0 The answer was the obvious one, it couldn\u2019t.\u00a0 Our professor was very clear, we will be designing our own experiments at home and reporting our results.\u00a0 I know other teachers in virtual environments tackle the same problems.\u00a0 For teachers looking to flip our classrooms, we must be brave enough to create authentic tasks for our students to tackle on their own.<\/p>\n

    I would argue the best way to accomplish this is to identify the most fertile areas for flipping.\u00a0 Prelab work and readings are obvious, but lab work can also be done at home at times.\u00a0 Don\u2019t flip your electrophoresis lab, but flip the prelab preparation so they can ensure they can run their gels long enough in class.\u00a0 Don\u2019t flip your photosynthesis lab by making it a dry lab over break, flip it by finding a new way to measure photosynthesis progress like biomass accumulation in various amounts of shade or temperature.\u00a0 Don\u2019t skate around the problems by simply providing tasks that are easy to design, get creative and solve the REAL problem.\u00a0 Eliminate the busy work and allow more time for your students to focus on what\u2019s left.<\/p>\n

    \"Flipping<\/a>

    Excel file to report a full lab in AP Biology.<\/p><\/div>\n

    The second issue is evidence for the final course marks.\u00a0 Half this problem is solved with quality flipped tasks.\u00a0 The observation I would make is that we must find ways to take measurements that provide greater description for past learning.\u00a0 A forum post is a fairly superficial measurement at face value.\u00a0 A photo diary of the experimental process provides the same verification of an activity, but cuts the extraneous time investment to a minimum.\u00a0 A well-crafted graph can be reported which provides evidence of data collection and analysis in a product that can be rapidly evaluated by the teacher.\u00a0 The ultimate message is, \u201cIncreased workload does not a rigorous course make, and often it is its undoing.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Michael Ralph is a teacher making mistakes at a prodigious rate in the hopes he will run out of errors sometime before he retires.\u00a0 He\u2019s also tweeting more now @ralph0305.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Moving student learning out of the classroom will require better formative measures of competency and content acquisition.   Summer is the time for reflection in the life of a teacher. \u00a0This year I stumbled upon something interesting; I found myself at a nexus of several teaching styles: I teach a general biology course in a
    + Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1142,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes","_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-labs","category-teaching-resources"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1142"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4616"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4621,"href":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4616\/revisions\/4621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kabt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}