Flipped Classroom Opinions

I have been trying various adaptations of the flipped classroom model this school year.  I work at a 1:1 laptop school, so all of my kids have access to computers all the time.  I also have access to projectors that record, SMART Notebook, iMovie, and anything else I need.  Since I have these resources available, I wanted to give the flipped classroom a shot.

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I teach the entire remedial math summer school program at my school.  I basically have all of the kids that made Ds in one classroom, all at the same time.  That's right - all of the math courses in the same room at the same time, Little House on the Prairie style.  My first year of doing this, I had all of the students work on packets of practice problems while I went around and helped students individually.  However, there was one big fact I overlooked.  The students didn't know enough to work on their own.  That's why they were in summer school!  Obviously, I needed to do something better.

Flipped Classroom - Take One - Summer School Edition

The students came to class and I gave the kids guided notes to fill in while they were watching the lesson.  When they were finished, they had to work a zillion practice problems.  When they finished all of the practice problems, they could leave for the day (it was summer school).

My Thoughts:  This worked very well.  Students could work at their own pace.  Since I let them leave when they were finished, they stayed on task the entire time.  Most of the student's test scores improved.  I consider this a success.  I will continue to use this in my summer program.

Flipped Classroom - Take Two

I gave the kids guided notes that they had to fill in as they watched the video at home.  They were supposed to bring the filled in notes to class the next day.  Super annoying.  About half of my students did not watch the video to take notes.  I was stuck - either have them watch the lesson during class or leave them in the dust.  At the time, I chose to leave them in the dust.  I was hoping that it would be a learning experience for them.  I invited (sternly told) the offending students to come to tutorials after school to make up their work and shot an email off to their parents.

My Thoughts:  I didn't really like this approach.  Kids not watching the video at home would be a daily problem.  I could have taught them the lesson while the rest of the class worked, but I didn't want to reinforce that behavior.  Also, I lost the discussion that normally takes place during the lesson.  Yes, we could recap afterward, but it's just not the same.

Flipped Classroom - Take Three

I gave the kids guided notes to fill in as they watched the video in class.  They all brought earbuds, watched the video, and worked practice problems in class.  At home, they had traditional homework.  My kids like this; they call it "video notes".  

My Thoughts:  I didn't like it.  It felt lonely.  There was very little personal interaction.  I tried it for a full week, but I won't do it again.  I completely lost the class discussions.  However, I do think this is a great option if I had a substitute.  

Overall I don't think the flipped classroom is right for me during the school year.  I think it is very important for students to be able to talk about math and put their thoughts into words.  Also, I don't want the daily struggle of kids not watching the videos.  No matter what I do, I'm always going to have kids that don't complete their homework, there's no workaround for that.

The Flip Family - Similarity Activity

Similarity is one of my least favorite units to teach in Geometry.  I know there are tons of awesome examples and activities, I just feel like everything I try falls flat.  One of my good friends is on the Geometry team, so we got together to revamp the unit.

Mrs. AwesomeGeoemtryTeacherFriend used to teach a pull out math remediation course at her previous school.  She used "The Flip Family" with her kids to really cement the idea of scale factor and review basic graphing.  So, we thought we'd give it a try this year.  The activity is adapted from this website (starts on page 11).

I gave my students a list of coordinate pairs to graph.  Then, they connected the dots to make a face (Zip Flip).  My students thought he looked like Bart Simpson.  Once they had graphed Zip, they have to use rules to transform the points and graph five more characters (Zap, Pip, Pop, Bip, and Bop).

I made my students list the height and width of each feature (face height and width, eye height and width, etc.) by counting the units.  Then, they had to write a million ratios comparing the all of the features of the five characters to Zip Flip.

Once they had filled in all the ratios, they had to figure out who else was in the Flip family.

The students worked in assigned pairs.  I told them that they could split the work in half or work together.  The more successful groups chose to split the work of figuring out the points and graphing, but worked together to answer the questions.  My lower level students really shined in this activity, while my higher level students struggled.  This totally surprised me.  I think the higher level kids were over thinking things and trying to make the exercise harder than it actually was.  

I really liked that this activity had a graphing component.  I was disappointed to see how many kids had trouble graphing points.  We've been doing coordinate geometry throughout the year, so I (wrongly) assumed that they had it down.  The most common mistake was kids switching the x and y coordinates.  I think they wrongly applied "rise over run" after hearing it so many times in their math-lives.  We'll just have to fix that.

* This activity was adapted from The Missing Link by Annenberg Learner.