Here is my current plan for researching the flipped classroom in the context of 6th grade literacy.

My research questions:

  • What are best practices when “flipping” a classroom?
  • Why should teachers consider using this teaching method in a literacy classroom?
  • How are other teachers at my school already using online videos to leverage technology for effective instruction?

 How I will conduct my research:

Each week, I will post different videos for our weekly writing workshops, based on trends emerging in my students’ writing samples. When students come to class for their writing workshop, the skills they learned through the video will be practiced, with individual and group support.

I will analyze my students’ writing to note progress and growth, as well as conduct informal interviews with students (and their parents) to gauge the effectiveness of this program.

While researching in the classroom, I will also investigate best practice globally and also in my more immediate communities. I will article and share these resources through my blog, as well as an annotated diigo list to share with other educators interested in flipping their classroom.

 How I will evidence my learning:

I will create and install documentation posters in Learning Commons for my Junior School community. I will also document progress through my Cohort 21 blog, and in keeping with my theme of making videos for educational purposes, I hope to archive my learning through a video for the larger education community about how literacy instruction can be differentiated using a flipped classroom approach.

Currently, my school is collectively investigating best practices around differentiation. I hope to share this video about flipping classroom instruction as a precursor to a Monday staff meeting, sparking conversation and dialogue about various differentiation strategies and practices available to teachers to experiment with.

3 thoughts on “Declaration of intention

  1. Hi Celeste, Happy New Year!

    Flipping the classroom is certainly a popular topic in education right now. Marcie’s connection could prove very valuable to you indeed. I love that you’re being very explicit with how you are going to evidence your learning, and I hope that the videos work out well. I have used Camtasia to create my flipped lessons, and I find the software incredibly effective. I strongly suggest that you leverage your willingness to take this on with your administration and see if you can ask them for some software to help you create the videos – particularly if there are others in your school that are already flipping their classroom.

    I would suggest a few words of advice – these were the things that I found out the hard way a few years ago:
    1) When flipping a lesson, you want to try to make it reusable. There is a lot of work that goes in to making effective videos that students find useful – novelty wears off very quickly! So try to make your videos with the end in mind. Personalized videos are a great thing – but in my experience, they only have a one-shot effect. So, for example, if you’re creating a video about sentence structure, avoid names, dates, specific examples, etc… Just focus on the skill/strategy/content that you need to. (it may help to ask Marcie’s connection if he wouldn’t mind sharing some examples for your classroom)

    2) Prepare your students for what you are about to add to your classroom. I read once that we can assume too much from this generation of digital natives – we need to be careful not to assume skills and preferences that they have. In this vein, speak to, and teach the learning skills required for them to succeed with a flipped lesson. For example, teach them directly about how to pause/stop/rewind/replay the video. You may even want to include visual or oral prompts for them to do so throughout the video that you make. Be sure to include prompts like “this is important”, or “be sure to listen carefully to this next bit…” These are skills that I am still working on with my more senior students! It is a great resource, so make sure that they know how to use it for their own success!

    Good luck, and I can’t wait to see your first video!
    garth.

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