Flipped First Semester Finished

My school district changed its calendar this year, and for the first time our final exams were finished before winter break.  So I am “home for the holidays” reflecting on the completed first semester of my “experiment” of fully flipping my two World History sections.

In my last post I mentioned the idea of building in some gaming elements into the course to help potentially build morale. There wasn’t any real visible sign that moral was waning, but I was sort of fearing that it could happen. Tom Driscoll, a leader in social studies flipping, has blogged about gamification (see, for instance, his Aug. 13, 2013 post) and its place in education. I did not do what Tom has done in forming the whole course into a game with levels and guilds, etc., but I did build in a few elements. I called the first semester “The Great Race” and offered incentives for certain achievements.  I have often pitted my classes against each other through the averaging of test scores and the like with the prize usually being a field trip to downtown Chicago with P-Dad.  In these flipped World History classes I couldn’t easily compare scores because kids were all taking tests at different times, since kids were working through the class individually and in groups, so I offered this:  The winning class would be the one which had the first four groups finish the semester.  (Each class has 9 groups.)  I stipulated that each person in the group would have to have above a “zero” in the last several units to be considered as having completed that unit.  In our district a “zero” equals 50%.  So if anyone in the group had a 0, if they wanted to be in the running for the field trip they would have to get their grade above a zero, by retaking tests or improving the quality of their work.  I also offered certain small incentives like candy bars and P-Daddy bucks (small extra credit currency I issue from time to time) if groups would come to me for an “exit survey” when they had finished certain units.

The results of these “gaming” elements?  Not very successful.  Neither class won the field trip because neither of my classes had four groups who finished the semester work with no members of the group getting zeroes.  In a class where every student is working through the course individually (with the help of group members) there was a real flurry of activity at the semester’s end, students trying to meet final deadlines.  It almost seemed as if the gaming element was not important, it was the finishing of the work.

The same was true for the smaller incentives.  Several groups did pursue the small prizes I offered, but many groups simply ignored them and plowed on with the coursework.  The groups that students were placed in became real pockets of comfort and companionship for them.  That seemed to meet their needs for drive and meaning more than some gaming elements.  Because almost all of my World History students are freshmen and sophomores, they are not as mature and socially agile as my seniors are.  The entire semester all 18 groups in the two World History classes stayed connected and tight, with very little crossover with other groups.  It was like this group gave them identity, companionship and meaning and only once in the entire semester can I remember a time when a group member broke with the ranks of his group and crossed the room to go join another group to socialize.  This was absolutely amazing to me, and showed me the power of learning groups.

Often group members would socialize, but on any given day, if you would have visited my classroom, you would have seen students engaged with each other, usually with the content of the course.  70% of my time in the class was spent on grading student work in their presence, answering questions, consulting on projects.  The first five to ten minutes of class each day would be to get the test and quiz takers going.  Everyone who was taking a test or quiz that day would come up front, and I would get them going, some on computer tests, some with paper, others with our classroom set of iRespond clickers. The rest of the class I was “open for business.”  Students who wanted to see me would write their name on our world wall map, and I would call them up one at a time to address their needs.  All assignments had to be graded this way.  No more leaving a piece of homework in a bin, or turning it onto a stack on the teacher’s desk.  Anything to be graded had to be brought to me so we could go over it together.  I made comments, engaged them in its contents and then entered a grade in the gradebook.  At times all 4 members of a group would come up when they were working on something together.

This way of running the class, which was done almost everyday, defines the practical limit of how much face to face time a teacher could have with his/her students.  Because it would be almost impossible for any teacher to have more face to face time with students than I had with my two World History classes this semester.  The bulk of every class period every day was me interacting with students.

So my first major assessment of this semester of flipping would be that it was a radical success in meeting the two major goals I have articulated all semester:

1. That students learn to take responsibility for their own learning.
2. That I have more face to face time with students, including struggling or low-performing students.

Students learned as the semester went on, that they really were responsible for their own progress, in a more complete way than they would learn this in a traditionally run class.  I have taught World History traditionally for 10 years.  And I was the one directing the work.  Cutting this unit short, to be able to have more time with this unit, deciding which days we went to the lab, when we would have group projects, etc. etc.  But with these flipped classes, students had to make those decisions.  Sure, some students chose to be “slackers” just as every class run a traditional way has “slackers”, students who underperform, do not do the work, are lazy, etc.  I would occasionally chase down underperforming students and try to motivate them, encourage them, kick their butts, etc.

So I watched the class sort itself the same way classes did when I taught the course traditionally, some students working hard, trying to achieve, trying to learn, and some students going for the minimum, just getting by.  I definitely spent more time with the “slackers” in this flipped arrangement, but not the way I had hoped in theory.  Since I knew there would be more face to face time, I thought I would have more time to work with them, befriend them, get them moving along in a more successful way than would have been possible in a more traditional lecture-based history class.  But as I said, my class management involved the outer limit of face to face time with students, and there simply wasn’t enough time to single these students out and work with them.  So with classes of over 30 students, with 55 minute daily periods I now know the practical limits of face to face time.  It was spent on students who were bringing me their work, wanting feedback, progressing in the course.  I was able to take time to chase down those who were plainly not moving forward and progressing well, not often in line to see me, but usually just enough to encourage them to get moving, to suggest next steps for them.  What they really needed, a full time tutor, I could not provide.  So for any teacher reading this, who has wished in the past that there was more time to work with low- and under- performing students, let me say as one who had maximum face to face interactions with my students this semester: it’s not going to happen, so don’t beat yourself up.

The only way it would have happened would have been to design the class something like this: formulate a way for students to turn in everything electronically, so they would have been able to bypass me physically during class, and for me to simply dedicated every moment of class time to the “slackers”, the struggling, the poor students, the needy.  In other words the students doing the work and progressing would get almost no face time from me.  They would turn their work in, see their As and Bs and Cs in the gradebook and never access me face to face.  I would then pinpoint and seek out the other students, the strugglers and slackers, and spend my time moving among them.  I think I thought this would be possible in my flipping of these World History classes.  It was not.

I have rambled on in this post, let me continue my semester evaluation in another post later…