One Teacher's Journey: Flipped Classrooms

Wednesday, 14 August 2013

Flipped Classrooms - Maths

Hello friends,
Recently I had the privilege of attending the annual Maths Symposium at Waipuna Lodge. Many talented maths leaders and teachers gathered to present and host workshops for teachers from around New Zealand.

My first workshop suggested ways to teach number strategies through strand (Geometry, Statistics and Measurement). Teaching Y6 this year where weighting of time spent on Number vs Strand swings in favour of strand, I found this workshop encouraging. Providing students with 'rich' and relevant investigations where they need to be creative and engage problem solving strategies, is key. Cooperative skills really come into play and recall is no longer the big divide.

Later I found this video on Youtube from the Edutopia channel:

It was filmed in Chris Opitz' classroom at Bowman Elementary, USA. I think you'll agree that there were some really cool ideas raised and modeled in this video. Thank you Chris for sharing.

My second workshop was centered around teaching decimal concepts in a variety of ways. It again kept referring to investigative problem solving so that students formulate their own understandings as opposed to being TOLD the form and function of a math concept. One message that stuck with me was the verbalising of digits in decimal places. Say you write 2.345 on the board, when naming it, say: 2 wholes, 3 tenths, 4 hundredths and 5 thousandths instead of 2 point 345. This really emphasizes what parts of wholes the numbers represent and leads to less confusion during number operations. I made a place value resource around this principle. You can view the video for it below.

This resource has Place Value boards and cards for playing dice games like first to 100, first to 1000 and first to a whole. It also has bingo games for whole numbers as well as decimal numbers. The bingo cards depict 3 ways for referring to a number. I have listed this resource on all my stores. The links are at the bottom of this post if you are interested in getting your own copy.

My final workshop was probably the most inspiring. Recently I had stumbled across the concept of flipped classrooms. Here is a video I watched.

This last workshop was presented by a young and enthusiastic junior high teacher who shared her journey with us. Judging by the audiences reactions - many tired and overworked teachers - it was not a concept that was going to fly but I was hooked. This was an idea I had been toying with too and had been using Educreate on our classroom iPads in order to record concepts that we were learning with the students in small group. I would then post these on our classroom GoogleSITE at the end of each day for the kiddies to refer to, revise and to share with Mum and Dad. The principle behind flipped classrooms is that you post videos of content that students need to familiarise with, prior to meeting with you for a lesson. This way the lesson can go deeper and further because the basic stuff is out of the way.

I hunted around a bit and came across LearnZillion, a treasure trove of video lessons compiled by teachers across America. Some are great and I have set them for students to watch. However, they are Common Core aligned, while this is great for our American colleagues, not so much for us and it can takes ages to hunt out the suitable material.

So...
I have started making my own. Its early days still...and feels really awkward listening to my own 'teacher voice' talking back at me through youtube, especially when my family are floating around and tease me about it. But...I am proud of the few that I have finished. I would love some feedback if you have the time. Please visit my channel and watch a couple. I have started with multiplication concepts as that is what my class is looking at this term. Here is one of them. The rest can be found through this link. See store links below.