The Doctor Visits

Love when students make nerd references in their costume selection (it's a pep rally day with a theme of Halloween)

Simply Amazing!

If the goal of education is to inspire students to learn and foster innovation, then this group and school have it. I hope to one day to provide students the space and ability to be this innovative within my classroom.

Students Invent New School Lock

8 Weeks into the Year: An Observation

So we have completed 8 weeks of our school year - a forth of the school year is done!

Here are a couple observations ...

1. My students are more engaged, and are performing well on (in their words) "hard assignments." In the past (P.F. or Pre-Flipped Era) my class was straight forward - I would lecture, students would take notes, we would do a review and then test. Nothing overly fancy - except my random Superhero/Star Wars references. Now my students are finding the information they need (with guided helped at times), putting their findings into practice, and then producing a product of their findings (be this a graph, video, or some other product).

2. My students are struggling - they are so use to being handed the material they need. They struggle to work with not very detail, step by step, directions. I give them parameters, the problems, a starting point on what they need to solve the problems, and we even talk as a class on the material needed. Yet they struggle because we have trained them over the years to do not learn. Teaching them how to find the material they need, and then how to apply that information is a struggle - both for me as a teacher and the students.

In a lot of ways my class is harder than it has been in the past, and I think this is a good thing. And yet with this increase in rigor, my students are stepping up (though there are growing pains) for the most part.

Looking forward to see what the rest of the year has in store.