Time to Flip Out

by Tara Seale
Dan Bruno, who also publishes on the High School Matters blog, wrote a post about flipped classrooms in December.  Although I didn't explore this instructional method at the time (re-doing two National Board entries, taking a graduate class, teaching 90 AP Lang students, and trying to be a mom and wife - as teachers - you, best of all, understand why I didn't get around to it:) I recently found the time to explore the flipped classroom concept, and Tech & Learning has a great post explaining the positive effects of flipped classrooms.
Simply, a flipped classroom is one in which students watch a video lecture at home and complete classroom activities, or what would normally be considered homework, in class. This set up allows teachers to act as both a lecturer and a facilitator.  I watched the Flipping the Classroom Tech & Learning video, and one comment made by a student really stuck with me.
He said that he didn't have to stop the whole class if he didn't understand.  He could pause the video and re-watch what he didn't get the first time.  We all know that we have students who will not raise their hand, and unfortunately, they miss out on important information.
A teacher comment in the video also stuck with me.  When students come to class ready to complete classroom activities, the teacher is not the only one helping students.  Students who watched the video and easily understood the lesson serve as peer tutors.  Students who have additional questions can ask not only the teacher but also a classmate, and the students who understood the lesson reinforce the concepts of the lesson as they assist other students.

If you did not read Dan's post, he provides a basic outline to organize flipped instruction in an English classroom.  I encourage you to read Flipping Out.

Several websites support teachers implementing the flipped classroom model:

1. Sign up for the online community The Flipped Class Network
2. TechSmith has printable tutorials
3. Best of all, TEDTalks has signed on to support teachers in facilitating a flipped classroom.  Check out TED's Beta TED-Ed site.  Read the press release here: TED-Ed Launches Groundbreaking Website with New Tools for Customized Learning.

Glogging - not Blogging

by Tara Seale

Have you heard of a Glog? I recently used Glogster in my classroom to allow students to display a short, descriptive paragraph before we embarked on a long narrative.

I wanted my students to be able to describe a place to create a setting, usually essential for a great narrative. I do not teach Pre-AP or AP English, so for regular 9th grade English students, a model sentence is usually the best way to start.

The sentence below, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is absolutely the best model sentence that I have found to use in describing the location of a place.

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I like this sentence because it starts with three prepositional phrases, and most 9th graders can write prepositional phrases even if they do not usually incorporate prepositional phrases into their writing. I also like that this sentence starts with a general idea of the location and moves toward a more specific location, so I instruct my students to do the same. After the prepositional phrases, this sentence has a verb. Hopefully, all 9th grade students can supply a verb. Then the sentence uses adjectives that describe the subject, which allows me to teach comma rules related to adjectives. The last word in the sentence is the subject. Most of my students do not write sentences in which the last word is the subject. It is usually the first word in most of their sentences. This model sentence forces my students to explore how to end a sentence with the subject. I usually have great success with students who are trying to duplicate F. Scott Fitzgerald's sentence. See some examples below:

• At the top of the wooden stairs and down the hall to the right, the loud sound of music filling the air, waits a large, cologne-filled room with clothes and junk all over the floor.
• Through the wide turns around beautiful trees, about seventy-five miles from Little Rock, stands the two-story house, aging.
  
• In the dim light of the afternoon sun, just through the back door, is my old, warm kitchen.

There are a few minor differences but basically the same structure. Next, I discuss the difference between showing and telling sentences. I always share Mark Twain's famous quote:

"Don't tell me the lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream!"

After my students are satisfied with their descriptive paragraph, we record their voices reading the paragraph. I am fortunate enough to have a class set of ipods with voice recorder capablities, but if you aren't, you can always use Audacity, which is a free open source software used for recordings. This assignment made me realize how important it is for students to hear themselves reading out loud. Even though my students read their own writing, they still had to read it several times to develop fluency.

Next, we uploaded everything to Glogster. Students selected images that best represented their paragraph. I discussed Fair Use and Creative Commons Licensing. We practiced using Google's Advanced Search by clicking on Google Search > Images > Advanced Search and under usage rights, we changed the default to labeled for reuse.

I am very pleased with the Glogster results. Click on the links below to see some of my favorites (be sure to click on the player to hear the student read his or her paragraph):

1st Student Example Glog

2nd Student Example Glog

3rd Studnet Example Glog

4th Student Example Glog

5th Student Example Glog

I try to model every assignment I provide for my students, so see the Glog I created below:

Link to the teacher model Glogster

The Year of Twitter

by Tara Seale

So did you try out Twitter in 2009? If you didn't, then apparently you weren't one of the 18 million who did. Several websites claim that 2009 was the year of Twitter.

Mashable's How Twitter Conquered the World in 2009

Yahoo! News: The Year of Twitter and Facebook

and Time Magazine explains "How Twitter will change the way we live"

I tried Twitter in early 2009, and I really didn't get it. I left a few measly tweets and thought there was nothing I could possibly say in 140 characters that anyone would want to read. I picked it back up again after a few months, and I lucked out by finding and following teachers who shared links to great resources that I could use in my classroom, so I began to share my ideas and to learn how to abbreviate and convey what I wanted to say in 140 characters. I currently use Twitter to keep in touch with teachers from all over the world @tseale.

As I began to use Twitter effectively, I wanted to share this powerful communication tool with my students. Luckily, I am in a school district that allows me to experiment with Web 2.0 to enhance my classroom curriculum. I created a teacher account @bryantenglish, next my students signed up for a Twitter account, and then we followed each other. We began by tweeting about outside reading, and I used Twitter to send out homework reminders.
I decided to use Twitter to engage my students while we read Edith Hamilton's Mythology, required for 9th grade students at my high school. Some students love the book and enjoy mythology, and some students think I am trying to torture them by forcing them to read about Greek gods and goddesses, so my hope was that students would want to read about Greek mythology if I connected it to a fun web tool, and I also decided it could help me teach one of our 9th grade required literary terms: persona.
I began by creating a list of mythological characters spread throughout Edith Hamilton's Mythology. I did not use any of the major gods or goddesses because they are all covered fairly quickly in the front of the text. I then gave the list to my students and asked them to look up the characters in the index and decide who they most wanted to be on Twitter. Students picked their top three, and I used their preferences to assign each character to one student. The students were sworn to secrecy to not share the identity of their Twitter persona. Students, over a period of ten days, created ten tweet clues in character as if they were their actual Twitter persona. They even changed their Twitter photo to match their character. The first student to correctly guess everyone's identity received the incredible award of sitting in my big comfy rolling chair for the day. I was surprised that this award was so appealing and inspired so much competition. By the second day, students were already on to me though. They claimed that I came up with this assignment so that they would have to read through the whole book to discover everyone's identity - busted- but it didn't matter because they kept participating. Plus, students learned how to create a persona. In the beginning, student tweets were rather weak. See some examples below:

I am the master builder.

I made the god's angry.

I labored long and hard.

Students tried their best to follow the rubric I provided in class, but I realized I had to create better models of a Twitter persona. I became Apollo and added my tweets to the rubric as an example. I also have to recommend the book Oh My Gods! by Scholastic for example tweets. The book even provides example Facebook pages for the Greek gods. I began to post my favorite student tweets on our class blog page to inspire students to create better tweets. See a few of my favorites below:

Shoot...you think you have a big mouth... you apparently haven't seen what I have eaten. (Cronus Persona)

Ha Ha King Minos you can't catch me now. (Icarus Persona)

Hey Theseus you know I am a better hero than you. (Hercules Persona)

I am so selfish...How could I have let it get this bad... a war over me... It's really not that worth it. =( (Helen Persona)

I can't wait to open my gift! (Pandora Persona)

I used a Google spreadsheet to create a list of each Twitter account and a word bank for each persona that students had to research. Students filled out the spreadsheet as they guessed each identity, and they shared the spreadsheet with me when it was complete. If you are interested in seeing the links to my rubric, spreadsheet, and the directions I gave the students, visit the link to the Twitter Assignment on our class blog page.

I am considering how my students might use Twitter next. I like NPR's recent use of Twitter. They asked people to tweet about the year 2009 in one word; participants could also Facebook the word. Then NPR created a wordle out of the words they received. In a wordle, the most repeated word is the largest. I am going to steal this idea because I am Hermes, the God of Thievery (all of the good teachers are Hermes), so I think I will ask my students to tweet the one word that sums up 2009 for them, and maybe they will also find 2009 full of change and challenge, but somewhat awesome and hopeful too. See the NPR wordle below:

Read the NPR article here: NPR's The Year 2009 in one word.

Ruminations on Favorite Lessons

At this time of year, I reflect over lessons and think about what to keep, what to improve, and what to replace as I reorganize and prepare to pack up my stuff for the summer. Often, my colleagues and I show up at lunch clutching some beloved handouts as we put away files for the year; “Do you think you could use this?” “I found this worked well…” “What do you think I need to add to this one?” During these informal share sessions, I’ve gotten the seeds for some of my favorite and most useful lessons, so I thought I’d start an online version for us virtual colleagues. Every time I put away my research essay unit binder, my hand lingers affectionately over assignments for the Annotated Bibliography. I started using it in my research essay unit about five years ago, and each year, I think it serves students more and more.

When I was a girl, long, long ago in the eighties, we found our research sources via the card catalog and the Readers’ Guide to Periodicals. I only found as many articles as I was willing to fill out little slips of paper and ask to be retrieved from the shelves for me. Today, with the click of the mouse, my students find thousands of sources. As they select the HTML or PDF full text files, all the sources show up and print out in near identical appearance to each other. Back in my day, I looked at the hard copy article within its original publication. The ads on opposing pages, the pictures and font all gave me information about the source’s quality even if I didn’t actively realize it at first. I knew a medical journal must be more academic than a magazine just from its boring goldenrod cover and Times Roman typeset. For my students, all that peripheral information has been stripped away. The Annotated Bibliography process helps put it back.

I adapted directions I found on Cornell’s website. Students use the process to vet about ten sources before they sit down to begin organizing the essay itself. Initially, students think the process will be easy. In fact, it is easy, but it is also time consuming because it requires critical thinking. As students complete the steps, they need to ask themselves, who wrote this source? Per instruction, students “Google” authors’ names to find information they can use to establish credibility. We practice all these steps together, and then students repeat the process on new sources independently. I ask them to complete the annotations on ten sources, and let them reject some of those sources as inadequate, trying to communicate that not everything is of equal quality just because it all looks the same when found through a library database.

This process takes a couple of weeks. As students work on the project for homework, I do classroom lessons on reading and taking notes, paraphrasing, and how to write Works Cited entries. The work can be rote, but students tend to find the process empowering, too. This process provides clear, distinct steps for determining the “good” stuff from the “not so good” stuff, and my students are glad for the tool. Because the Annotated Bibliography repeats the process for each source, it lends itself to differentiation, too. Students can learn the steps and then re-apply them, working at their own paces. I can direct students to sources appropriate for their reading level, too. Not everyone gets it right the first time through; I let students revise the document until all the annotations are high quality. Sometimes students thrill me during this revision process and say things like, “Actually, I’m not going to use that source at all. I couldn’t really establish the author’s credibility, so I think I’m going to find something else.”

Writing a good research essay takes experience, but an Annotated Bibliography can really be mastered the first time out once students understand the process. I like including this assignment in our research process, not only for the enhanced research skills and critical thinking it provides, but for the sense of accomplishment it gives students during what can often be a long and wearying process. I’m always on the look out for processes that improve the research essay unit!

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Educator

Is Differentiation of Instruction Part of the Job?

My father told me and my sisters, “Anyone can teach the kids who get it. The real challenge is teaching the kids who don’t get it at first.” We’ve all taken the challenge. One of the ways I’ve met the varying needs of students in my mainstreamed classroom is by differentiating my lessons. So an article in last week’s Washington Post disturbed me…In “Waiting Too Late to Test: Parents Protest as Area Schools Delay Learning Disabilities Screening in Hopes of Avoiding Costly Special Education,” Michael Alison Chandler writes that schools in the D.C. metro area favor “response to intervention” (RTI) techniques instead of learning disabilities testing. RTI techniques can include moving a student to the front of the room or grouping students who need to work on a particular skill together for review. These are the kinds of things I do when I differentiate a lesson to meet various students’ needs—what’s the problem?

I kept reading, and Chandler continues: "Many educators say learning disabilities have been over-diagnosed and are seeking ways to address learning difficulties in mainstream classrooms, rather than addressing them through special education for as much as twice the cost. Loudoun officials estimate their cost per pupil in special education is $22,000 a year, compared with $12,000 for most students…For many school systems, RTI-influenced strategies have led to a significant drop in the number of special education students. In Charles County, special education enrollment has fallen to 8 percent from 12 percent in 1999. In Frederick County over the same period, the rate dropped to 11 percent from 17 percent. Loudoun's rate fell to 10 percent from 12 percent in 2001. The national average is about 14 percent."

Chandler also explains that: "The national movement reflects the emphasis on quality teaching and on raising student achievement in the federal No Child Left Behind law, said William W. Knudsen, deputy assistant secretary for special education and rehabilitative services. Too many students, he said, are funneled to special education because they have not been taught appropriately or have not been well prepared for school…Many school systems, including Loudoun, have sought to revamp general education programs in response to concerns about high numbers of minority students who flow into special education. African Americans make up about 8 percent of Loudoun students, but they constituted about 12 percent of the county's special education population last year."

Okay, well now I’m riveted because the high numbers of minority students in special education have concerned me for years. If we in education are classifying students who don’t actually have disabilities, that frightens me. However, Chandler goes on to report that some parents feel these RTI steps don’t serve students; the article suggests that RTI strategies keep students from services they need so schools can save money. The accusation stung. I’m not a special educator, but I’m the mainstreamed teacher who often works with classified kids, differentiating my instruction with RTI strategies to service students. In fact, I think of that as my actual job, yet Chandler portrays me as sort of stuck with a kid who needs to be self-contained. I’ve never met a special educator who tried not to serve kids, either, and the characterization of special educators trying to pinch pennies upsets me. I needed clarification on how schools actually use RTI, so I called my former college roommate, a speech-language pathologist and special educator in Montgomery County Public Schools, another D.C. metro-area school district.

My friend explained that the discrepancy model for diagnosing learning disabilities looks for a discrepancy between IQ and achievement scores on tests; however, other factors could contribute to that discrepancy, especially in the first years of education. Did the student miss a lot of school last year? Does the family read a lot? Did the student have Teacher A instead of Teacher B? Did the class learn phonics too early in the year for this student’s readiness? The way I understand her explanation, the student might be behind rather than disabled. The federal law requires that students be in the “least restrictive environment.” It alarms special educators that they have diagnosed disproportionate amounts of minority and poor children. So the RTI techniques gather more data before the steps of labeling and self-containment are pursued. Yes, RTI means classroom teachers need to differentiate instruction and keep data on these kids. If these strategies are employed faithfully and students show “resistance to intervention,” then they will continue the process of classification. It’s an intermediate step to verify diagnosis, not a refusal to serve. My friend pointed out that maybe Loudon County should spend $15,000 to $18,000 on “normal” students, lowering class size and providing classroom aides, perhaps catching students up who fall behind without formal RTI techniques; $22,000 versus $12,000 is one heck of a difference! Gathering more data can prevent students from being classified with deficits they might not have. If a student isn’t really learning disabled, should we really classify him or her?

She and I discussed how we’ve come a long way from the stigma of special education that our peers experienced when we were in school twenty years ago. Chandler characterizes parents as seeking classification for their children; years ago, people resisted the label of special education. It’s terrific that we’ve moved passed the stigma, but there’s no reason to label average kids who have fallen behind simply because we find being average less desirable than being “special needs.” Shouldn't we take steps like RTI before categorizing a kid and moving him or her to new teachers in a new classroom?

My friend and I have known each other for almost twenty years, and we’ve both worked in education for over ten. We’ve discussed various aspects of education innumerable times. When we spoke about this topic of who is and who isn't "special ed" this past weekend, however, she said something I’d never heard her say before: “Sometimes classroom teachers will say to me, ‘I’ve got one of your kids.’ How did the kid become mine and not theirs? Don't all these kids belong to all of us?” Her comment struck me because I’ve said that to various special educators across the years. I don’t really know what I meant by it, but I’m a big enough believer in the power of language to stop saying it now. Does an IEP or a 504 or RTI make a kid not “mine” even when he or she sits in my own classroom? Am I the teacher to the normal? Am I reinforcing the idea parents have that I don't teach students who have learning difficulties?

Essentially, I’m offended by the characterization of teachers in Chandler’s article. I haven’t found that special educators seek placement for students to save money, and I don’t hang around with teachers who resist the concept that they should differentiate instruction to meet a variety of student needs or feel that doing so isn’t part of their job. I think RTI strategies are part of good teaching rather than part of a conspiracy to help schools save money by not meeting students’ needs. However, Chandler’s article prompted me to examine my perspective on students with special needs, and while I’m still confident I differentiate well, I’ve realized I need to broaden my sense of which kids “belong” to me. In the meantime, I agree with my friend…let’s spend more on the “average” kid and just see how much improvement we can get…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Educator

I Need Spirits--Yes, I Do. I Need Spirits--How 'Bout You?

So, umm…I’m wrapped a little tight. I like routine, which is part of what I love about education. I think the comma really, really matters. So things like Homecoming and its preceding Spirit Week can make my eyes twitch. Sometimes Spirit Week made them roll in their sockets. Okay, to be fair, just the left eye…

It took me a few years to understand that Spirit Week is the week when adolescence trumps education, and that’s okay for one week. Theoretically, I’m all for school spirit, pep rallies, big games, parades, and formal dances; it’s just in practice that I get anxious. Early in my teaching career, I thought I could stem the Spirit Week tide, but I soon learned to go along for the ride. One week, right? It’s not like I was SGA sponsor! (God bless SGA sponsors…) Spirit Week winds the student body up like a top, and teachers just need to guide the spin through Friday…

What would Monday of Spirit Week bring? Pajama Day? Hat Day? The variance from normalcy started slowly. I actually liked Pajama Day. Not because I participated, but because teenagers who wear very little clothing on a regular day tended to wear darling, modest flannel p.j. sets, complete with pig tails or sleeping caps and the whole thing smacks of Peter Pan in a way I find charming. Because of my before-mentioned leaning towards tension, I did worry about a fire drill with so many students clad in stuffed animal slippers that didn’t lend themselves to actual locomotion, but I digress…

By Thursday, the pulse of energy amongst the students began to make my own heart palpitate. Thursday was often Mix and Match Day. By then, any students in my classes of disengaged learners who were invested in the school in any way were probably absent due to hallway decoration/float building/dance organization/pep rally preparation or the like. Those of us who remained eyed each other warily. My students dared me to teach a lesson of consequence during Spirit Week. Would I prove such a Spirit Week Scrooge? Mix and Match Day’s disconcerting visual montage exacerbated my anal disposition’s discomfort that the school had wandered from the rigidity I knew and loved. Students neatly braided half their heads but allowed the other half to flow freely. One high heel would be worn while a flip flop slapped alongside it. Jarring color combinations swirled around during hall change. Eventually, I found it easier if I stayed up ludicrously late Thursday night, for total exhaustion would make it easier to ride the surreal wave of Friday…

Ah, Friday of Spirit Week…Students wore the school colors on their…well, on every conceivable surface. Change of class became the center of the day; classes are merely where students must wait for the real action, doled out in four to six minutes of passing time. The bell schedule was modified to allow for the pep rally that would be held at the end of the day. I actually relaxed on Friday. In my sleep-deprived haze, I realized my world of forty-two minute lessons subdivided into six or twelve minute tasks could not exist. No administrators asked about NCLB goals or if my county objectives were on the board. “Thank you for coming in,” they said as they rush by with their walkie-talkies. “Let’s stick together!”

My first high school pep rally as a teacher scared me. Coming in rested, I remained completely aware that we, 172 adults, had grouped approximately 2200 students into one room, which pulsed like a hive and gave off heat from the bleachers in those strange swirly waves like pavement on a highway in August. Then, the band played music, and speakers encouraged the student-bleacher conglomeration to stand, to compete by grade level, to wave…Young girls in tiny outfits (yes, exactly like American Beauty) roused strong feelings in our hormonal crowd. The potential for disaster made my mouth dry. In front of the doors stood twenty or so of us adults, the rest of us peppered around the gymnasium as assigned by a diagram found in our boxes two days earlier…Our front line consisted of six to eight men, most of whom suffered from at least one of the following: bum knee, lumbago, high blood pressure, asthma, or gout.

With experience, I realized that total disaster rarely rages at a pep rally because the students mostly—wait for it—enjoy it! High school consists of a huge social component, and even students who don’t care for school spirit, sports teams, or competitions, certainly enjoy the anarchy Homecoming imposes on the school structure. Students who didn’t necessarily excel in my class might excel at the many venues Spirit Week and Homecoming provide, and because it happened right during school, I got to see and admire it. Heck, a pep rally can make stars out of the band members! I learned to wait a week to cure illiteracy and eradicate lazy thinking. Besides, the week after Spirit Week would be fantastic. Students took at least three days to replenish their stores of energy, and I got a lot done in that time…What kind of spirit does Spirit Week rouse in you?

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher