IWBNet Pty Ltd

supporting digital classrooms, digital schools

Are you ready? How we prepare our students for learning

By Leave a Comment

Barb and Kirsten have been friends since joining Monash University’s Office of Learning and Teaching (formerly Office of the Vice-Provost Learning and Teaching) in 2014. As part of a team of recently appointed educational designers, they set about creating just-in-time resources for teachers (BYTES) that would assist them in building knowledge and skills for applying active learning in the student-centred education landscape that lessens the reliance on didactic teaching.

Are you ready? How we prepare our students for learning

Unit Enhancement began in earnest at Monash University as part of the bigger picture of improving learning and teaching. The message was simple and to the point. Scaffold learning through the introduction of pre- and post-class activities, active learning in the face-to-face time, constructive alignment, and formative assessment. This effective framework includes guidelines and resources to support the development of learning materials and activities for both face-to-face and online modes that effectively blur the line between the modes to create an enhanced learning experience.

After moving into faculties, both Barb and Kirsten have developed blended learning approaches that have clearly articulated learning pathways that scaffold the students as they build cognitive frameworks to support the construction of learning. Together with a science educator, Barb published a study on the blended learning approach in one science unit.

Our role in the faculties has been critical to a change in teaching approaches and adoption of active learning pedagogy. Previously, lectures have been very content heavy, with lecturers relying on students doing the pre-reading. This has been a model of teaching in universities for generations but it does not actually facilitate learning in that valuable face to face time.  Instead, lecturers found themselves going back over content that students could have / should have engaged with through reading. Students came to lectures unprepared and thereby not cognitively ready to process the new information or concepts.

By supporting teachers through a changing paradigm from didactic to flipped and active learning, we have enabled an environment of rich learning experiences for both the educator and the student.

In our workshop at FlipCon 2018 in Melbourne, we will give you the framework and strategies to help you develop your own active learning pedagogy. This will free you from a didactic approach and give you more time to scaffold your students through learning materials and assessments that are complex and require the development of higher order thinking skills.

References:

Gleadow R, Macfarlan B and Honeydew M. Design for learning – a case study of blended learning in a science unit [version 2; referees: 2 approved]. F1000Research 2015, 4:898
(doi: 10.12688/f1000research.7032.2)

KNOW /ACT/ REFLECT and FLIPPED LEARNING

By 1 Comment

You know when you have hit upon the right flow when it is easy and yet fits into a problem niche like a glove.

Our cluster of schools have a learning cycle we have developed KNOW/ACT/REFLECT and when we need to include evidence the KAR becomes KARE. We were using this to engage our teachers and learnings in a shared language around the learning cycle and this was going very well ….but …… it needed supercharging!

Teachers were quite rightly inquiry strategy jaded and yes this seemed (although a very good one) to be just another version of an inquiry model. Enter flipped learning  – or in our case inflip learning and BOOM innovation central!

Here is a short video explaining this learning model

It is important to note that this model is fluid and not linear as at any moment a learner may be at any stage of the process.

Key guiding questions to each phase are outlined below

Know Phase

    

Teacher Learner
What is the distilled knowledge and or skills I need to impart to the learner ?

What is the best way to model this?

What do I need to create or curate for this ?

How will I make this resource accessible ?

How will I evaluate the effect?

What do we know about the students next steps in learning?

What do we know is the best practice for delivering the needed content, skills and competencies.

What do we know about the curriculum area?

What do we know about the digital options?

These ideas build on the TPACK model from Mishra & Koehler, 2006. http://www.matt-koehler.com/tpack/tpack-explained/

 What am I learning?

Why am I learning?

How will I know I have understood this?

How can I re access this if I need to?

Act Phase

      

Teacher Learner
What active learning am I promoting ?

How can I triage the learning levels from the previous phase?

How is the knowledge being applied?

How can we dive deeper?

Relationship based teaching

What are the planned for deliberate acts of teaching and steps in learning?

Is there any pre learning / resource gathering etc that the teacher needs to do?

What are the learning intentions and success criteria for the lesson?

What are the actions that the learner will be expected to complete?

Using the SMAR model to construct lessons that use the affordances of the digital immersion for best leverage.

http://www.elearning.tki.org.nz/Professional-learning/Teacher-inquiry/SAMR-model

 What can I do with my knowledge?

What do I need to practice and develop?

How can I utilize my teacher time ?

Go back and re use the flipped resource if needed?

Reflect Phase

Teacher Learner
Formative or Summative ?

Am I gathering evidence?

Mastery ?

Were the resources / learning experiences effective?

What does this change for next time ?

How successful was the teaching and learning experience? Use of both teacher and learner voice, assessment data and SC reflections information.

What is now the next step for teaching and learning for the student/s?

How did the activity measure on the SMAR scale what could be changed to move further?

 Where to next?

Do I know enough?

Do I want to explore more?

Has my outcome demonstrated my learning?

How can I share this ?

Create a new flipped resource as evidence of learning ?

The individual space is all about the Know phase while the group space is used for the active learning time or ACT phase. The way the flip learning meta strategy supports teachers to create a learning process for students is super energising for educators and just makes sense to parents who often reflect on this as “wishing they had   been taught like this.

My name is Beth Lamb and I’ll be presenting at both FlipCon NZ (Auckland 7, 8 Sept) and FlipCon AUS (Melbourne 14, 15 Sept). I’d love you to come along and say hi – www.flipconaus.com

Why do my students’ grades improve with flipped learning?

By Leave a Comment

Just like all teachers, at the beginning of the year, I check out the available data on my new students regarding their grades last year. I then promptly forget this information due to the frenetic pace of the first few weeks of term. I then get to know my students in my in-class flipped mastery classroom and make my own evaluation of my students. I think that I am able to predict those students who will get As in my subject because they demonstrate grit, and agency and are progressing through the course well. So, I was surprised the other day when I went back to the data and found that a good number of students that I thought would get As actually got Cs last year.

I naturally reflected on what was going on here. I think the explanation is that the students respond well to a flipped learning classroom and my students had not previously experienced it. So what is it about flipped learning that is most likely to benefit these students? I think there are a number of reasons why my students respond favourably to flipped learning.

Active, student-centred learning:

In Alison King’s (1993) seminal work “from Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side” she says that students are not empty vessels filled passively by an instructor lecturing content but instead, understanding is actively constructed (King, 1993).  Flipped learning increases the amount of time students spend engaged in active learning because the teacher is not the “sage on the stage” but the “guide on the side”.

Prince (2004) defined active learning as “any instructional method that engages students in the learning process…….Active learning requires students to do meaningful learning activities and think about what they are doing”. Active learning has been found to increase student performance (Freeman, et.al., 2014). Flipped learning is a pedagogy that facilitates students to engage in active learning (Abeysekera and Dawson, 2015).

Flipped learning emphasizes student-centred, active learning in the group space through a variety of rich, meaningful learning experiences that explore concepts in greater depth and complexity and support the students’ construction of knowledge (Bergmann and Samms, 2012; Talbert, 2017).

Differentiation:

Flipped learning allows all students to work at their own pace. In the individual space, they can pause and rewind the video as often as they like, they can take a little longer to take better notes and they can go back and re-watch the videos later.

The role of the teacher in the flipped classroom also allows differentiated instruction and support for every student every day.  By interacting with every student, in every class, the teacher can tailor their support to the individual student, if and when they need it. In a traditional classroom, it is often the best students that get the most attention from the teacher because they are asking and answering the questions. Whereas, in a flipped classroom, the students that struggle the most get the most help.  “We think that this may be the single most important reason students thrive in the flipped model” (Bergmann & Sams, 2012, p.23).

Relationships:

Jo Boaler (2002) says that interactions between students and the teacher and between students are an essential part of a student’s learning and development. The interactions between students and the teacher in a flipped classroom are more frequent than the traditional classroom model (Bergmann and Samms, 2012). “Flipping allows us to build better relationships with our students” (Bergmann and Samms, 2012).

The reasons I think that my students respond well to the flipped classroom are because of the increased active, student-centred, learning, the differentiated instruction and the rich relationships. Perhaps there are other reasons as well. All I know is that many of my students show significant improvement in their grades in the flipped classroom.

Post script to this post is that the first assessment has now been graded and it has confirmed my suspicions that students are performing better this year in a flipped classroom.

Please join me @ FlipCon NZ or FlipCon Australia where I will be running a Cohort and presenting a break-out, I’d love you to come and say Hi – www.flipconaus.com

References:

Abeysekera, L., & Dawson, P. (2015). Motivation and cognitive load in the flipped classroom: Definition, rationale and a call for research. Higher Education Research & Development, 34(1), 1-14. 10.1080/07294360.2014.934336

Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2012). Flip your classroom: Reach every student in every class every day. International Society for Technology in Education.

Boaler, J. (2002). Learning from teaching: Exploring the relationship between reform curriculum and equity. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 33(4), 239-258.

Freeman, S., Eddy, S.L., McDonough, M., Smith, M.K., Okorafor, N., Jordt, H., and Wenderoth, M.P., (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 111 (23), 8410-8415.

King, A. (1993). From sage on the stage to guide on the side. College teaching, 41(1), 30-35.

Prince, M. (2004). Does active learning work? A review of the research. Journal of Engineering Education, 93(3), 223-231. 10.1002/j.2168-9830.2004.tb00809.x

Talbert, R. (2017). Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Using social media for assessments

By Leave a Comment

I sat in a taxi in Sydney last year, on my way to indulge in another large helping of steamed dumplings in my quest to try all of the top 8 dumpling restaurants Sydney has to offer. (as voted by website Concrete Playground). The taxi driver was a middle aged gentleman of Greek origin. I asked him about his opinion of Uber. Did he hate them? Had business slowed since their inclusion into the market? etc. He told me to open his glove box. To my surprise, within the glovebox was his Uber identification tag. He had a foot in each camp! He had accepted that Uber was here to stay and slumping in his seat and complaining about it wasn’t going to get his bills paid. To cut a long story short the main learning I took away from this interaction is that we can choose to take one of two options. Embrace the trends or fight the trends.

This train of thought is something I have always sort of followed but never really embraced. The taxi driver had inspired me to not only embrace the trends but to accelerate them. Make them my own and use them to my advantage in an educational setting. Things like the bottle flip, dabbing, fidget spinners, memes etc. have been banned in some schools, whereas I see them as an opportunity to teach projectile motion, angles of a triangle, reflection or a relevant way to bring up and discuss social inequity, assumptions and bias.

An example of an educator who is not embracing trends. (used with permission from Mr. Jones online from Teachers pay teachers)

This is where social media comes in. Do we embrace it, or do we fight it?

For me it is a no brainer. After meeting this motivational taxi/ Uber driver I set myself the goal to use Social media as a means for assessment, both in a formative and summative manner.

These are some of the success stories.

Formative assessment:

This was an important one for allowing me to check the students understanding of the content. It was an excellent way to transition the move from the ‘individual’ to the ‘group’ space of the flipped classroom.

I instructed the students to use Snapchat for this. I asked them to summarise or take key points from a video, complete a two truths one lie, do a three level reading guide on a text or any sort of activity where they needed to think about and exhibit an understanding of the content. Once they had created a video using Snapchat they were to save it to their camera roll and then post it onto our class Facebook page. The buy in from students was excellent. Feedback from the class showed that they didn’t mind putting themselves out there for others to see when there was a fun element to it, when they could use a filter to disguise their faces and their voices, and when they could quickly check any notifications they had.

 

Some examples of students who have used Snapchat filters to record their responses. (used with permission from the students)

 

Facebook obviously allows you to post videos and other content to your classroom group. I will often put up a video or a link to an article and ask the students to leave a comment which shows their understanding. This allows the students to learn off each other, especially if you have the students in some sort of ability grouping. Students who are lower ability might only need to make a literal statement directly from the text or video whereas someone of a higher ability may be asked to write a comment from a much more critical lens. Going ‘live’ and the new ‘watch party’ feature on Facebook have opened up other avenues of viewing content as a class and could prove to be very useful in the future. Colleagues of mine have set up a Facebook chat for homework where students have had to meet online at a certain time and talk about a specific topic. Although this was optional, it had excellent buy in from the students and some valuable learning came from it.

Summative assessment:

Many sportsmen and sportswomen are setting up “athlete” Facebook pages. Even people who have only been going to the gym for a week or two are setting up fitness based Instagram and Facebook pages too.

This made me think about how I could use the same format for my students. Being a PE teacher who is teaching contextualised courses which are based around improving a students own ability in a sport, it was easy to follow the “athlete” page model. Students had to create a profile, using their school email address as their login. They could make it a page or group depending on whether or not they wanted to keep it private. They could also choose not to make it public or not to publish it at all. This worked particularly well for an assessment where the students had to reflect on their participation in an activity and discuss the factors involved. Typically they would have done this in a diary type format but Facebook allowed them to post their response immediately and also gave them the option of adding in video and photos as evidence. I have seen the same standards being assessed in a similar way on Instagram. Any sort of assessment that requires a portfolio of evidence could be used here.

An example of a post from a students “athlete” page. It is a reflection of their use of interpersonal skills throughout a lesson.

Some of my colleagues from the English department followed suit and allowed their students to set up a Facebook page on which they critiqued the books they were reading and completed reading responses.

I have also seen public pages created by students which contain information about a set topic. The page itself is the assessment and the student needs to have a certain number of resources, posts etc. Making a page designed to create change in a community is a possibility for a number of Health based topics.

These are just a couple of ways that you can use social media to enhance your classroom practice. At the end of the day student buy in is a very important part of being successful on a day to day basis. Using tools, techniques and technology that students are familiar and comfortable with can be a big positive. When a new trend comes along think about how you might be able to use it to your advantage, don’t be scared of it. Go with the trends and don’t concern yourself with what cannot be controlled. Embrace the trends and make them your own!

Perks of a Flipped Primary Classroom

By Leave a Comment

“Perks of a Flipped Primary Classroom – You can do it too!”

Written by Matt Burns

There are some teachers who think that the flipped classroom is just for high school. I don’t agree. In a sense – it all depends how you define ‘The Flipped Classroom’.

If your definition of the Flipped Classroom is this: ‘a classroom in which all the instructional content is viewed at that home, and in which the homework is done in class’, then yes, I would agree with you. The Flipped Classroom is probably not for primary schools.

But I do not think that is an accurate definition of the Flipped Classroom. I prefer Aaron Sam’s definition (a leader in this movement) first posted on his blog in 2011.

When you read anything about The Flipped Classroom mentally substitute:

“a class that uses screencasts as an instructional tool” for “the Flipped Classroom” and all will be well.”

I hope that opens a few doors for you. All we are really talking about today is the concept of using screencasts, or ‘learning videos’ in order to help your students learn (in or out of the classroom).

I have been doing this for five years in my primary classroom. And I have seen the results. My classroom is transformed. It is transformed for the better. The students learning has improved, and they prefer it. I’ve got more time to work one-on-one with particular groups or individuals. Furthermore – I am able to differentiate the curriculum to a degree which I was not able to previously.

I suggest it’s all down to personal devices being more available to individuals, and the latent growth of Wi-Fi we have seen in classrooms, and a little creative-thinking. That’s it. In a nutshell, there are new technologies available that can dramatically (for the better) change how we as teachers teach. It’s not rocket science.

How can you do it? Make some screencasts or learning videos that you think you can use in your classroom (students tend to prefer your own). The videos do not need to be Hollywood productions. They just need to be. Here is a pretty basic example of a very low – tech video that I put together recently, that my students found very helpful.

You can incorporate screencasts into the students learning in any way that works for you – and the students. Perhaps you can have them watch the lessons at home? (This doesn’t really work for me. Though…it might for you.)

Perhaps you could put them into small groups and have different groups engaged in different lessons pertinent to their specific needs? (I tend to do this a bit.) A regular practice for me is to perform a pre-test with the students (before the final summative assessment). In this way I very quickly, in an ad hoc manner – gather some information with the students about what they are specifically struggling on. After this, students access topic specific screencast that the pre-test has revealed they need some help with. The screen casts contain brief lessons and activities within. I am then able to then wander around the classroom helping individual students as they need, whilst really, the entire class is receiving multiple different lessons pertaining to their specific needs.

Another classic example is the weekly spelling test. Are you still reading out one list for all the students to write down? Are you still waiting for the slowest speller to move at the pace of the class? You don’t need to do it this way. You could record the spelling list on You-Tube and students could access it, at their own speed on separate devices.

Yesterday I had six girls away at the soccer competition. It was four days before the highly important yearly standardized (NAPLAN) testing we complete across Australia in Year 5. They missed a very important writing lesson. The lesson itself was broken up into separate parts and took about one and a half hours. The lesson was not all lecture. There was plenty of ‘listen and do’ in the lesson. I made a very basic recording of the entire lesson in 15 minute segments, as I taught it. I just used my ordinary old iPhone to record and the ‘old-school’ whiteboard (not electronic).

All the girls came in the next day, put on their headphones, accessed their devices, turned on the lesson, and caught up to the rest of the class. Here’s one small part of the lesson. Please notice how basic it is! 🙂 It didn’t have to great. It just had to be available. (So pleased with the ‘still-image’ YouTube has captured.)

I asked the girls did they feel part of the lesson? They said yes. Subsequently, I saw the girls’ writing. It was more than adequate. They were prepared for the exam. Of course, students will need devices. They will also need headphones. This you will have to sort.Technology is changing. And so should teaching. Some people think that students can’t learn from devices. That’s simply not true. Of course they can. At this point, what student can’t do with devices is debate, collaborate and empathise with. Devices will not be able to facilitate the lesson. Students still need each other, and you.

But the days of standing out the front delivering one lecture to the class, in one place, at one time, at one pace?

I think, given the Wi-Fi access that we have today and the devices available to many students, those days are probably coming to a close.

Matt Burns is the Stage 3 Coordinator and Tech Integrator at William Carey Christian School, Sydney, Australia.

Previously he was the Flipped Classroom Coach K-12 at Inaburra School, Sydney, Australia.

Matt will be leading a Cohort workshop at the International Flipped Learning Conference, RESCON being held at Griffith University on 18 & 19 October 2019 called Flipping the K-6 Classroom. Take a look at the program @ https://www.resconanz.com/

Matt’s Blog – http://flippingmyprimaryclassroom.blogspot.com.au/