The beginning - background

So, I've been thinking about, and working with our technology director on flipping the classroom. He first introduced our upper school staff to it during a training day, and it really got me thinking. I actually do many of the flipped classroom elements with my Grade 7 social studies classes already, in that we are an IB World School and so follow the Middle Years Programme. The philosophy of the programme is that lessons should be student-driven and student-centred, therefore lecturing or spending large amounts of time imparting knowledge is not the way to go. Therefore, most of the time my students are working individually or in small groups researching information and then applying this to tasks, usually assignments. The policy of our school is to have 2 grades per criteria, per semester, which does end up being quite a lot of assigment work...especially towards the end of the semester...but why? If the philosophy of the MYP is to encourage students to be risk-takers, and it completely against grading progress, why do we still do this? Anyway, I digress. 

After listening to Joe talk about the notion of the flipped classroom, and the integration of technology, I fired off an email to ask more about flipping the classroom. In return, I was given the links to blogs by Catlin Tucker and Crystal Kirch. I've found both to be incredibly helpful, in different ways. Crystal has masses of really useful information from her own classes, letter templates, reflective posts etc. etc. But, she is a maths teacher and I am not. I have always found it difficult to immediately come up with ways to apply methods from other classes to my own. Catlin is an English teacher and so slightly closer to my own subject. She has some great stuff on source analysis, for example. This is an area that my Grade 7 students really struggle with - how to analyse a source. Especially as they seem to be very used to just using whatever they find, without really thinking about the origins and purpose.

http://catlintucker.com/
http://flippingwithkirch.blogspot.fi/

Joe asked me to send him a plan for a unit I wanted to flip, I did this and we then went through his suggestions. He introduced me to some amazing sites, and incorporated my desire to introduce online games into the class as well. NoTosh has become a new favourite haunt of mine, so many amazing ideas and I would love to see these guys as keynote speakers at a conference sometime!

http://notosh.com/

So that's background in a nutshell about the start of my flipping the classroom journey! The purpose of this blog is really to allow me to throw my thoughts, ideas, opinions, reflections and general 'OMG what am I doing?!' moments onto a page, to give me a chance to reflect on my progress, my student's progress and my general feelings about flipping the classroom.