It happened again! My students dressed up in blue shirts and khaki pants for my birthday! (I promise, there is no grade or reward associated with this behavior.)

Here’s a picture that was taken during 2nd period:

They decorated my room and brought food for the occasion as well:

In 3rd period, I got another cake:

And here’s the girl who made it:

And another student who didn’t make it into the first picture:

Then, we took another picture after lunch, with more BSKPers. This was taken by the girl sitting in front:

It was a fantastic day!! I adore my students so much, and I hope they realize how good they look when they dress like this!!

Thank you all for another great memory!!

The dynamic in the classroom is changing in more ways than we think. The “millennials” – as some have dubbed this generation of learners – are people who are more connected, more tech-savvy, and more collaborative than previous generations, but they also want an open and honest relationship with those in charge, where their opinion is valued. In short, they want to be appreciated as individuals, not just numerically assessed on the basis of their skills in the classroom.

This boils down to the concept of respect. Back when I was in high school, most teachers demanded respect from learners because, well, the teacher was in charge, and that was all there was to it. Any learner who truly wanted to learn just had to deal with whomever was in charge, since that person held all of the information. And in the days where physical encyclopedias were our “internet”, there were not many other options for instruction.

Back to today, teachers have less power than before, since we are no longer the only source of information, and learners know that even if they aren’t engaged during class, they can easily get the information later, from some other forum, if they really want to.

So is respect for teachers no longer necessary? Absolutely not.  Respect for one’s elders is still an important concept for learners to understand and apply well into their adulthood. So how do we as teachers get that respect? Easy, we as teachers must demonstrate respect by showing it to the learners first. Like many other interpersonal skills, this needs to be modeled. This can be accomplished in many ways, but they go against a lot of things that we’ve “always done”:

First, get to know your students. Know their interests, their hobbies, their favorite music and movies, and most importantly, know the way they learn best. If you know each student, you can easily individualize instruction for them.

Second, give students options for demonstrating what you want them to know. Allow creativity, ask questions that allow them to have an answer that they can give their personal voice to. Assessments don’t always have to be tests, although testing can be presented as an option along with a menu of other options.

Third, give students options regarding the curriculum itself. Give learners the list of topics that needs to be covered, and let them choose the order.

I understand that there are many issues that can arise from these ideas. For example, what if we teach multiple sections of the same course, and different sections want to learn in different orders? Well, this is why being a “good” teacher today is different from being a good teacher years ago. In fact, the entire job description has changed, despite many teachers’ attempts to fight it.

Above all else, the most important thing is to separate the results in your class (grades and behavior) from the learners as people. Learners need to know that they created the consequences they received, and I refuse to take any situation personally. I still genuinely care about them as people, and giving consequences is simply part of my job.

This is one of the reasons I am glad I flipped my classroom. I now have time to get to know my students. I now can plan for varying assessments that allow learners to express themselves while demonstrating deep understanding. I now have flexibility to have classes of learners watch videos in the order they choose. I now have time to explain consequences and use the explanation to clarify our relationship. As a result, mutual respect is evident in my classes, because I can have conversations with learners about their interests, and still hold them to a standard of expectations that they are more than happy to meet.

It’s been said that the biggest benefit of the flipped classroom model is increased face-to-face teaching time. But I think we can go one step further and improve our person-to-person time.

This is my entry into the “Flip This Classroom” contest. The winner gets to choose a Steelcase classroom furniture configuration. Wish me luck!! WATCH HERE !!

So far, I am having a fantastic year! I’ve kept the flip going for the second year, and have added some things to allow students to take ownership of their learning:

• iTunes U – My IB Math course is now publicly available! Check it out here! This took some time to get all of the students enrolled, but since I also implemented the First Five Days again this year, I had some time to get everyone enrolled before the first day of actual curriculum. With one exception, all of my students are enrolled in the iTunes U course. The one student is more comfortable on a laptop, so I directed him to the website I created last year, with the same videos and activities, so he’s not missing anything.

• Flip Discussion – In Algebra 2, I decided to spend one day at the beginning of each unit talking about the concepts and seeing how much they know before any new material is presented. I am surprised at how much my students remember about systems of equations! Because of this, I can summarize the graphing, substitution, and elimination sections all in a day, and move on to solving using inverse matrices and Cramer’s Rule.

• Flip Mastery – In IB Math, students are staying on track, and some are even working ahead in order to manage their time and complete everything for all of their classes including mine. They are very grateful that I have given them all of the material in advance, allowing them to work at their own pace.

• Summary at the Beginning of Class – This is going very well. I recap the previous night’s video with a simple example and ask students if they can make an example that is more complicated. When they come up with something, I ask them to explain what they would do differently to solve the new problem. This gets them thinking about the style of questions that are asked on tests versus daily class assignments. I then allow them to work while I make myself available for individual questions.

• Unit Projects –In IB Math, students have a choice on how much they can receive as a maximum score on their end-of-unit project. For each section in the unit, if they find a problem from a different textbook or from the internet, and solve it on paper, they earn a maximum of 80. If they record their solution in a short video that explains their steps, they earn a maximum of 90. And if they make a video, or series of videos, that summarizes the entire unit, they earn a maximum of 100. We have only completed the second unit and already the results are amazing!! Almost everybody decided to go for the 100! One student went so far as to compile her videos onto a website! I asked her if I could post the link, and she said I could, so here it is!

So everything is going very well. I am excited to see what happens as the year progresses. I plan on asking students, via a Google Form survey, whether they feel the same way about this year as I do. Results will follow after I get them. Oh, and great news – two “Raw Hundos” on the very first test!

It hasn’t been a full week yet, but I’ve had a great time with my department!

This morning, at our morning meeting, most of them showed up wearing blue shirts and khaki pants!! Of course, this was the ONE day I didn’t wear my signature colors. How embarrassing.

But what an unbelievable surprise!! Thank you guys so much!! Here’s to a great year!!

Well, this is officially my second year flipping (yes, I made that logo) and it’s time to make some changes – add some things, keep some things, and take some things away. While I wish I could say it was in the name of educational progress, I have to be honest and say that it’s because I get bored with my own curriculum after each passing year, and my own compulsive behavior forces me to change it.

Firstly, this year will already be different since it is my first year as Math Department Chair. I’ve already been experiencing a lot of the stress (and I stress “stress”) associated with that, even though the stipend doesn’t kick in until this month’s paycheck. The added DC responsibility means that I am only teaching 4 out of 7 periods instead of my normal 5 out of 7.

Another change for the school this year is that all students have been issued iPads, and the expectation from above is that teachers will be finding ways to incorporate them into their daily activities … frequently. My principal gave an analogy: “It’s like when I give my son the expensive skateboard he’s been wanting – I tell him that I had better see him using it a lot!!” I think that’s reasonable, and I’m actually quite excited about the possibilities!

THINGS I WON’T CHANGE

• Room Layout – I absolutely love the changes I made to the layout of my room: my desk against the wall, student tables in groups of four, and blank walls that will eventually display their work. Unfortunately, my class now needs to hold 32 kids instead of 28, so it will be slightly less spacious. I may have to lose some weight to get around the room, but I should probably do that anyway.

• Raw Hundo Club – I also love the “Raw Hundo Club”, a series of framed pictures of those students who achieved perfect scores on assessments before the scores had been curved. It reinforces my message that while perfection is not a reasonable goal, it’s something that needs to be recognized when it happens.

THINGS I WILL ADD

• Overview Day – At the beginning of each unit, I will introduce the topic in a very general way, and students will spend the rest of the day researching that topic, finding out as much as they can on their own. Then they will share their findings as a class, prompting questions that will guide the curriculum from that day until the day of the test. This will give students complete ownership of the day-to-day calendar so that the learning is their own.
• Recap at Start of Class – By popular request, I will be providing a summary of the previous video at the beginning of each class, not by lecture, but by way of a more challenging question that they try on their own and discuss together.

• iTunes U – For my seniors, along with the website that stores all videos and video checks, they now have the option to follow the curriculum through an iTunes U course that I created over the summer. It’s a lot like the website, but more iPad-friendly. (Plus, it allowed me free use of a MacBook Pro over the summer, which is much nicer than my clunky old Dell.) Also, the videos are all my own now. (Sorry, TMatsu131, we had a good run.)
• Flip Mastery – This means I will be using the Flip Mastery model with my seniors. Hopefully this approach will get them ready for college next year. (They were epitomic “last minuters” last year, and hopefully that will change when they see all that is required of them as IB seniors this year.)
• Flip Discussion – With my underclassmen, I will use the Flip Discussion model, allowing their discussion to drive the curriculum instead of using my own calendar. I noticed that my students loved to talk and argue last year, so hopefully this will channel that gift in a more meaningful direction.
• Alternate Assessment – Also for my underclassmen, I also plan on providing alternate assessment opportunities for those who don’t want to take a paper-and-pencil test. I was going to create a menu of options, but, to make it even more student-directed, I will allow students to tell me how they wish to be evaluated. (Obviously, I will have to approve each idea beforehand, otherwise I may get a lot of Play-Doh “masterpieces” that are worth less than the tub in which they came.)

THINGS I WILL OMIT

• Busywork/Tedium – Worksheets, definitely no more worksheets. While I agree that students need practice, and I should give them resources for practice upon request, I am not requiring all students to do the same set of questions, especially since some of them don’t need as much practice as others. Instead, I will give chapter reviews at the beginning of each unit, so that they can struggle with how to solve tough problems without having all of the information and/or strategies yet. “Intentional withholding of information,” Dr. Ramsey Musallam called it. And of course, the solutions to those reviews will be provided eventually.
• I think the whole “this-is-how-to-do-it-so-do-it-with-these-examples” idea will be gone from my classroom activities. My videos definitely cover the basics of each concept, but the next day, they will have to incorporate other prior knowledge along with what they just learned in order to solve problems. They just won’t know ahead of time what prior knowledge they will need. It sounds evil, which I like, but it actually helps them.

• This notion was reinforced in me when my flight got canceled and I was stuck overnight at the airport, in a strange city, with my two boys, and my wife already in the air on a flight that did not get canceled. Under the pressures of not knowing where I was, a crying two-year-old, a fast and curious eight-year-old, and no one manning the information booths at the airport, I had to do my best. And I did okay, despite not having watched a “how to find quick inexpensive accommodations in a strange city for yourself and your two sons” video. (There is no such video, by the way.)

In summary, the concepts of creativity and critical thinking will play a strong role in my class this year, because they are truly important. But more importantly, I will be focusing on fostering curiosity in students and building strong relationships with them. I started this last year, with overwhelming success, and if it’s possible to have an even better year than that – for them, not me – well, it’s worth every ounce of effort I can give, every single day.

Yesterday, I took my 2-year-old, Rylan, to McDonald’s for breakfast, and of course, he immediately noticed the play area. Who wouldn’t? It’s brightly colored and it has a sense of danger and adventure to it. So after eating half of a hot cake, he headed over to the play area. No one else was there so he just crawled in.

He climbed upward through the play area until he was about 8 feet up. He felt a little nervous being so high up so he asked me for help – well, “cried for help” is a more accurate phrase. However, the structure he climbed was inside of a tube that was not designed to handle someone of my age or weight. So I told him I was just too big. His cries got louder, indicating that he really didn’t care how big I was, it was my fatherly duty to help him. (I’m translating, of course.)

So I made my way as far as I could and offered to help him down, but that’s not what he wanted. He wanted me to follow him through the colorful maze and see him through to the other side.

Before I weighed the pros and cons of giving in and climbing up, he had already moved on. He was all the way to the top and starting to move through the tunnel. Relieved, I wormed my way out of this contraption and watched from a safe distance. At one point, his foot got caught and he was unable to move forward or backward, and he could not wiggle his foot free. At that point, I reached up and pushed on his foot until he was able to continue. He made it the rest of the way, and slid down the long tube slide at the other end of the play area, emerging at the bottom with a huge smile, a mix of joy and pride in himself.

After that, he repeated the same path over and over again, each time getting faster with an increase in confidence. Once he felt he had mastered it, he started to explore other ways to get to the slide, and he even went to other destinations within this activity maze. When it was time to leave, the cries came back, but only because he wasn’t finished exhausting all of the possibilities of this wonderful colorful world of adventure.

I think the educational analogies are pretty obvious in this tale, but let me just summarize. Ultimately, even though students want teachers or classmates to hold their hand through new learning experiences, they get much more of a sense of accomplishment if we let them struggle, and only help them when they are genuinely stuck (a conclusion that is reached by us, not them). And our focus should not be on accomplishing a task predetermined by us, but rather on exploration of a concept so that they can experience the joy of making a seemingly new discovery on their own. And once they’ve done that, they can seek to make new discoveries, some that will pan out and others that won’t, all the while feeling like they are not wasting their time, but enjoying the process to the point where they don’t want to quit when the bell rings.

Learners should not be asking us each day, “What are we learning today?” – or, at least, not expecting a direct answer. Yes, they need to learn a long list of required skills, but does it really matter on what day a specific skill is learned? As long as they are given a general framework and tools to use, let’s let them figure out things like properties, general formulas, and even theorems – and their applications – by themselves. But always be there to give them a little nudge when they get stuck.

This week I had the opportunity and privilege to go to Stillwater, Minnesota for the 2013 Flipped Conference, aka FlipCon13. It was particularly exciting for me because I would have the opportunity to meet so many of the people that I had been chatting with every Monday night on Twitter (#flipclass).

Sure enough, I was able to meet Jon Bergmann, Aaron Sams, Brian Bennett, Cheryl Morris, Andrew Thomasson, Katie Lanier, David Fouch, Aiesha Stover, and others – in person! It was strange because, in my mind, they were like celebrities, well-known innovators in the education world. But when I met them, they were just regular people, warm and welcoming, eager to talk with others about their experiences. The people at this conference were unlike the people I’ve met at any other conference for this very reason.

Then I went to the workshops. Two words: MIND…BLOWN. So many innovations in the flipped classroom have taken place, and I am excited to try all of them! Here are some of the highlights:

Keynote address: Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams – The duo that are credited as the pioneers of the flipped classroom discussed how they are using their own philosophy of reflecting on what they’ve done in order to continually become better. Jon and Aaron traced their history together from what they referred to as “Flipped Classroom 101” to today, where the focus is on individualized instruction, differentiation, autonomy, and alternative assessment. Read the rest of this entry →

So this is the first year that I implemented the Flipped Classroom model with my students. And before I go into the details, let me just say that I am never going back to the Stand and Deliver model that so many teachers are reluctant to alter in any way.

When I decided to flip my classroom, I knew it would be a lot of planning and work ahead of time. I am still aware that I will always have to be ahead of the students now that I am making changes for next year, including video editing and changing scope and sequence. This has helped me this year because, otherwise, I would have walked in each day with a general sense of what the topic was and just winged it. But that means I would have inevitably left out somewhat important points or really good examples. My kids deserve better.

So now that I was preparing for everything ahead of time, and making pretty good videos with Smart Notebook and Smart Recorder, with video checks created with Google Forms, I could now spend more one-on-one time with the students, which was the goal all along. I could now explain concepts more clearly and give more examples, individually or in small groups. I could also answer “what if” questions for that one student that everyone has in their class at one time or another. But best of all, I could get to know my students, through simple conversation. And there was more time for them to express themselves through creative projects that had varying ideas and varying results, all good.

What were the results? I was able to get closer with the students, to the point where each period was like a family get-together. Sure, we did math, and talked about important and necessary concepts, but we enjoyed each other’s company. Sure there was typical drama, and conflicting personalities, but somehow it always seemed to resolve more quickly this year. We all knew what we had to do, and we respected each other’s need to get things done. But we laughed at each other, celebrated our successes, and just had fun. In short, I feel like I taught more and lectured less, if that makes sense.

Please keep in mind that these are my International Baccalaureate juniors and seniors, along with my “IB prep” underclassmen, so the work is rigorous and the curriculum is full. But even so, we did more than simply meet the requirements of the course. My seniors – I’m sure of it – excelled on their IB papers. All of my students expressed great creativity in showing their understanding of even the most complicated concepts.

So what do I have to show for it? My students took great joy in showing me how much fun they had this year. Earlier this year, we celebrated my birthday by having “Blue Shirt Khaki Pants Day” and most of them dressed for it. Later, I had the honor of being invited to the Top 5% Banquet by one of my brightest and funniest seniors. And now, as the year ended, I received homemade T-shirts, gift cards, letters, a signed cartoon picture of all of my seniors, and so much more. I even got a gift basket, complete with a “blue shirt khaki pants” bear, and a bag of Canadian coffee! Three of my seniors – Harini, Amanda, and Natasha – “stickied” my car with the message, “We love you, Mr. VanderSchee!” Plus there were so many tears shed by all of us at the end of the year (even from the underclassmen who would simply be getting a different teacher next year) because we would genuinely miss each other.

One of the most unexpected rewards this year was the Principal’s Award of Excellence from my principal, Mr. Jasso. I looked at the names of each person that won each year, and I can’t believe I was included in such a revered group of outstanding educators!

Now I’m thinking about next year. First off, I was offered the position of Math Department Chair, and I enthusiastically accepted. I already have some innovative ideas that I can’t wait to put in place. Next, I plan on making my classes asynchronous, a concept I heard about from my #flipclass tweeps. My students will have everything they need each unit upfront. My one rule is that they can work ahead, but they can’t fall behind. While they will have practice problems, they will not be graded. They will do as much as they need to in order to complete a more creative assignment for each lesson. This will take some getting used to on my part, but I am up for the challenge.

One criticism that I have received often this year is that my students like it when I teach in person rather than by a video. I’m thinking of resolving this by assembling a small group at the beginning of class and doing a recap of the previous evening’s lesson, with a question and answer session to follow, for those that want it.

Overall, calling this year a success would be an understatement. I absolutely LOVED this year!! The connections I made with students were stronger than ever, and what we learned from each other will not be forgotten. I know that I am not the perfect teacher, nor do I wish to be. I merely want my students to pursue their passions and build strong relationships with each other. So whatever new teaching strategy comes along that allows me to do that, I will wholeheartedly embrace.

If you had asked me to predict how this year would go, my guess would have been far less exciting than what actually happened. That said, I look forward to another great year of trying new things. I look forward to getting to know a new bunch of students. I look forward to approaching each day, motivated by what unexpected things will happen.

Yesterday, teachers were told to wear college shirts from their respective alma maters to support Gen Tx Day & ACES at our school. During lunch, a colleague asked if I had any of my shirts from “that college in Canada you went to.” I said no, and explained that they no longer fit me.  My colleague then said, “I bet if you tweeted out that you needed a T-shirt, your students would make you one.”

Challenge accepted.

Here’s the tweet:

Sure enough, two of my juniors, who admittedly should have been studying for their IB Economics paper the following morning, texted me:

And here’s the shirt:

It’s not an official UW shirt. It doesn’t have any of UW’s colors – red, black, and gold. It’s not even blue and khaki!!

But it IS the best college shirt I have ever owned!

Challenge complete. Thank you Michelle and Anita!!