Impromptu Debate in Class

Nothing could prove to me more that my students fully understood the concept of debates than in second period today when I realized that I had a debate scheduled and no one on that debate topic. So what did I throw at them? An impromptu debate! 

I had nothing planned for second period, other than the debates as regularly scheduled. After I had the students pass back the papers that needed to be handed back, you know to give my teacher brain time to process what to do "spur of the moment" with an empty period. I got some students working on missed homework from last week, and I quickly realized that I didn't want to look at a full period of "nothing!" So I asked if anyone wanted to do an impromptu debate on the topic of dress codes. Believe it or not I had seven kids jump, and I mean JUMP at the idea of doing another debate, or for some to do their first debate just to "test the waters."

I got up and handed the students ipads, and had them quickly go through and do a small amount of research to prepare. They quickly divided out the roles of opening statement, rebuttals, and closing statement, and were furiously writing out their ideas for their own individual parts. They really just amazed me! Honestly it was a topic they were somewhat passionate about but for having no time to prepare, to really only fall back on their knowledge of what a debate was supposed to look like (based largely on what the students learned through their flipped videos) they did amazingly well!

Yet again, another super proud moment at the students ability to "show" what they know!

Debates

My first period blew me away for our very first round of group debates. The students have been working together in class, as well as outside of class using the likes of edmodo and other back channel resources to communicate and work together to be the best team they could be. The students in first periods debate on the topic "Beauty Pageants Cause More Harm than Good" proved to be adequate in handling the technology that has been made available to them. One student utilizes dropbox on his smart phone and was able to send the files of his opening statement speech and power point to me as he walked into class. The opposing team used an ipad to read their opening statement vs. printing it out. AND, when one team member forgot their thumb drive with the presentation at home another member of their group created a nearpod presentation for the closing (this wasn't a requirement nor was it something I even mentioned to them as a possibility, I was quite please that she did this one her own). So they adapted and used pieces of her nearpod presentation, which really impressed the audience. Overall the students ease of use with technology was quite impressive and it was one of those teacher moments when your students go above and beyond your expectations and you can't help but just sit back and be so proud.

This is the goal of flipping and technology integration, to give them the ideas and the room in which to work together and create something that is so much more than you ever thought they were capable of.

We have used the flipping model to go deeper into persuasive techniques and identifying fallacies. I have found that, at least with the first day of debates, that my students are doing better than ever at the critical thinking skills necessary for rebuttals both during the opening statements as well as during the rebuttal process. Overall I am pleased! Plus they have only just begun!

 

Current Interventions

Blitz Grade Campaign
Our administration sometimes comes up with kooky plans that don't pan out, and then other times when we tweak them and rework them until they become a brilliant makeup of our academic success. A few years ago we simultaneously reintroduced the idea of homerooms or advisory for our students, and moved to proficiency grading. We had moved away from teaming, due to budget issues we didn't have the staff to support it in our schedule, and we felt like we needed something to tie the teachers to the students to build relationships. Our high school was in their third year of the proficiency model, see my previous post on proficiency here, and we were trying to accommodate and prepare our students so we switched as well. Why is this important? Well, admin realized that we were spending a ton of time after school reteaching and retesting students and it was becoming a strain on teachers, there was no time to prep and grade due to the student overload after school. Thus the tweaking began... How could we change our advisory to work in our favor? To make a long story short, especially since this is background information and not really related to the topic at hand, we created an advisory that was two days of relationship and/or skill building, and two days of academic support (we don't see our advisory students on Wednesday because we have a late start built into the schedule to support CIT and PLC time).

This year we have tweaked things again, trying to make academic support work throughout the year but also provide a focus a certain crucial times. For the last few weeks we have been providing focus for each core content area for a week at a time. Each core teacher has to provide a list of students that need to come in and work on their grades. This week was language arts focus! I wanted the students to be aware of their grades, and to know they could come in and work during advisory, or even come after school. It was especially important to me because my student teacher taught prior to winter break, while on winter break she graded everything and has since moved on to her next placement, which means I get to do grade clean up on her activities. Many of the students with grade issues have just a small simple fix.

So I entitled my blitz grade campaign last week "Grades in Your Face" which I tweeted and posted on edmodo about, telling the kids to get ready and prepare for looking at their grades because some of the grades weren't pretty! I passed out a failure slip to those that were not passing my class. As well as a class print out (highlighting the 90% category pieces).

The semester change is right around the corner so having a language arts focus this week, as well as making a concentrated effort on my part to get items from students I think will only prove to be beneficial. I have already had an incident with a parent e-mailing all the teachers of that student confused and upset by the grades she was seeing for her student. Having all these things as documented ways I have intervened on behalf of the child has only made my response e-mail to the parent that much easier. So while it might take a little extra effort on my end, I have a parents that know how to have an appropriate conversation with their student.

Homework Efforts
As you know my classroom is a flipped class, we recently had a leadership meeting where the topic of homework or lack of completion of homework was brought up. Our building is trying to decide if the 90% 10% model works for middle schools. The main reason is there is a lack of accountability, we aren't the high school if a student doesn't complete their proficiencies they still move on- instead of losing a credit like at the high school. So we were arguing about if raising the 10% to 20% would raise the amount of homework completion. We have many teachers in the building, that even though we are required by admin to give out 2-3 nights a homework a week, don't assign homework because their students don't do their homework. So how do we encourage homework completion? From my perspective I believe it is with engagement, in my head I had a lofty idea that on a regular basis I was having 80-85% completion of homework, this is quite accurate. With my student teacher, who only did a few videos while she was teaching, the students became rather lazy and complacent, so I knew I was going to have to step in and rethink how I "encouraged" the homework being done.

I also knew I was completely changing tactics, see previous post here, on how I was presenting the homework. The digital google form submission makes it super easy to track data on who is completing homework as a whole. You can easily calculate 80/148 for example completed the form as of 9pm last night. So that was the first step, getting a physical number to start the day. I found that the students actually really liked seeing the percentage of kids that did their work each day. In the previous post I also embedded a video on flipped learning, which at one point he talks about how the room could seem or look chaotic because you really start to see differentiation at it's best, kids are catching up on homework, moving onto new topics etc. I felt like I was able to start seeing this more as we came back from winter break because I was able to encourage those kids that consistently didn't do their homework to quickly get the notes down.

1. I encourage kids to bring their own headphones for this purpose, however sophia also let's you embed prezi's and the power point slides you used for the video. So for those kids that didn't have headphones they could just flip through the slides.
2. This allows you to make sure that the crucial content that you want the kids to know was getting through, which I think is a major con against flipping if you have kids that are just not going to do their homework, how do you get them the content? But I would also argue that this approach defeats the original purpose of flipping in that it is now taking away class time, and those students don't get to participate in the activities we are doing in class. It is a toss up, but you do see students starting to step up and do their homework when you assign it so that they aren't missing out.

I also wanted to check their notes in class, so that they didn't think I was only grading them for the digital submission portion. So as I get them started on their mini-lesson for that particular day I will quickly walk around with a seating chart in a plastic sleeve and a vis a vis marker and quickly make a mark for those kids that don't have their notes. This would also be a great time to have them discussing some of their questions from the previous night's homework, which is what Crystal Kirch does with this time period in her class structure. I started out the year with that but I fall back onto old habits and I am not convinced that giving them time to ask these questions is any better then my quick perusal and commenting on some of the most important questions posted by students that should be addressed. I use that quick seating chart data and put it in a quick google form:



This way I have a quick digital spreadsheet and I can start to see patterns on who is missing what. Have I mentioned I am super into google forms yet? HA! Anyway the efforts are paying off I am getting quite a few kids fixing their grades, and I have hit 85%-90% homework completion which I am pretty excited about. Especially considering we are on a proficiency based system and these kids don't really, for all intent and purposes have to do their homework- it is only 10% of their grade after all. Needless to say I am pleased with my efforts since being back from winter break and my even longer break with my student teacher taking over.

Big Changes!

I have done a lot of changes and revamps since my last post. My student teacher took over for the month of December, and of course we had two weeks off for winter break, I was able to get a TON of things done.

First it might be good to give some background information: for many years I was diligent with my district provided website. I had a little reminder that would pop up on my computer before I left for home on Tuesday that told me to update the website. When I transferred everything over to edmodo at the semester change I felt redundant and I stopped updated my website on the district page. I wanted to only do something once, and I kept up that mentality this year. I guess I was hoping for people to be able to access all the amazing things I was posting on edmodo. I think I knew last year, but was trying to avoid it, that parents couldn't see much on edmodo unless you specifically designated them to get it. Which as much as I love edmodo this is actually also a redundant and more time consuming process than I wish it to be. They use a drop down menu that searches for your items and you have to do it over and over again. I wish you could do a drop down menu and then check off what you want to use. But that is neither here nor there, I finally came to the conclusion that edmodo just wasn't cutting it for me in the whole scheme of things. I needed easier access for parents, and I needed more organizational tools for the flipped videos. It was in late November that I took a webinar by the great Crystal Kirch, which influnced my new direction greatly. I started looking at her student website, and her mention of parent access as well as her use of sophia.org to create tutorials and playlists. While my student teacher was teaching I used the time to create a similar blogger page and back log all my previous youtube videos onto tutorials and playlists on sophia.

Now in addition to adding items to sophia I have also taught myself all about google forms and spreadsheets. So in addition to creating a sophia playlist and tutorial included in those with the embedded youtube video is the digital portion of the student's WSQ (pronounced wisk) see Crystal Kirch's website above to get more information on what the WSQ is all about. I was going to say or take a look at my blog entry about WSQ'ing but I just looked at my blog again and realized I haven't done that. HA! I probably should! Anywho! The WSQ stands for watch/take notes, summarize, and question. So the digital portion of their homework is to summarize the video for the night and then ask a question, a HOT question. They submit that portion and it is giving me instant feedback and data on how the kids are doing. It is pretty amazing, and for the most part I have no one to nerd out with. Perhaps I should look to this blog as my outlet. NERD ALERT! You will see that as an official warning before I go crazy overwhelming on some of the stuff the students are doing. Because so far I have been super stoked about their efforts.

I have also taken a concerted effort in the last two weeks to pay close attention to my homework turn in rate, we had a leadership meeting in our building on this very concept and it peeked my interest/concern for sure. So far I have a consistent average of 85% with a peak at 90% one day. But that is with intense interventions and one on one conversations. I think overall that is a great turn out for ANY homework this day and age, let alone a flipped video. Most people's first gut reaction is about accessibility and what happens if the students just don't do it. Well here is your answer. Constant vigilance! HA! No just kidding. I think there are a lot of factors at play here and I shall perhaps ponder that in another entry but for now it is a lot of teacher interventions, as well as student motivation. Well at this point this has been a fairly large entry and I feel like I haven't really talked about anything specific and I am actually avoiding putting together information on my next grouping of flipped videos, so enough stalling! I have some work to do!

I will leave you with this great video I just saw in my twitter feed: