Teacher Education Archives - Samantha Mosher

Flipped Classroom for Grad Students

We’re now almost half way through the semester. This means I am almost halfway through my experiment in using a flipped classroom with my graduate students. In all honesty, so far I’m loving the experience, even though there are things I’d do differently next time and kinks I still have to work out.

Flipped Classroom Love

Students do the reading for the flipped classroom

After a couple of rocky sessions where some of the students came unprepared and unable to complete the tasks, I’m now sure most of them are coming having done the reading (or at least having skimmed it–there’s too much reading. Not sure how to fix that yet). Having to apply the concepts immediately gives the reading a purpose.

Student engagement

One thing I’ve really loved is how engaged students have been. During activities in our flipped classroom they are discussing, planning, reflecting, and asking questions. They’re referring to class texts for reference the way I would want them to while planning in the field. I’ve even started to see debates and discussions about their in class lesson planning assignments.

I did a standard lecture just before Spring Break. It was terrible. Granted, it was on the one course topic I have never lectured on before and I was very nervous. I’ll concede that this might not have been me at my best. At one point during the lecture I looked out to blank stares. It felt awful. The only reason I hadn’t changed it was because it was an extremely busy week and I couldn’t make the time. I knew it would be better and I should have trusted my instincts.

Checking for Understanding

Checking for understanding has become much easier. Because students are getting a video where I model or describe a process and then applying their new learning in a controlled setting (guided practice) in the classroom, I can really monitor what they’re doing and how well they are understanding the course concepts and how well they are able to implement skills. I can also monitor growth. For example, every assignment involves crafting objectives. With each assignment I can see their ability to create these objectives improving, and can then see that improvement transferring to their work in the reading clinic.

Flipped Classroom…meh…

Work Now, Reap the Benefits Later

Since this is my first time doing (or trying to do) a fully flipped classroom, there’s a lot of extra work. I need to choose different resources, make videos, create application assignments. All of that takes time. So. Much. Time. That means I don’t always have the time to make the video the level of quality I’d eventually like it to be. Or sometimes I don’t have the time to make a video at all. And the more I do, the better at it I get. However, that means I’m definitely remaking some of my earlier videos as I learn more about how to craft them and about what makes a good video (and even discover some tech tools I didn’t know existed!)

I’ve been teaching this course for what feels like forever. All the other changes I’ve made have been slow. This has been fast and big. It’s been so much work and I feel like I’m barely keeping up. Classes feel better, but I don’t know if I can keep up the pace. There were two weeks where I sort of gave up and did my usual lecture. And I need to learn to be OK with that. I can’t do everything all at once.

Managing Time

I’ve been overly ambitious with my assignments. When I go back and revise them, I need to make sure that I think about how much time I actually have–after making announcements and checking in with students, and before they meet with supervisors. Not how much time is scheduled for the class. I also need to make sure I’m actually making announcements at the beginning of class instead of jumping in to things.

It’s easy to get into a rut

One thing I’ve noticed is that most of my assignments are the same. Instead of making assignments different, I’ve been making them all pretty similar. Probably because of time constraints.

Flipped Classroom: Will I do it again?

Yes. I’ve put in a lot of work, but it’s not just because of that. I’m really seeing the benefit for my students, and I’ll find out once I look at the results the midsemester evaluation form I sent out, if they feel the same way.

Flipped Classroom Mini-PLC

This year I’m not in a classroom as much as I was last year. I’m not teaching a core content class, I’m only doing small group intervention. That means that I have more time to coach, but I still miss the classroom. A lot. So, when I went to a workshop about using flipped classroom methodologies along with mastery-based learning, I was really excited. But I was also really disappointed. Where could I possibly use this? Certainly not as a coach.

But then! A math teacher I work with, Robin, came to me with a problem: Her students had a wide range of abilities, and she had exhausted her toolkit of differentiation techniques and activities. We talked for a while about what she wanted her students to achieve, what she had tried already, and why she thought it wasn’t working. It came down to students being in very different places in terms of their content mastery. No matter what type of instruction Robin tried, someone always felt frustrated. Kids who got things quickly didn’t feel sufficiently challenged. The kids who struggled were overwhelmed by homework and needed more coaching and support to do things correctly. Jumping in and trying to put together a flipped classroom and looking at mastery learning seemed like a great idea.

Reading About the Flipped Classroom: Starting a Mini-PLC

Our first step was to do some research together. I had dabbled in using flipped classroom techniques, but had never done it fully. She had never done it before either. After some quality time with Google and looking through the resources that I had from the workshop, we settled on the book Flipped Learning for Math Instruction by Jonathan Bergman and Aaron Sams (ISTE, 2015). We each ordered a copy and agreed to read it over winter break.

If you are a math teacher and thinking about using the flipped classroom model, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It is clear and concise, and gives plenty of real examples from classrooms. The book is organized in a helpful manner, taking a teacher through a logic progression of beginning to implement the flipped classroom model and all the way through extending the model to using it as a part of a mastery learning environment.

Taking The Next Steps for a Flipped Classroom

As Robin and I mapped out how she would implement the flipped classroom for math, I started thinking about how I could apply it to my own teaching. I’m still not sure if I can make it work for intervention, but I can try it out in my graduate class. So we’re trying it out together and supporting each other along the way. I’m excited to work together with Robin, even though we’re implementing the flipped classroom model in vastly different settings!

Self-Care: Crying In Your Car Is Not Enough

Cat assisting with self-care — My cat is a champion of my engaging in self-care, sitting on my grading when she feels I’ve spent too much time doing that and not enough time letting her sit on my lap.

Working with teachers who are in their first year of the NYC Teaching Fellows program this year has really highlighted for me the importance of self-care for teachers–especially new teachers. A couple of them brought up the NPR Ed piece called “Hey New Teachers, It’s OK to Cry in Your Car,” which is a terrible title. It did, however, have a lot of good advice for first year teachers regarding self-care.

That made me think: If I could travel back in time ten years and give advice to myself as a first year teacher, there are a few things I would make sure I did during my first year of teaching instead of spending the time up until February break skipping the self-care strategies and throwing myself into work. I dealt with my stress through a combination of long showers, Two-Buck Chuck, crying on the A Train, and ice cream. That obviously wasn’t sustainable.

Only take home as much work as you can feasibly do in 2 hours or less

It takes time to calibrate this, but it’s really important. Carting more work than you can do back and forth from school each day makes you feel unsuccessful and frustrated. It might actually take the first two or three months of school to figure that out, but once you do, set that boundary and stick to it. Even before you figure out where that boundary is, set a timer and don’t work past that.

Get enough exercise

Seriously. Start an exercise routine: biking, running, yoga, Pilates, swimming, CrossFit, mall walking, martial arts. It doesn’t matter what. Just do it. For me it works especially well if I exercise between then end of the school day and starting my grading or planning.

Sleep

Set yourself a bedtime and stick to it. Really. It doesn’t matter how much grading you have. Unless you’ve decided to…

Make time to spend with friends

My first year of teaching, I sometimes got so wrapped up in work (or feeling stressed about work) that I forgot to see my friends. That made me feel disconnected and lonely, and it caused me to get even more wrapped up in all of the negative things about my first year. Make a monthly date with a close friend and stick to it. I still do this with my friend Kate.

Just because you can be in the building until 7 PM…

Some schools kick you out, others don’t, but set yourself a curfew and don’t stay past a certain hour. I had a key my first year. It was bad. Some of us work best if we take a break between school and doing more work, some of us don’t. Either way, set a time when you’re going to stop doing work and go out or change gears.

Read

Yes, of course, read articles in professional journals and the books you’re teaching to your class, but also make sure to read books that are for you. Books that remind you of what you love about reading, and what you’re interested in outside of school. Develop a readers’ life apart from the books that you’ll recommend to your kids.

Eat good food

Learn a couple of simple recipes, or get a crockpot and make yourself good, healthy food for your lunches and dinner. Don’t live off of takeout just because you’re busy.

Find your flow

Resurrect a hobby you let go of or learn a new skill: knitting, gaming, bread making, canning, sewing, painting, dancing, making music, photography, martial arts, running. Whatever it is that helps you to really be in a state of flow, do it. Schedule time for it. Make it a priority. Share it with your students.

Let go of your mistakes

The most important piece of advice from that NPR segment that I would reiterate to new teachers (and have tried to reinforce to my first year Teaching Fellows–I’m forcing them to read this for their last class. I’m hoping they’ll tell me if I did it enough): I’m still in touch with kids I had my first year of teaching, and they’re not scarred for life by the myriad of mistakes I made during that first year. Just to be clear: I made A LOT of mistakes during my first year I run into them around the city in all sorts of unexpected places. I’m friends with a few of them who are in their 20s on Facebook. I get emails from some who are in college. They’re all OK. Even the ones I worried wouldn’t be OK.

But I don’t have time for self-care…

Make the time. I’ve been telling my 8th graders all week that winter break is a great time for a reset. It can be a great time for a reset for teachers too.

How do you engage in self-care? If you don’t think you are yet, how will you make it a priority in the new year?

New Beginnings

I finished my first week of school. Every year brings a number of new beginnings, but this one is coming with a lot of changes. And I’m excited about all of them.

New Room

New beginnings: Changes in Room 470 — Same room number, but wait until you see the inside…

It looks like the same door as last year (with an added name. We’ll get to my new teammates later), but when you open it up and look inside (I got a picture before the blinds and clock went up, but you get the idea):

Looks a little bit different than last year, right? The school knocked down a wall between my room and an office next door and we ordered all new furniture. We put a lot of thought into colors, the types of chairs (they’re really hard to tip back on, but when you lean back on the chair, the back leans a little bit and the seat slides forward), the table, our desks. It’s an amazing space. As one of my little M1s (5th graders) said: “Your room is so small, but it has everything!” What I’m most excited about though, is the Idea Paint. The tables and the wall that you can’t see in this picture are all painted with Idea Paint, so most of the surfaces in our room are whiteboards! Students can work out math problems on the table or jot down notes and ideas. It’s also a much brighter and friendlier space than last year.

New Colleagues

I’ve mentioned my colleague Pooja Patel before. She and I have presented together before and teach sections of the same course at Teachers College and now we’re collaborating as Middle School Learning Specialists. I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am. It’s really exhilarating to work with a colleague who both challenges me and helps to build my ideas. Collaborating with someone in a new way comes with challenges, but I can’t wait to see what the year has in store for us.

New Roles

There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening this year in the evolution of my job. The two biggest are the expansion and formalization of instructional coaching as part of my job duties and the addition of a co-taught English class to my teaching duties. Last year, not much was done in the way of introducing the coaching role that the learning specialists were taking on. The rest of the faculty didn’t know what we were doing and didn’t really understand what coaching was. This year, our roles are being introduced right from the beginning. And we’ve already started working on building relationships with teachers and introducing our new roles (thanks to a brilliant suggestions from Pooja and some amazing baking by my friend Amy’s bakery).

The treats and the welcome notes that accompanied them seemed to be a big hit.

I’m also excited to be co-teaching an English class with my colleague Drew Murphy. It’s my first time co-teaching for an entire year. I’ve done units of study or helped introduce specific literacy skills, but I’ve never been a full-fledged co-teacher. I spent a lot of time this summer refreshing things that I had learned in my Special Ed coursework, reading books, and thinking about how things will work.

I’m also teaching a new teacher ed course this year. This time it’s a course about teaching reading to adolescents with LD. I’ve done two classes so far, and I’m enjoying it so far.

How was your first week back? What new beginnings are you excited about this year?

Adventures in Teacher Education

Teacher education: Student feelings about assessment — My students share their experiences with assessment during one of our initial classes.

I spend most of my time teaching middle schoolers, but I’ve moonlighted in teacher education for nearly 6 years. I started out teaching one course in the program where I got my Master’s degree. Then I was presented with a new opportunity to participate in teacher education. A professor at another local university reached out to me and asked if I was interested in teaching a 5 week summer course in assessment for Special Education over the summer. The course was for students in an alternative certificate program here in NYC. I was thrilled to try something new, but there were challenges that I hadn’t anticipated. Working in a different kind of teacher education this summer really challenged a lot of beliefs and assumptions that I had about education. Particularly the idea that learning is scalable.

Learning is scalable is one of the CGC principles that really resonated with me. What it means is that our beliefs about teaching and learning for children in a classroom should be able to scale up to a whole school level, to professional development (and, by extension, teacher education), and even to how we run our schools. In theory, if I truly believe that learning is scalable, the same beliefs about education should apply whether I’m working in a middle school or in teacher eduction.

I know that with my middle schoolers I believe that work should be able to be revised as many times as possible until a student demonstrates the knowledge, skill, or understanding that I’m expecting. Basically, I believe in mastery grading and not punishing students for taking longer to understand things than their peers. I don’t really believe in penalizing students for late work, but I found myself more frustrated with graduate students who turned work in late without an email or a request for an extension. I found myself feeling that I shouldn’t be offering students the opportunity to rewrite things because they should “know how to do this by now.” I found it really hard to reconcile my belief that graduate students should possess a particular skill set with my belief in everything above. Was it my responsibility to teach them those things? Or, did they need to ask questions, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and figure it out. Did I really believe, as my Ed Psych professor in college said, that in “grade school you have teachers who teach, and in college you have professors who profess–get used to taking in information and figuring things out.” When I really examine my beliefs, I don’t believe that at all. But I also am not sure I have the time to teach them all of that.

A summer course means less time. It means less time to revise work, so that means less time for students to “get” everything before the end of the term. There is also less time for questions and discussions about assignments, and fewer assignments. There’s less time for me to write substantial feedback on the assignments I do get, so there are fewer assignments. There’s also less time for student-professor contact outside of class. I hope I did a good job of building relationships with these adult students, but I’m not sure.

If I teach this course again, I want to make sure I spend more time getting to know my students. I also want to spend more time practicing what I preach: using formative assessments to figure out what skills I need to teach before a major assignment is due. And now that I’ve taught the course once, I’ll be better able to adjust assignments and content to make time.

What are your experiences with teacher education, either as a student or as an instructor?