Spin me right 'round

 Some rights reserved by dbr Atl

I've been wondering about how important "flipped learning" or "reverse instruction" can be for learning for our classrooms.

Initially, and still really, the idea seems obvious to me.  Of course we want students doing, creating and making while we are with them.  Not only because Bloom's Taxonomy says it's a higher level of learning, but because that is the part of teaching that I enjoy the most. 

I've wondered how we can do this in the Primary Years Program as well.  I think that when we are looking over concepts and ideas, we can introduce these at home (through videos). I know that at our school our home learning does not always connect to our daily lives in the classroom.  Our math work is often practice sheets, we have traditional spelling assignments at home, which is not what the teachers I work with do in their classrooms.  I think that providing videos to "tune in" to the day or week's tasks would be incredibly helpful for learning, and overall classroom enjoyment.  More than that, the parents would get a bigger sense of the concept based approach we take at our school. 

This article resonated with me because of the "pitfalls" section.  This is more than just changing a way we teach, it's changing the way we learn and the culture of schools.  These changes can't happen immediately for everyone, we are shifting the culture of what it means to be a leaner, and it's all very exciting. 

I use videos with teachers, for my instruction with them, and then we work together on their projects.  By giving them the main concept of what we want them to know, our face to face time is set on pedagogical approaches to learning and changing classroom culture.  I'm also modelling a basic flipped learning approach. 

We use blendspace to  get teachers used to our google apps approach before school starts. All incoming teachers are asked to go through some short "courses" if they are familiar with google apps they can just take the quizzes.  These short quizzes allow us as Edtech coaches to zero in on what each teacher needs help with, so instead of doing an hour or two on google apps, we can go into individual teacher's classrooms and work with them on the specifics of things they need to be able to do. 

Blended and flipped learning really help us zero in on specifics and get students working their ideas out.  Creation is the most engaging aspect of learning, and a flipped classroom helps us get to the heart of creation.