He 'flipped' his Classroom

This really makes so much sense.  Even better,your best students can be easily enriched as well and never be bored.  Learning has always been about a first overview followed by a practicum that policed up the new knowledge and developed skills.  That practicum always needs assistance even if it is in the form of the text book.  Here we do much better.

This must obviously become the new standard for everyone.  Even better all students will develop the habit of preping for the next day's classwork and not have to take a lot of practical homework home.

Hip hip Hooray!!  Maybe this is the end of bad schools.  Pretty hard to goof off when you must be engaged in your classwork.

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His students were struggling, so he 'flipped' his classroom. Then everything changed.

November 04, 2015

http://www.upworthy.com/his-students-were-struggling-so-he-flipped-his-classroom-then-everything-changed?c=ufb2

After 12 years as principal of Clintondale High School, Greg Green had a bad feeling: He knew his school was failing its students.

Especially the at-risk ones. Only 63% of the kids at Clintondale went on to college, and 35% didn't even make it though high school. It was rated as one of the worst schools in Michigan.

He and his staff had tried everything they could with the school's limited resources. Nothing worked.

But he had an out-of-the-box idea.

Green is also a coach. To get the most out of the time he had with his players, he'd been making them videos to watch at home so they could see what they were doing wrong and how they could improve.

At practice, he found that after they'd watched the videos, they'd already processed what was going on and made the necessary corrections.

What if academic classes operated the same way, with kids prepping in advance by watching videos online at home or in the school library, and then doing their work in school, during the day, with teachers on hand to assist?

Could that actually work?

Here's what a high school day is like these days.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average high school day is 6.7 hours long. And the average kid has 3.5 hours of homework per night, according to Education Week.

That's a 10-hour day — every day.

Oh yeah, there's also extracurricular activities like sports, music lessons, and so on.

Kids have to process and internalize what they've been taught during the day at night, after they've already put in what would be a full workday for adults. And they have to work out everything by themselves.

So Clintondale decided to try flipping a classroom.

 

They started with one teacher teaching a flipped class to struggling kids and the same teacher teaching the same material in a traditional way to average students. The idea was to see if the students having problems would be helped at all by the switch.And...

The kids who were selected for this program actually outperformed the other class!

By 2011, Clintondale had flipped all of its classes, the first U.S. school to do so.

Clintondale's failure rate dropped from 35% to 10%. College enrollment went up from 63% to 80% in two years!

Maybe the best thing, though, is how the kids feel.

"Once I came over here, it was completely different. I absolutely loved that I could get the teacher's help in the classroom. I honestly went from a D, F — those were my basic grades — to almost all A's right now."

— Gisselle De La Cruz Diaz

Clintondale's success has caught the attention of schools all over the country, with 48% of teachers flipping a classroom by 2012, and 78% by 2014.

Sometimes, to get exceptional results, you've just gotta take exceptional action.

transcript 

First Speaker: I've been principal for 12 years and I was very frustrated at times because I knew that we were failing. I knew that I had problems but I just didn't have the money to fix it or the technology to fix it. I think all of us have some opportunities to create change and we have to make a decision: Do we or don't we? And I think here at our school we've decided to do that. Good morning. Good morning. Oh hey Jack. We are going to put a stake in the ground. We are going to risk what the professionals around us say. And we are going to prove to people that this can be done.

In 2010, Clintondale High School was one of the worst schools in the state of Michigan. So they tried something new. The "flipped classroom" approach has students learn online lessons at home and do their homework in class.

Second Speaker: In this video, I want to give you the basics of trigonometry. Sounds like a very complicated topic but we ...

First Speaker: We use video, lectures and so forth, they have students pre-load before they get to class. They review those things so that when they come to class they're prepared and then they can actually do the assignment with the teacher. That's what flipped learning is.

First Female Student: The Sugar Act, the Townshend Act, and the Stamp Act were all attempts to control trade.

First Speaker: It's not about a video. It's not about the technology you use. It's simply about the amount of support and how much activity you do with the kids in class. I coach a travel baseball team and I understood that I need to make use of my practice time because that was the only time that I had.

The hip, his shoulder...By actually recording videos using a software, and I posted those videos and then I had the team watch those videos and then they came to practice. I found that the players knew the material much better. And I said, "Well, if my students lacked that opportunity to do that in math class, what in case we took the coaching philosophy and just implemented that right into the classroom?"

What really came out ahead of discussions with students about what needs they had and a lot of students said that they did not have a safe environment to learn in, they didn't have the necessary tools or the experts that were there when they were doing the actual work.\

We started with one teacher who had 13 students who had chronically failed throughout their career, and they were taking a civics class. He was also teaching a traditional civics class so it was an opportunity to measure the traditional environment versus the at-risk environment.

At the end of 20 weeks, what we found is that this at-risk class actually out-performed the traditional class using the same teacher, the same materials but just in a little different method. We said, "You know what? This is giving us so much hope that we're going to flip our entire school."

In 2011, Clintondale became the first school in the country to flip every classroom in its school. Failure rates haves have dropped from 35 percent to 10 percent. College admission rose from 63 percent to 80 percent in two years.

Second Female Student: At my old school, I gave up. I didn't think that I was intelligent enough at the time that I would be able to get the material. Plus the teachers would move on every single day so it would be harder for me to get the information I needed. Once I came over here, it was completely different. I absolutely loved that I could get the teacher's help in the classroom. I honestly went from a D, F, those were my basic grades, to almost all A's right now.

First Speaker: I think we have a responsibility to educate all kids. We talk about that, but do we really? Do we honestly think that we are giving the same, exact learning environment to someone from upper-income status through lower-incomes situation? I think this is a great equalizer.

You know, a student may not have a computer at home but they get it at school. And so many may have a tutor at home, that your parents pay for, but my teacher's right there going one-on-one with the student.

According to a recent survey, 78% of teachers had flipped a classroom in 2014. An increase from 48% in 2012. Green says he's been contacted by more than 300 schools interested in flipping classrooms.

First Speaker: Well Jeremy, you know, it was taking a long time. Maybe the first year you might not have said that.

I think what makes me most proud of our story is that we decide to act. It's really hard to take the risk to be the first one out there and I think that we owed it to our kids, we owed it to our families. We also owed it to ourselves because we got into this profession, well for a reason, to make a difference. I think that we owed it to all of us. 

There may be small errors in this transcript.