The demise of teacher-as-lecturer was the theme of Dr. Eric Mazur's morning keynote address, with a reminder that teaching is far more than the transfer of information from instructor to student, that learning is about assimilating information and applying it to new circumstances, and that hardly any of us would list "teacher lectures" as the main ingredient that allowed us to become really good at anything. What, then, are 21st Century teachers doing to optimize learning? Enter the age of the "flipped classroom."
Mazur used a course management system (CMS) during the keynote called Learning Catalytics that he and others designed at Harvard for his college physics courses. This tool allows him to pose live quiz questions to students throughout the class to assess for understanding, to publish polls, generate word clouds, etc. Mazur's method is that if fewer than 30% of his students respond to a poll correctly, he stops and reexplains. He repeats until a critical mass can answer correctly and his questions ask students to apply knowledge in a new context rather than regurgitate his original explanation. His fluid use of Learning Catalytics in today's presentation made me think about the set of 30 Promethean ActivInspire Learner Response clickers we have at school, and made me wonder how to get teachers to use instant assessment tools like this more frequently. We should stop by the Promethean display for a group demo before the week is through!
After the keynote, I sat in on Darren Kuropatwa's session on 21st Century Bricoleurs. Kuropatwa is a high school math teacher from Winnipeg, Manitoba who shared how he and his students are utilizing cell phones, Flickr, wikis, blogs and YouTube to "show and share what they know with the world and contribute to the global knowledge commons" -- Wow! Here is a link to one of his AP Calculus class blogs.
Later in the day I found myself at a session called Flip Your Classroom led by two dynamic high school teachers named Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann. To them, flipped classrooms are "hubs of learning where the teachers interact individually with every student every day." One of the ways they have achieved this in their math and chemistry classes is by recording the entire year's worth of lectures and frontal demonstrations into short and engaging video podcasts (vodcasts) which the students watch and learn from on their own time, using iPods, phones, computers and even DVD players. The point is that little to no class time is used for whole-class instruction, a teaching method which inevitably leaves a portion of the class disengaged. Rather, students arrive to class and get straight to work on projects or labs independently, with the teacher circulating between students to check in individually and assess for understanding. Disengaged students? Not a problem. Here's the link to their site. With many of our Upper School classes lasting a mere 35 minutes, I can't help but wonder how to maximize our students' time with us and how to flip some of our own classrooms.
Finally I sat in on Kern Kelley's session on how to deploy Google Apps for Education, which he has done in his rural K12 district in Maine. You can see his session slides here.They use Docs, Gmail, Blogger, Sites, Forms, Video and Picasa to enable students to publish and share their work, to turn in assignments, to blog and to create. When students graduate, the district pays for them to have a personal domain for one year, to give them a home on the web for them to continue housing their prior work and to continue growing their web portfolio. At MCDS we are about to begin Year 3 with our own Google Apps domain for Upper School students, but we have only begun to scratch the surface of potential for this toolset. The Tech Department is exploring the idea of migrating faculty to Google as well, which would only encourage us to collaborate with each other and our students more effectively.
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