EDU@YourBest

In this final episode with Elisa Lewis, we discuss both the connections and disconnects that working primarily outside the classroom creates. We discuss the unique opportunities and challenges that the role of academic liaison presents. 

This is part 5 of our ongoing series with Elisa Lewis an Academic Liaison and we discuss the broader perspective working in a school but not in a single classroom can provide.  We discuss how many people in different roles can be needed to help students be successful. Join us as we continue our discussion.

In today's episode, we continue our short mini-series of interviews with Elisa Lewis. In this episode we talk about the planning and development role that Elisa plays in the school-wide RtI system.  We talk about how using a 25 minute block of time at the end of the day helps provide for both intervention and enrichment for students. We also discuss training and utilizing student mentors and leaders in various capacities to help underpin the school environment.

In today's episode, we continue our short mini-series of interviews with Elisa Lewis, and Academic Liaison. In this episode we talk about the interplay between the liaison, student, and classroom teacher. We also continue to discuss some of the tightrope that coaches, interventionists, and other para-classroom educators walk when working with other classroom teachers when it comes to meeting student needs across the student’s academic day.  We also discuss how a staff member that works with relatively small numbers of students pays big dividends for the whole school environment.

Join me this episode as Elisa Lewis visits the Teacher's Lounge and we talk about her role as Academic Liaison.  In this first part of our conversation we discuss her role with struggling students. 

In today's episode, an encounter with an old high-school teacher of my own brings up the topic of reflection from the three of us about the changing seasons of our teaching careers. Join us as we talked about being an 11 year teacher, a 17 year teacher, and a 21 year teacher.  How do seasons change in our career, and how do those changing seasons affect our classroom management, planning, presentation, and role that we play in our learning community.

Eirik Wattengard and I talk good practice for effective learning videos.   

"Idea #5 Sharing your summer", centers on including students in an ongoing project or conversation that allows them to see progress, frustration, setbacks, problem solving, learning, etc. To differentiate what I am talking about in this entry from the last entry, idea 4 was taking pictures, video, etc of isolated events you experience this summer.  What we are talking about in this entry is a longer term project that will happen over a larger time frame.  Think Game of Thrones story arcs rather than Big Bang Theory episodes. For me I am going to document the building process from planning, estimating cost, construction, etc. to use next year in class. Join us for Idea 5 in our series All Flipping Summer.

This one is a big one.  Find some way to take your students with you, digitally, this summer. Every life science teacher I know finds themselves in the forest or on the lake. Every English teacher I know has a stack of books they've been saving for just these three months. Every social science person scours the internet or antique malls for relics to add to their Sanford & Son classroom museum. Alternatively, they pack up the family truckster for travels with Charlie going to battlefields, museums, or visiting every cast plaque historical marker they can locate on Google Maps. Regardless of your content, there is something you're going to do this summer that would benefit your students. 

Q: How do you eat a whale?  A: One bite at a time.  It doesn't much matter where you start on any big project or adjustment to your classroom.  The reality is you will likely not use the first thing you create or first change you make as learning is a process and you won't know where the road leads or the skills you need until well after you have set off. This is why making a second one of anything takes far less time and frustration than doing it the first time, you figure out a more efficient methods using newly acquired skills. It is a bit ironic that as teachers we forget so often what it means to be a learner. 

Take time this summer to find something "important" in your classroom or teaching that needs a little tending to grow to a more full potential. Knowing that summer allows for professional growth, we need to also make that growth a priority and set aside time among the other priorities for summer. Join Me for Ideas #2 in our All Flipping Summer series.

I enjoy my job, most of the time, but I also look forward to summer. As a teacher I spend 9 1/2  months of the year balancing 150 teenage personalities on the ends of sticks and trying to move them from one place to the other in a positive and productive direction. I am exhausted, and summer is the opportunity for me to recharge, rejuvenate, and reload. To be clear, my job is not the first thing on my priority list for this summer so here is the first idea for making the most out of your summer. Let's get started with idea number 1.

In this episode I try and think through a potential policy change for next year.  I am beginning to look ahead at a few adjustments for my classroom next year.  I have signs up in my classroom that forbid the use of cell phones, tablets, digital watches, etc. These signs are up not because I am anti-technology, but because the school where I teach is 1:1 with Chromebooks making the other devices mostly redundant.  

This quick episode tells the story of how a BBC podcast by Tim Horford helped me realize a few things about flipped learning. I have found what many others have realized, flipped learning required a rethinking of the whole learning ecosystem.  43 minutes between bells is no longer a constraint.  Location is no longer a constraint. Uniformity need not be a constraint. Flipped and blended learning allows us to re-think classrooms and re-imagine education. 

In this episode, I give my answers to the three questions regarding "practice" brought up in our Flip Fails blog series.  This blog is available here as a podcast, but is also available on www.flippedlearning.org in traditional blog format. 

In the Flip Fails #4 I ended with a list of concepts that my failures had forced me to reflect upon.   Here are the first three as they popped into my head while writing. How much skill practice does a student need to become proficient? What type of skill practice is most effective? Where/when is practice effective? In this episode we make progress addressing the problem of practice. 

In this episode we continue our Flip Fail series and set the course for the next few entries. If I sum up all of my many failures in my first semester or 18 months of flipping my class I would have to say that I failed to go far enough.  I don't mean that I feel I didn't use enough technology or that I didn't use enough weird teaching methods. What I mean is that I was not willing to open my eyes wide enough to reflect on many of my very basic practices and beliefs that I had carried for the first 12 years of my teaching career.

In this episode we talk field trips and all of the other things that take students out of the classroom.  We also try to figure out a few aspects or measurements that can be used to make this time outside the classroom as beneficial as possible.  Join us in The Teacher's Lounge.

What to do in the classroom Here is where we actually get the most common failure among young flipped classrooms, failing to appropriately plan for the group space. To this point, we have talked about planning for what should happen in the individual space. However, the key to the flipped classroom is to evaluate what portions of the learning need to happen in the individual space and which need to happen in the group space. Once we open up this group space, we need to make sure that we have positive, productive, and meaningful learning opportunities ready to be put in the group space. In this episode I recount my failure and give a few options on how best to utilize the group space.

A very common initial misstep for recently minted flipped classrooms is a teacher who is not fully committed to reorganizing their class in a meaningful way.  In most cases, this is evidenced by flip teachers reteaching the flip lesson in the classroom space. This is a scenario that I guarantee every flip teacher will see or have seen. A teacher assigns a component of learning to the individual space and the following day the students come to the classroom having not completed the learning component. At this point the teacher doubles down on failure and re-teaches, re-lecturers, or repeats whatever learning component the students were responsible for the night before. We talk in this episode about ways to address this situation.

This, hopefully short, series highlights various ways that you might cause  yourself problems when planning or implementing a flipped classroom.  Flip Fail #1 is confusing who the focus and beneficiary of the flipped classroom needs to be. I relate my story of starting my flipped classroom with the wrong motives and wrong mechanics.  While my flipped classroom still benefited students it was in spite of my efforts not because of my efforts. 

We focus in this episode about the tendency we all have, but specifically that young people have, to believe that we can efficiently multitask. While classrooms need to include variety and choice, the ideas that a single student cam effectively accomplish multiple disparate tasks concurrently is patently false. The problem has always existed in the classroom when we ask students to take notes, listen, and participate in discussion, but with the all of the tech students have within reach during their day the fracturing of attention becomes even worse. We talk about how to juggle multiple tasks and meet individual needs while maintaining a clear focus for students.

In this episode we discuss some of the many ways behavior and achievement can be combined or separated. Much like our previous discussion of extra credit, this discussion takes us afield into a variety of education areas and grading constructs. We discuss how we address this issue in our own classes, while still working within the procedures and policies of our learning community. We also do a bit of wishful thinking as all concrete change begins with just such an exercise. While policies regarding behavior and achievement marks are mostly above our pay grade we try and bring our combined experiences to bear on the issue.

In this episode we tackle Bryan's topic of "extra credit". This lightening rod topic begins what has turned out to be a multi-episode thread on the nature of grading and assessment. From the term itself, to the implied impact for both students and teachers, this seemingly simple concept has deep significance in our local learning community. I am willing to bet that anyone who has been a teacher for any reasonable amount of time has encountered a request for, or desire to award, "extra credit". We discuss our personal views, and how this concept is more a symptom of deeper education issues, including classroom funding.

In this episode we do attempt to give you a small picture of who we are and what we are up to in our classrooms. We talk about the rise of tech in the classroom.  We discuss the changing expectations with regard to differentiation.  We also lay out a few goal we are working on throughout this school year. Although we all teach math, as veteran teachers we are involved in many broad areas of education as members of teams, team leaders, and local iconoclasts.  Also I am a full on flipped educator and Ross uses flipped elements, Bryan reflects a more traditional classroom format.   The Flipped Learning Network has been kind enough to team with us in launching this podcast but conversations will not be limited to the flipped model. 

This is the audioblog form of the Flipped Learning Myths series at flippedlearning.org  In this episode I discuss a few lessons about flipped learning and my profession I learned from my other hobby.  

"I know what flip is" As the cycles of education ideas and vocabulary wax and wane it is easy to confuse familiarity with an education term with understanding.of that methodology.   Flipped learning has now been in education circles long enough that most have heard the term. Many have heard the term often enough they feel they have reached a thorough understanding. As a flipped educator for nearly seven years I still feel I have more areas to understand and explore.  Join us for this audioblog version of the article available on www.flippedlearning.org

Okay so if flipped learning can be adapted to students on the two tails or extremes of the normal curve, and if flipped learning is malleable and effective enough to be customized to various student groups, is there anyone for which flipped learning does not work best?  I think that answer has a definitive yes. In this episode we talk about the "Just tell me how to do it" student and the troubled relationship they have with flipped learning.

This audioblog is the companion piece to the original blog at flippedlearning.org I discuss the role and relationship of research and flipped learning to the idea of the digital native. Join us.

The basis of flipped learning myth #4 is the second half of the definition of flipped as “videos at home/ homework at school” In the previous post for Myth #3 we discussed the limitations of defining flipped learning as “videos at home”, and the false limitations it places on students and teachers. Now let’s take a look at the second half of that incomplete definition.  https://flippedlearning.org/how_to/flipped-learning-myth-4-homework-only-at-school/

The basis of flipped learning myth #3 can be found in the limited definition of flipped learning as “videos at home / homework at school”.   We discuss how this definition is a viral yet limited view of flipped learning. check out the original blog at https://flippedlearning.org/flexible_environment/flipped-learning-myth-3-instruction-only-at-home/

The second misconception about flipped learning is “flipped learning is easy for the teacher”. There is a tempting element of flipped learning that if the students are watching videos, and the students are doing homework, then the teacher is free to not have to do those things. That is only somewhat true. Join me as we talk about the road to flipping. check out the original blog at https://flippedlearning.org/how_to/the-paradox-of-effort-myth-2-flipping-is-easy/ 

I hope to cover just a couple myths about flipping in the next few blogs. The first two have to be grouped together because they are opposite sides of the same coin and both address the real and perceived effort required to flip a class. Myth number one: “It it's really hard to flip a classroom” Join me here or at flippedlearning.org https://flippedlearning.org/how_to/the-paradox-of-effort-addressing-flipped-learning-myths-part-1/

Previously I attempted to debunk flipped learning myth number five that states “no tech is needed to flip”. I still believe that for flipped learning in the modern classroom this is a true statement; however, I must admit there are those with reasonable opinions and reasonable perspectives that vary in the technology necessary. Join me as we look at some of the work of Dr. Robert Talbert and technology beyond video.  Source: https://flippedlearning.org/?p=9575&preview=true Cited: http://rtalbert.org/flipped-learning-without-video/ 

This is the audioblog for the blog of the same name found at www.flippedlearning.org

I short audio record of all of the things necessary to get my classroom planning done on what should have been a peaceful Sunday afternoon. Another entry in the #flipblogs series.

This week my job really got in the way of my fiddlefarting.  In this blog I discuss what I would rather be doing than what I have to do as an educator.  Listen in and enjoy.

Myth number 6 is “flipped learning results in overuse of technology”. Myth number 5 was “no tech is needed for flipping”.  Like most teaching and learning myths, this myth has a flip side of the coin as well and that leads us to myth #6 and the overuse of technology.  Listen to this blog as read by the author.

This episode addresses a common myth about flipped learning that no technology or video is required. I use Mickey Mouse as an example of the necessity to join sight and sound with text to realize the full potential of flipped learning. Join me as we talk history and education.

I sat down with Dr. Kristen Kendrick-Weikle following a two day regional professional development institute to talk about the need for collaboration and professional growth.  With limited financial resources for professional development, we talk about opportunities and benefits that can emerge when teachers, buildings, and districts combine their efforts to benefit one another. The Central Illinois Professional Development Institute has been successful but we discuss opportunities for growth in learning and sharing.

Mrs. Brummer is a teaching veteran of 19 years in the science classroom, but this year she began a new chapter at a new school.  We discussed what it is like to move from a long term teaching job in one junior high to take on the challenges of teaching in a different district with new colleagues.  Join us as we discuss being the new kid on the block.

In this episode I had the opportunity to sit down with Zack Korzyk via webcam and talk about this game changing math tool.  DeltaMath (found at DeltaMath.com) is an infinite practice set program that allows students to practice to success mathematics problems that thoroughly cover Geometry, Algebra II, Pre-Calculus, and Calculus with more courses on the way. Zack is an in-service teacher who has created this tool for his students and shares it with us out of his passion for math and education. 

This episode we talk with guidance counselor Adrian Moody about addressing the needs of expectant and parenting students.  Research shows that the responsibilities and challenges of pregnancy and parenting can have a significant impact on a student's educational success.  In turn, educational achievement has a significant impact on long term financial stability. We talk about how to best help these students in the public school system.

This is our first official week of the podcast and we are kicking out some of the content we have compiled for a strong start and for you to get to know us.  Follow us on twitter @EDUatYourBest and check us out on iTunes, Stitcher, Google, and any of your favorite podcast formats.