Notes on Flipping Your English Class

William Parr

EDRD 651

July 27, 2014

Notes on Flipping Your English Class

Page	Text	Comments
1	“It was more problematic that I wasn’t seeing the learning results.  I wasn’t seeing my students achieve those “Aha!” moments we teachers so tirelessly work to get.”	I would definitely get discouraged too after enduring a few years or even months of this.
2	“Flipped Learning is a process that consistently improves you and allows you to do things in your class you never had time for before.  It’s like a spouse who constantly demands you be a better person.  Flipped Learning constantly demands you be a better teacher.”	I think most teachers strive to improve constantly, however, I do appreciate his passion for Flipped Learning evident in this quote and throughout the text.  Being able to focus less on generating lecture notes and more on meeting student needs is never a bad thing.
4	“With the Flipped Classroom, I can give struggling students ample attention and assessment to meet their needs.  I have the flexibility to give alternate assessments on an individualized level.  I have the extra time needed to talk with these students and help them where they are struggling.  If they are behind grade level I can easily modify assignments or teach/reteach missing content.”	Being able to provide individualized instruction in a large classroom is probably the main reason why I would like to flip my classroom.  With students coming from so many different education backgrounds it definitely would benefit students with straight A’s and those at risk.
7	“Finally, many Flipped Classroom proponents will tell you, “It is not about the video.”  Well, what does that mean exactly?  The majority of new flippers focus much of their attention on creating videos.”	I could see myself getting hung up on making fun, flashy videos with Metta or other tools, so I like that Cockrum reminds readers that in the end you are not really trying to impress with your videos.  The goal is to inform students and hopefully engage them as well.
9	“The ultimate goal of Flipped Learning is to provide a student-centered learning environment.  This gives teachers the ability to practice project-based learning, mastery, inquiry, peer instruction, constructivism, and more.  The flip makes these pieces possible, but they are not necessarily required to flip.”	Again I like the student-centered learning emphasis with Flipped Classrooms.  The best part of the model as I see it is that it gives teachers more time to work with all students rather than leaving those who are struggling already to catch up by themselves.
11	“Students must be able to access the material quickly and efficiently for a Flipped Classroom to succeed.”	Access could be an issue in some areas.  I wonder about how you can run a Flipped Classroom well when students do not have stable and fast internet access at home.
15	“I have a ‘three-then-me’ policy for my students.  They are encouraged to have three other students critique their work before they show it to me.  They can receive input from students or adults outside the class, but are encouraged to use their classmates with Google Docs Revision History, I can easily check who collaborated on a document.”	This ‘three-then-me’ policy suits me better than the policy implemented by the author of From Notepad to iPad.  Encouraging, but not necessarily enforcing peer review develops student editing skills and eases teacher workload, without seeming unwilling or unavailable for advice.
17	“Another benefit is that my feedback is more targeted and richer.  I’m not reading stacks of papers in one or two sittings trying to give students feedback.”	Being able to keep a record of feedback given to students allows teachers to better track student progress.  Using a database like Google Drive to track such comments would be one way to track feedback.
22	“Truth be told, even though I don’t believe this is the most effective method of flipping an English classroom, I recommend most teachers start here.”	Sort of unsure what to think of the author suggesting starting with a flipped model that he does not believe in.
55	“For some teachers, language skills (grammar and vocabulary) are the first content they flip, and for others, language skills are the second… What I really love about using a flip to teach grammar and vocabulary is that I can have fun, engaging, and lively activities in class and don’t need to spend a lot of time on grammar rules.”	Flipping grammar lessons would be great.  Many students have varying familiarity with grammar rules because many teachers either do not want to teach it or assume that students’ previous teachers already covered the subject.
91	“Many language arts teachers struggle to work speaking and listening skills into their curriculum.  This is an area in which flipping has really helped me to enhance my class by providing the time and environment to develop speaking and listening skills.”	I can see how flipping enables teachers to focus more on oral language skills, which often get neglected in English class.  While I do not consider these areas to be my forte, I do feel that I will want to bring an emphasis on these important skills.
91	“The parts of a successful speech should initially be taught separately—because they require different skills—and then be brought together for at least one full presentation.  However, my students do several presentations throughout the year, both formally and informally, to practice these different skills consistently.”	Separately a speech into different parts makes the learning process more manageable for students who may have issues with public speaking.  Scaffolding students into their speech ensures they will be prepared to give it their best.
113	“Just as an actor will tell you, you need to overact in order to appear normal… When you create the video, you need ramp up your energy to uncomfortable levels and when played back it will appear closer to normal.”	I would not have intuitively known to do this when making a video, but it makes sense.  You can’t expect students to watch and learn from educational videos if they are completely boring.
115	“A good rule of thumb is one minute per grade level as a maximum time… Now, I can’t always keep my videos to the maximum amount of time for my classes (which would be seven or eight minutes), but because the majority of my videos fall in the four to seven minute range, my students know I do respect their time and try to keep the videos short.”	Communicating that as a teacher I value my students’ time will be important to me as a future new teacher.  I anticipate trying to keep most videos around 5-7 minutes long even for higher grades as a way to make sure I condense the information covered as well as possible.