Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Monitoring Your GAME Plan Progress



This week I have been monitoring my progress toward the goals in my GAME plan and have extremely fortunate to be working with a well versed media specialist.  This week we have working on facilitating wiki’s and web forums so that I can provide my students with constructive and timely feedback.  One of the challenges I am facing is a lack of student participation.  Although their participation is factored into a grade, there is not enough incentive for them to actively engage and collaborate.  In my attempt to gather additional information and materials I came upon Flip Your Classroom, which details how to create a digital instructional setting.  In this environment, students receive the majority of their instruction through video and online presentations outside of school (Bergmann & Sams, 2012).  Class time is then spent on the application of skills and mastery of content (Bergmann & Sams, 2012).  . Through reviewing the information form the book I was able to gather new ideas and tools I could implement into my lesson and further my GAME plan.  Beyond these insights, Flip Your Classroom has opened a new arena of teaching which I had not envisioned before.  Their concept of mastery is so intended with my pedagogy, that I now have a blue print to execute a flipped classroom. Although my GAME plan goals do not necessarily reflect a need to integrate technology into my instruction, the flipped process aligns seamlessly with my goals of meeting diverse learning needs and creating reflective and collaborative environment for my students. I was concerned that initially I would have to completely rework my plan, but I found that the flipped process was easy to implement and my students have been more willing to engage in the virtual collaboration and instruction.

As I reflect further I have come to realize that I need to be more patient and allow the process time to work.  Because of the time of the year, I was hoping for more instantaneous result and an increase in engagement.  It was disappointing that the student initial response and level of enthusiasm did not match my own, but I needed to take a step back and evaluate what changes needed to take place to benefit students.  Once I made adjustments, and gave the students time to explore the process, I found that engagement increased along with student enthusiasm. There is always going to be a small population of students who do not buy into the instruction and there is no silver bullet to remediate this behavior.  With this new instructional approach tough, I am able to focus more on the individual needs of the students and provide added support (Bergmann & Sams, 2012).

In the coming weeks I will be able to better determine the overall benefits my students have been able to reap from this activity, but I need to begin to explore addition professional development opportunities and resource.  In order to do this I will need to seek out resource outside my school district, but I am unsure of what is available and will be useful.  This uncertainty is what will drive my subsequent questions and alterations to my instructional practices.

References

Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2012). Flip your classroom: reach every student in every class every day. Eugene, Or.: International Society for Technology in Education
International Society for Technology in Education. (2013, March 10). NETS. Retrieved from International Society for Technology in Education: http://www.iste.org/docs/pdfs/nets-t-standards.pdf?sfvrsn=2

5 comments:

  1. Hi Jaime,
    I have often gotten very excited about trying a new project and the students reaction is less than impressive. Usually once they get started they get into it but it is a real let down. Hopefully they will reflect back on your lesson and remember the effort and skills that they learned.

    Good luck!

    Melissa A.

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  2. Melissa:

    I completely agree. It is devastating when have spent all this time carefully planning and developing activities and then students tell you it was lame or stupid. I equate it with my kids telling me we never do anything fun after spending all day at the zoo. What I have come to realize though is that in general when students make these type of comments it is do to an underlying issue rather than my lesson. I think this is why I like flip your classroom. It allows me the freedom to investigate where the student is struggling and determine how I can intervene.

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  3. Jaime,

    I have heard so much about flip your classroom but I have never heard from any teacher directly who has tried it. I am so happy that you took the risk to try something different. I have wondered how flip your classroom would work. I think it sounds great because you can get so much more in depth during class. However, I think I would have the same difficulties as you. I do not think my students would be as interested as I am. I also have a handful of students who do not have internet access at home so would be unable to take part in some of the lessons. In addition, I have a hard time getting my students to actually do work at home. They do not find it important. How do you deal with these situations?

    Thanks for sharing!

    Tanya

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  4. Digital instructional setting is an environment that I feel most students would feel comfortable working in within the classroom. Benefits will be felt when each students learning is personalized. Your strategy to try and keep students engaged by Flipping Your Classroom seems to be the best approach. It involved technology in the classroom setting which impacts differentiated instruction.

    Verna

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  5. Jaime,

    Classroom participation can be detrimental to your classroom learning. I teach middle school connections or exploratory classrooms and the student participation level isn't quite were it needs to be in order to take students to a whole new level of learning. You did mention that with it being a certain part of the year, this does have a factor in increasing class participation. If students were not engaged on day 1 of class, then it will be hard trying to get them to come into class with a new concept.

    Flip your classroom sounds like a wonderful too to use for digital instruction. I'm not sure what grade level you teach, but how has your student involvement outside of the classroom been. I can't always rely on my students to bee able to complete work using technology outside of the classroom and proves it authenticity. At my school, it would be a challenge for all of the students to watch the videos at home. Has this been a challenge for you?

    Nakeia

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