Blended Learning and Mindset

I try to keep this as an all audience blog, and despite the occasional foul language, I simply could not resist using this clip to demonstrate mindset.  I mean talk about resiliency, grit, and the celebration of failure!  The coconut horse bit never gets old also.

I have been working for almost 5 years of teaching to change the mindset of students.  I have redesigned the structure of my course and assessment to undo the permanent nature of failure that exist for so many students.  That is to say...If a student fails a quiz, and aces the portion of a test on the same topic...why do we keep the quiz?  The quiz is not accurate anymore, the quiz is artificially weighing down the ability of the grade to communicate level of learning, and worst of all it is telling the student that failure is permanent and inescapable.

Which brings me to mindset

mindset  

Web definitions mentality: a habitual or characteristic mental attitude that determines how you will interpret and respond to situations.

Quick summary of Deweck's ideas on mindset (she wrote a whole book on it so forgive me for all the stuff left out in these descriptions)

Closed mindset people see their abilities as fixed and are resilient to learning anything that does not come naturally or fits within their self image.  "I am good at math so I try, writing however I am terrible at...".  
Open mindset people see their abilities as dynamic and invite challenges as a chance to expand their ability, not question them.  

I want to build open mindset students and I am lucky, none of my students have ever taken physics and don't know that they are bad at it (a challenge HS Algebra I teachers face daily).  In addition to a grade that is 90% reliant on what they know or can do (test) and 10% everything else (HW, participation, labs, etc) and the regular opportunity to review and reassess old content, I added the following.

The initial delivery of material was done electronically and by student choice.  They were given objectives during the week and self paced through them.  I wanted students to have some voice and choice in the direction they took to mastery.  This infusion of technology + daily mindset coaching on how much I believe in their ability to learn Physics delivered the following.

11 students enrolled in AP physics (their senior year!...the average from P physics to AP physics is 1 student and the class is so hard (even by AP standards) that two years from now it will become a two year course!

10 of the 11 have never taken an AP science course before!

9 of the 11 have never taken any AP class before!

8 of the 11 are re-designated language learners,

and my personal favorite

5 of the 11 were failing the course at the first progress report...it's my favorite because I want to teach that failure is just a part of the process so long as you keep trying.

I am more proud of these statistics than anything else I have done as a teaching professional because they represent a change in student's mindsets.    The best part is...this is just the beginning, I didn't even know what I was doing and spent much of the time learning how not to run a blended learning classroom.   This is just the beginning.

Cheers!

The Fallacy of Precocity

or..."I'm not a smart kid, I'm in algebra I"

Malcolm Gladwell speaks about this idea at length in his awesome lecture found here, don't have an hour (also available on 92Y itunes account to listen whenever) here is a summary which this post is based on.

Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith. (Let’s just be thankful that Cézanne didn’t have a guidance counsellor in high school who looked at his primitive sketches and told him to try accounting.) Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to accept that there’s nothing we can do about it. How can we ever know which of the failures will end up blooming?  The problem is that we identify talented kids by their ability to learn things, and we identify talented adults is by the ability to do things.  Yet the difference between learning and doing is the difference between black and white.

Rest of Article

I personally struggled (well maybe not struggled, but I was certainly aware of it) with classification in school. In elementary my friends were in Gifted and Talented and I wanted to go with them to do the cool stuff they talked about (we are talking 3rd grade here), I don't remember the explanation as to why only some 8 year olds got to go the "gifted and talented" class, but I am sure it was rich.

In 7th grade I wanted to be in pre-algebra with my friends, so much so that one day I got a bathroom pass, walked into Mrs Drakes 2nd period class with my friends in it and asked if I could be in the class.  How would you handle this situation?  I really wanted to be in the class, and although I never felt "dumb" because of the classes I was in, I quickly figured out I wasn't one of the smart kids...

... and by 9th grade, I stopped asking.  I didn't enroll in AP courses when given the chance, and I only took one honors class (H Spanish 3, which was a joke by the way that I got a credit boost for that class) when a teacher said he/she thought I would be successful at that level.  This is the challenge of a system that has certain gatekeepers to achieve at a certain level.  I lost all agency in determining how high I could go.  The bar had been set, I knew what kind of student I was and worked hard to do the best I could at that level.

The problem lies in the focused linear and non-permeable lines we draw for students to move through school.  I feel like online lessons can work to undue this problem.  I am delivering content through Youtube videos that I make and let students work through material asynchronously, sometimes in class, sometimes at home.  I'm trying to introduce the business concept of ROWE, into my classroom (thanks Daniel Pink!).

This year I have asked our AP physics teacher to list one or two ideas per unit that I can present the students that he would like them to be familiar with coming into AP physics.  Students can self-select into this content should a bolt of confidence strike them given their progress on any given idea.  Having produced the lesson and practice online, I am not responsible for the differentiation that comes with inviting students to choose to do this work.  I only have to be there for support when they come to bumps in the road.

The big picture is this class, for any student, at any time, can morph into a H Physics class as the students choose to.  Students have a choice to push themselves to that level that is never there once you enter the College prep track.  The open ceiling also includes a clear well defined floor.  If you can do these things (insert list of essential core standards of passing a class here), you are guaranteed a C.  One teachers comment.

"So you have asking them to do the work in your class, that they used to have to do in G (general) Physics".

My response was yes! the only difference being that with confidence and encouragement, that student can self select into more challenging work at any time.  Where as once they were enrolled in the G course, that was all they were going to be exposed to all year long.

It's important to note that everyone (teachers) would prefer school to be this way, we have simply been lacking the tools to make it viable....until now :)

Cheers!

Mastery Teaching

Otherwise known as Standards Based Grading....

if you are not familiar with either term, or just want to be inspired watch this video by Dr. Tae the skateboarding physics professor and assessment reform proponent.  The first 8 min are epic.

If you are familiar with this the term skip down about 2 paragraphs.

I was having dinner with my wife the other night and I was sharing the model for the flipped classroom with her and accidentally used the term Mastery Teaching (from Bergmann and Sams book and other stuff from the 1980s) instead of Standards Based Grading.  My wife stopped me and asked me what "Mastery Teaching" was (she is a principle and is very familiar with what I do).  I shared with her how it is another term for SBG that I have come to describe in elevator pitch mode as

"A method of instruction and assessment that allows the teacher, as well as the student to know exactly where they are on the path to mastery".

She loved it! not the specific idea, she is an administrator and knows all about SBG.  What she was interested in was two things 1st: the cultural implications of the term "Mastery Teaching", she felt that it implied the teachers role in moving students toward mastery is at the core of the assessment system.  2nd:  She didn't know what it meant and was curious to ask...as opposed to "Standards Based Grading" which is getting dangerously close to being a "thing" that everyone feels like they know what it is (which can be dangerous).

Mastery Teaching is essential for flipping given that the criteria focus makes the videos and subsequent assessment to follow, manageable by students and parents who may not have any previous experience in our own content areas.

Here is a link to one of my current unit plans...science teacher or familiar with the material?  please offer ideas for improvement.  One of the biggest changes I made this year is a move away from a descriptor model of "Basic", "Proficient", and "Advanced"...as students were beginning to adopt the labels and apply them to their own fixed mindset (thanks Carol Dweck).  That is to say, after a few units students began to believe they would never be able to access "Advanced" content, and therefore tended to check out on those days lessons.

Differentiated Suprise

Student have different needs...all of them...all the time

(friggin awesome video by the way, thanks Tammy Heflebower!)

After my first week of out of the lab flipping (that is too say instead of practicing in the computer lab, they actually did the work at home).  I came a cross a curious senario. 

Big gaps in needs based on assessment results on the idea that we covered (Newton's 2nd Law).  Some students totally understood what I asked them to learn.  Other students understood the core idea, but have gaps in their ability to take it to the next level when it comes to 2nd Law.  Other's are lacking application and understanding of the basics.  Once upon a time...next topic, or work my but off to create a 3 tiered lesson, mostly help one group while managing the others.

Now that I have been busting my but to produce online content in order to flip, I find myself uniquely qualified to handle the problem in a non-flipped way, using the material I have created.  

Group 1:  8-12 kids with me working in groups of two at the most in the front center of classroom.  Use a preexisting worksheet that I had that covers the three levels of understanding.  

Group 2:  5 or 6 kids can work on the following:  create extra problems with explanations on the computers (that I have attained through grants) show the set up and explain how to solve it or...move on to extra credit content requested by our AP physics teacher.  Both options I love by the way, they are making stuff that will be posted on my website to help other students who need more practice (and probably explain it better than I do) or do work that I regret is not worth presenting to the whole class. 

Group 3:  Students with holes in their learning working in groups of three or four.  Individually these student's don't understand everything, collectively 1 in 4 can help on any particular problem, question, idea.

The best thing about this lesson was my prep time was already paid when I created my lessons and coached them on how to navigate the content.  The membrane between the groups was semi-pearmeable (I'm teaching two sections of biology this year), that is to say students could demonstrate a level of learning and move to a different group or assignment.  Finally...it worked!  

I had a room full of people not just working, but doing the right work for them.  This is very difficult to plan, but the flipped culture (not just the structure) allowed the students to completely understand the design of what we were doing this day.  

Given that I am regularly struggling with actually home participation (more on my soon to be weekly "by the numbers" blog post) in the lesson viewing it is important for me to focus on small victories.  

Is this a victory?  Many that could be watching them at home are not.  The test is friday and purhaps the results will provide opportunity for a "come to jesus" talk about their own levels of participation.  

What if the home participation is low, but the test results are better than last year given the change in lesson delivery (even if it is mostly still happening in class)?

thoughts?

Cheers