It was out of necessity that I decided to embark on the journey of flipping my already spiraled grade 10 Academic math curriculum. I didn’t know how I was going to project my voice loud enough through a mask for all to hear without getting light-headed from trying to breathe and talk through an N-95 mask. I enrolled in The Flipped Classroom Formula By Teach On A Mission and dove in. I was coming off of my maternity leave that started just after the Pandemic hit, and I was very anxious about how I was going to teach in the “new normal”. I spent my summer preparing videos and getting ready. I was able to get about a month ahead before school started, but then it was week-to-week after that.
Our school schedule had us teaching two blocks back-to-back in the morning and then our next double block in the afternoon. Luckily for me, it was the same course so that helped with the workload. The following week I had one double block of teacher prep time in the morning and then a double block of a different class than I taught the previous week. Those no prep weeks were killer. I would go home and plan, mark, make videos, etc. just to keep my head above water.
I really enjoyed teaching with the flipped-spiraled models implemented in class. This way the students and I could work on the hard questions together in class and when it was time for their at-home-work, instead of the usual grueling 1 hour+ of difficult problems, all they needed to do was watch a 10-20 minute video and take notes. It was much easier for them to “sit and get” at home so that we could do “the hard stuff” in class.
We have whiteboards all around my classroom, so in addition to the flipped-spiraled classroom, I also added one more component called Building Thinking Classrooms. This allowed students to do much more than I do, you do, we do types of lessons, they got to work on problems that were just beyond what we did the previous day to see if they could make connections and problem solve in their random groupings.
I will be talking more about these three components of my classroom teaching in later posts.
That is all for today. I hope something in this post was able to help and inspire you on your teaching journey.
Have a great day!