I'm currently putting the finishing touches on a presentation I'm giving this week at the New York State Council of the Social Studies Annual Conference this week and I realized that I hadn't posted too much here about my experiences last summer at the Library of Congress Summer Teachers Institute.  Bad Dawn!!!
     One of the lessons that I did early on the year was my own take on the Library of Congress' Connecting with Primary Sources activity.  

In my activity, I used maps!  It was a great way to introduce a wide variety of topics to my US History students because I chose traditional maps as well as infographic type maps which covered topics from colonial times through present day.

      The students walked into the room and chose a map that was of interest to them.  Then I reviewed the process of studying the maps (see above) as well how to use the Primary Source Analysis tool which was created by the Library of Congress (see below).

     I had a horrible time limiting myself to just 25 maps and ended up selecting over 35 maps (see below)!

     After completing their Primary Source Analysis (PSA) tools and answering any of the questions the students had, the students moved on to their next task.  They then had to locate the students who had maps which fell in to the same category as their map.  This was something that I needed to help them out with a bit and eventually I told the students what the categories were and they were then better able to find their matches.  See categories below.

     Lastly, as a group, the students shared their maps and discussed what they found interesting about their maps or the questions that they had.  Then the groups created a headline that would summarize the significance of their maps.  This was an eyeopening part of the lesson for me since the students had a very difficult time summarizing!  It helped me to understand why essay writing is so difficult for them, particularly document based questions.
     Overall, I really liked this activity and really like the idea of doing something like this as a way to either pre-assess student knowledge at the start of a unit or to use as a post assessment.  It's much more informational for me than a multiple choice assessment.

I’m a goal setter and a list maker.  Last spring, I set the goal to transition my classes to a flipped learning model.  This week I was finally able to implement a full, flipped mastery model to my two psychology classes.  How it will work, how much my students will learn and enjoy it, and what changes will need to be made all remain to be seen.  For now, I can tell you the process which led me to where I am today.

The Beginning:

It started with Twitter and Twitter Chats.  The two I engaged in the most last year were #sschat and #psychat.  People mentioned flipped learning and I was intrigued and decided to read up on it.  My research started online and then moved to the book Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams.  Initially, I found the book very useful but I decided that Flipped Mastery would not be something that I could do with my students.  I didn’t see how I could get through the curriculum or how they would be able to achieve mastery.  I also felt like it would mean me giving up on the instructional side of my teaching which is something that I love and feel that I am good at.

After a bunch of reading and research I dipped my toe in to flipping in April of 2013.  I figured that I couldn’t mess up too much at that point in the school year (we end in June) and I did some in class flips for my US History and Psychology classes.  I made sure to get a lot of feedback from my students along the way.  It helped me to fine tune my videos (shorter!) and to give me more goals to set in the future (put me in the videos, maybe even green screen).

Since it was the end of the school year, I didn’t get the opportunity to assign too many flipped homework assignments.  I did, however, make 13 Regents review videos for my US History students.  When I asked them just before the exam what were the most effective review methods for them, my review methods were highly rated.

Making Adjustments:

As the new school year started this fall, I had the goal of flipping one lesson each week for both US History and Psychology classes. 

This did not work out as planned for US History.  The students weren’t watching the videos and thus were not learning the material.  Instead of giving up entirely, I made videos as test reviews and for each vocabulary list I assigned to better explain the material and to help the students to review for our vocabulary quizzes.  The students have been making good use of these resources but I still want to get back to my initial goal of flipping more of the class instruction. 

In my psychology classes, my goal has been working out pretty well! I didn’t flip every single week but I did create flipped lessons regularly.  To increase students’ likelihood of watching the videos I did several things.

1. Put the videos on flash drives and DVDs for the students with limited internet access.
   
2. Posted the videos on both YouTube (with the links on my website) and Schoology (which is not blocked at school).
3. Gave the students ample opportunity to watch the videos; not just one or two nights.  I assigned the videos on Monday and made them due on Friday.
   
4. On the Friday when the videos were due, I held class in the computer lab.  I assigned fun activities for the class like taking personality tests or completing memory exercises.  The students loved them!  The students who hadn’t watched the flipped video for the week, however, had to watch the video prior to being able to do the fun activity.  
   

Using these methods, all students watched the videos whether at home or during class time.  Class time was freed up to do more engaging activities, have more discussions, and delve deeper into the material.  I was quite pleased and so were my students.

In my next post, I’ll discuss what technology I have used to flip my classes and some of the specific places where I have learned about how to flip effectively.  In a third post I’ll let you know the steps I’ve taken to move from a weekly flipped lesson to a fully flipped mastery model for my psychology classes.  Stay tuned!

     Over the summer I read a book that many other teachers read as well: Teach Like a PIRATE.  This book has been the talk of the town for a while making the rounds at conferences and water coolers.  One of the biggest venues to discuss the book is via twitter chats.  You can now find subject specific chats in addition to the general #tlap chat (Mondays from 7-8pm Eastern Time).  There’s #tlapmath, #ELAtlap, #sstlap, and #SCItlap (for science).  I’d say that the twittersphere’s response is a pretty good endorsement of how influential this book is!
     This book interested me before I even knew that Dave Burgess is a fellow high school social studies teacher.  Honestly, the pirate thing was the biggest draw for me.  Who wouldn’t want to teach like a pirate?  I wanted to be the teacher who would hold the students captive to my educational awesomeness and the idea of being a bit of a quirky peg-legged, eye-patched, friend of parrots was a definite incentive for me to read the book.  Finding out that the author teaches difficult to motivate students US History was only icing on the cake!
     So, I’ve decided to put my own spin on the pirate lifestyle for my classroom this year.  I loved Dave’s idea of selling the class to the students.  I made my class handouts resemble advertisements and even had endorsements from last year’s students.  I decided to break away from my regular first few days of class where I went over the rules day one and dove into the curriculum on day 2.  Like I said, I did my own spin on the pirate life so on day one for US History I did an activity called History in a Bag  and for Psychology I did the Marshmallow Challenge. 

     Next week I will be doing activities where the students will be up and moving in both classes.  Both activities are inspired by my summer conferences.  My US History classes will be doing an activity I learned about at the Library of Congress Summer Institute involving maps entitled “Connecting with Primary Sources” (more on this later).  My psychology classes will be taking part in a Values Walk.  
     I truly believe that using the PIRATE methods in addition to my own general zany character will really make my class an exciting place for my students where they feel motivated to learn.  Coupling this with my move towards gradually flipping my classes and integrating more technology overall will make this even easier for me to accomplish.  My goal is to have more class time to engage my students and really help them to connect with the content.  So far I’m feeling extremely energized and very excited to teach my lessons.  One student has already said to me “You can tell you really like your job”.  What a great endorsement two days into the school year!