Too Much of a Good Thing?

I've been putting a lot of effort into "flipping" my classroom. More and more of my lessons are being recorded on video. In fact, it's become my default teaching method. When preparing a new lesson or activity I automatically begin thinking about how I'm going to record my instructions in a video format.

Here are a few reasons why:

1. I get to spend more time one-on-one with students. For example, in my recent lessons on Osmosis I got to spend lots of time working with individual students who didn't understand the topic despite using three different videos from other teachers to explain it.
2. I have more time to check up on student understanding. Instead of standing at the front of the room talking I am able to assess students by walking around the room, looking over their shoulders, and taking up the short quizzes I give them.
3. The videos are actually shorter than if I gave the lecture live since there are no disruptions and I can work to make them as efficient as possible.
4. I don't forget things. In a regular lesson with me at the front, I might forget to include something while teaching live. If I'm thorough with my videos I can avoid this.
5. When I'm absent, or students are absent the class can keep moving and the absent students can catch up.
6. Students that need more time can have it, since they aren't bound by the speed of the class.
7. It doesn't take me any longer to plan a lesson. Instead of just thinking about my lesson and writing notes, I record my planning session and I'm done.
8. If I get the chance to teach the same things again, I have everything ready to go.

All this is well and good, but I do wonder if I'm using it too often. Here are some negatives I'm experiencing.

1. Using the same teaching style all the time is not a good thing.
2. It is much harder to organize some of the fun and interesting whole class lessons because every student is in a different place. For example, just yesterday I had a student say that it would have been much more interesting to read a story out loud with students taking different parts instead of reading it themselves. They were right!
3. Too much time staring at a screen.
4. If your network goes down you are in big trouble.
5. Some students complete all the work ahead of time and have nothing to do. (Clearly they need a challenge and now I need to work on providing that. So maybe this isn't all negative.)

Using video to teach is very powerful and has enormous advantages. But it is always important to be critical and look for best practices. 

The Dark Side of Project Based Learning

My school, along with the family of schools we are part of, has been looking seriously at Project Based Learning (PBL).

A few weeks ago our district of schools had a PD day on the topic.

It just so happens that we were in the middle of preparing for our spring musical. We had wanted to make use of Matthew West's excellent song Do Something to conclude the program. Then someone suggested that we make our own.

Foolishly I volunteered to take the project on using my grade 7 class. We had a little more than two weeks to complete the entire project on time.

Here's what they created.

I learned a few hard lessons during this project.

1. It is messy
• My classroom was a mess throughout this project, so was the room down the hall we turned into our photo studio
• The schedule in my room went out the window. Regular Bible, math, science, and any other subject was ignored in order to meet the deadline. This was particularly difficult to make work with the Arrowsmith students in my room who have very strict schedules.
2. Some students really didn't like it
• For those students who had figure out the rules of school, who knew what they had to do to earn an "A", who know how to give the answers the teacher wants, this project was very hard. These students were pushed outside their comfort zone.  
3. Parents don't necessarily understand it
• A project like this is not school as normal. For some parents this is uncomfortable. 
4. It's not in the "official" curriculum
• If I had to align this with the "official" curriculum I'd have to get creative to fit it in somewhere. (I could do it though!)
• It has it's own curriculum. Things like productivity, collaboration, creativity, meeting deadlines, and more.
5. The project revealed that students and I didn't really know how to do this.
• My students struggled to be productive. In one case I assigned a small task that should have taken 20 to 30 minutes to complete, 3 days later I noticed they were still working on it! They just didn't have any practice at really buckling down and getting to work.
• There were far too many of them who wanted to be the General in the army and not enough who knew how to be Soldiers and take orders. I'd walk into the photo studio and there would be 3 or 4 people in there, who weren't supposed to be, telling people what to do and no one actually doing the work!
6. I threw student work away because it wasn't acceptable.
• The work had to be excellent. Early on I had to throw away 1/3 of the posers they made for the video because they were sloppy, messy, and not well done.
• Students were not used to working with the expectation that their work had to be good.
• We ended up redoing some of the video segments 4 times before they were acceptable. (Some of the ones in the video we still would have liked to redo, but we ran out of time.)
7. It consumed me as a teacher
• Any other project, task, or assignment I had got put on the back burner. I marked next to nothing, and fell behind in a few other projects as I spent every minute working on this.
• I spent more time at school working on this than normal and I already work a lot. This had a cost with my family.

So my experience with this PBL project was messy, uncomfortable, off the beaten path, chaotic, stressful, and tiring.

And I loved it.