The death of a Teacher

After a recent presentation where I received some negative feedback I've been thinking about change.

One of the thoughts I've had is that some of the changes I'm suggesting are hard because they strike directly at a persons sense of who and what they are.

A year or two ago I had a student in my math class who's dad was a high school math teacher. He did not like my teaching method with the flipped classroom format. He made it pretty clear.

What struck me though was his fear. My teaching method attacked his sense of who and what he was. He described himself as a "Chalk and Talk" teacher. He stood at the front of the room with a blackboard and a piece of chalk and talked. And he was good at it. In this style he was a successful, competent, teacher who did his work well.

My method completely undermined his idea of what a teacher was and made his highly developed skills irrelevant.

I'm not surprised in the slightest by his opposition. I was attacking his very sense of self.

So many of the changes that education needs will do the same thing to many other teachers.

My Flipped Classroom Failure

A few months ago I was leading a workshop at a teacher's convention. I was presenting the work I've been doing in my classroom as I explore the power of video in teaching.

Recently I received the feedback from the participants and while it was mostly positive, some of it was very negative. I fact I was struck by two of the comments I received.

It was pretty clear to me that I must have done a poor job of presenting. Math happens to be the place I've started and the place where I have made the most changes to the way I teach, but it's not the only place. 

If you're curious about how I teach math I created a video for students and parents that explain it.

This is just the beginning:

When the students at my school were using their digital devices poorly I had my class create a video about how they shouldn't be used. 

I'm very particular about how students colour maps for current events and geography assignments so I created a video about how to colour them correctly. 

In history I used a video in order to introduce the research project where I had students creating video to teach their fellow classmates. 

In Bible class I use video to introduce assignments.

In Science I create a lot of videos to show students how to use their tools properly. Every single lab has multiple videos teaching the students how to use things well and I like to do lots of labs.

I find it very powerful in Art class. I'm not particularly good at art, but the videos let me teach so much better. Here's an example of one of my art lessons. Even more powerfully I'm using other people's videos. My students created amazing eyes after watching and following along with this video.

I've even made use of it in PE class. My PE class are so short that I hate spending so much time explaining things so I made this video in order for them to play Frisbee Golf. This was one of my least successful ideas though, not because the video didn't work, but because students couldn't handle the idea of PE Homework! 

Quite frankly, I'd like to go back and redo my entire presentation. I don't think I did a particularly good job this time.

Video is so powerful. I think it's a game changer in education.

But change in education is always difficult.