Flipping Things Around

This post is a little late - writing on Monday about last Friday. I haven't written much about our one section of Honors Chemistry, so I thought now would be a good time. Honors Chem at York is what we call "flipped." Instead of spending class time teaching the lesson and then sending students home to struggle through the homework on their own, we reverse the order of things. For homework, the students watch and take notes on a "Screencast," which is a recording of a teacher explaining the material. This opens class time up for students to do the actual work associated with the lesson - when teachers are there to correct misconceptions, answer questions, and check for understanding. It works with some subjects (such as math) more than others (such as English). This format creates a large amount of front end work on the teacher's part to create and record each screencast, but once its done, it can be used for several sections of the same class for several years and puts most of the responsibility to learn on the students.

This brings me to my next thought. Because we do a lot of flipped instruction for the Honors students - students that are more motivated and responsible than your average high schooler - it easily leads into thinking that these kids teach themselves. To some extent, this is true. They do take more ownership of their learning. However, I need to be careful to not allow myself to fall into the temptation of believing that they don't need instruction, correction, or guidance. A student that teaches herself should be pushed further, not just allowed to teach herself. Similarly, what does this mean for my other students? I also can't allow myself to think of them as unable to take responsibility for their learning.

We love to categorize people. Two categories are Honors classes and general classes, which is appropriate and helps us meet their needs, but the categories must always be balanced out by the individuals.