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In this final episode with Elisa Lewis, we discuss both the connections and disconnects that working primarily outside the classroom creates. We discuss the unique opportunities and challenges that the role of academic liaison presents. 

This is part 5 of our ongoing series with Elisa Lewis an Academic Liaison and we discuss the broader perspective working in a school but not in a single classroom can provide.  We discuss how many people in different roles can be needed to help students be successful. Join us as we continue our discussion.

In today's episode, we continue our short mini-series of interviews with Elisa Lewis. In this episode we talk about the planning and development role that Elisa plays in the school-wide RtI system.  We talk about how using a 25 minute block of time at the end of the day helps provide for both intervention and enrichment for students. We also discuss training and utilizing student mentors and leaders in various capacities to help underpin the school environment.

In today's episode, we continue our short mini-series of interviews with Elisa Lewis, and Academic Liaison. In this episode we talk about the interplay between the liaison, student, and classroom teacher. We also continue to discuss some of the tightrope that coaches, interventionists, and other para-classroom educators walk when working with other classroom teachers when it comes to meeting student needs across the student’s academic day.  We also discuss how a staff member that works with relatively small numbers of students pays big dividends for the whole school environment.

Join me this episode as Elisa Lewis visits the Teacher's Lounge and we talk about her role as Academic Liaison.  In this first part of our conversation we discuss her role with struggling students. 

In today's episode, an encounter with an old high-school teacher of my own brings up the topic of reflection from the three of us about the changing seasons of our teaching careers. Join us as we talked about being an 11 year teacher, a 17 year teacher, and a 21 year teacher.  How do seasons change in our career, and how do those changing seasons affect our classroom management, planning, presentation, and role that we play in our learning community.

Eirik Wattengard and I talk good practice for effective learning videos.   

"Idea #5 Sharing your summer", centers on including students in an ongoing project or conversation that allows them to see progress, frustration, setbacks, problem solving, learning, etc. To differentiate what I am talking about in this entry from the last entry, idea 4 was taking pictures, video, etc of isolated events you experience this summer.  What we are talking about in this entry is a longer term project that will happen over a larger time frame.  Think Game of Thrones story arcs rather than Big Bang Theory episodes. For me I am going to document the building process from planning, estimating cost, construction, etc. to use next year in class. Join us for Idea 5 in our series All Flipping Summer.

This one is a big one.  Find some way to take your students with you, digitally, this summer. Every life science teacher I know finds themselves in the forest or on the lake. Every English teacher I know has a stack of books they've been saving for just these three months. Every social science person scours the internet or antique malls for relics to add to their Sanford & Son classroom museum. Alternatively, they pack up the family truckster for travels with Charlie going to battlefields, museums, or visiting every cast plaque historical marker they can locate on Google Maps. Regardless of your content, there is something you're going to do this summer that would benefit your students. 

Q: How do you eat a whale?  A: One bite at a time.  It doesn't much matter where you start on any big project or adjustment to your classroom.  The reality is you will likely not use the first thing you create or first change you make as learning is a process and you won't know where the road leads or the skills you need until well after you have set off. This is why making a second one of anything takes far less time and frustration than doing it the first time, you figure out a more efficient methods using newly acquired skills. It is a bit ironic that as teachers we forget so often what it means to be a learner. 

Take time this summer to find something "important" in your classroom or teaching that needs a little tending to grow to a more full potential. Knowing that summer allows for professional growth, we need to also make that growth a priority and set aside time among the other priorities for summer. Join Me for Ideas #2 in our All Flipping Summer series.

I enjoy my job, most of the time, but I also look forward to summer. As a teacher I spend 9 1/2  months of the year balancing 150 teenage personalities on the ends of sticks and trying to move them from one place to the other in a positive and productive direction. I am exhausted, and summer is the opportunity for me to recharge, rejuvenate, and reload. To be clear, my job is not the first thing on my priority list for this summer so here is the first idea for making the most out of your summer. Let's get started with idea number 1.

In this episode I try and think through a potential policy change for next year.  I am beginning to look ahead at a few adjustments for my classroom next year.  I have signs up in my classroom that forbid the use of cell phones, tablets, digital watches, etc. These signs are up not because I am anti-technology, but because the school where I teach is 1:1 with Chromebooks making the other devices mostly redundant.  

This quick episode tells the story of how a BBC podcast by Tim Horford helped me realize a few things about flipped learning. I have found what many others have realized, flipped learning required a rethinking of the whole learning ecosystem.  43 minutes between bells is no longer a constraint.  Location is no longer a constraint. Uniformity need not be a constraint. Flipped and blended learning allows us to re-think classrooms and re-imagine education. 

In this episode, I give my answers to the three questions regarding "practice" brought up in our Flip Fails blog series.  This blog is available here as a podcast, but is also available on www.flippedlearning.org in traditional blog format. 

In the Flip Fails #4 I ended with a list of concepts that my failures had forced me to reflect upon.   Here are the first three as they popped into my head while writing. How much skill practice does a student need to become proficient? What type of skill practice is most effective? Where/when is practice effective? In this episode we make progress addressing the problem of practice. 

In this episode we continue our Flip Fail series and set the course for the next few entries. If I sum up all of my many failures in my first semester or 18 months of flipping my class I would have to say that I failed to go far enough.  I don't mean that I feel I didn't use enough technology or that I didn't use enough weird teaching methods. What I mean is that I was not willing to open my eyes wide enough to reflect on many of my very basic practices and beliefs that I had carried for the first 12 years of my teaching career.

In this episode we talk field trips and all of the other things that take students out of the classroom.  We also try to figure out a few aspects or measurements that can be used to make this time outside the classroom as beneficial as possible.  Join us in The Teacher's Lounge.

What to do in the classroom Here is where we actually get the most common failure among young flipped classrooms, failing to appropriately plan for the group space. To this point, we have talked about planning for what should happen in the individual space. However, the key to the flipped classroom is to evaluate what portions of the learning need to happen in the individual space and which need to happen in the group space. Once we open up this group space, we need to make sure that we have positive, productive, and meaningful learning opportunities ready to be put in the group space. In this episode I recount my failure and give a few options on how best to utilize the group space.

A very common initial misstep for recently minted flipped classrooms is a teacher who is not fully committed to reorganizing their class in a meaningful way.  In most cases, this is evidenced by flip teachers reteaching the flip lesson in the classroom space. This is a scenario that I guarantee every flip teacher will see or have seen. A teacher assigns a component of learning to the individual space and the following day the students come to the classroom having not completed the learning component. At this point the teacher doubles down on failure and re-teaches, re-lecturers, or repeats whatever learning component the students were responsible for the night before. We talk in this episode about ways to address this situation.