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Blended & Flipped Instruction: 21st Century Education
In a traditional classroom, I would typically lecture 70-80% of the class time, have only 10-15% of class time to help students one-on-one, and assign homework for each night where most students would typically struggle with applying the physics concepts. However, with emerging technologies, a flipped classroom uses the time in reverse to personalize and make the learning more effective—podcast lectures (typically 10-15 minutes) delivering course content can be accessed via laptops and mobile devices as homework, freeing up class time to work on the more difficult application of physics concepts, doing more hands-on activities, delving deeper into subjects, and getting help!
Through a blended learning approach, we will mix some old-fashioned lectures with high-tech podcasts, in order to maximize class time to make learning more engaging, individualized, and effective.
Now I typically will only lecture 20-30% of the time (some things are best seen live—like having 50,000 Volts pass over your friend through a hand-held Tesla coil, seeing old school colored disco lights mix on the ceiling to form the primary and secondary colors perceived by the eye, or having a bowling ball hung from the ceiling swing at your face and not knock your teeth out!), effectively doubling to tripling the time I have to help students one-on-one and to do more hands-on activities to help students engage in the physics concepts at hand!
Mastery Learning:
In addition to having multiple attempts on assignments and flexibility in working towards mastery of problem sets, you will have the opportunity to RETAKE unit exams(!). Sometimes you will work really hard at learning something new and things just don’t quite click—or you just had a bad test day! :(
Fortunately, you will have the opportunity to re-take unit exams within a week of the original test date to demonstrate mastery—you simply need to complete the “Retake Ticket to Exam” in your notebooks and schedule with me when you would like to make-up the unit exam—also a unique feature of my course! This takes some of the pressure off of exams to focus on learning and mastery—and learning physics is hard enough work in and of itself!
Finally, you are welcome to come in for extra help anytime—you just have to let me know what time works for you so we can schedule a time together before or after school—I am fully committed to your success!
Here’s to a great school year—please let me know if you have any questions or comments!
Mastery Learning
What is unique in my new course format is that you can click on ANY of the assignment links that are active and can COMPLETE those assignments up until the end of the quarter!!! (However, it would be in your best interest to complete the assignments before each unit exam!).
In other words, you can immediately raise your physics grade any time, and instantly see your grades go up as you makes progress towards the learning objectives of each unit!
Typically, you will be given multiple attempts at homework sets, and are given the highest (!) score on an assignment in order to emphasize mastery of the concepts presented in class.
Just like learning to shoot a free throw takes practice and more than one attempt, it only makes sense to give you every opportunity to succeed!
No More Busy Work:
Note also that homework sets are often dramatically reduced (often times only 10 problems or less to solve over a few days with in class to get help and work together in groups) to focus on helping master the concepts instead of the usual “drill and kill” approach with paper worksheets and textbook assignments.
On my interactive homework sets, you immediately know if you get the problem right or wrong, are given multiple opportunities to get the answer correct, receive credit for properly breaking down problems in your notebook, and are encouraged to work together with your classmates (not cheating—we call this collaboration in real life!). Every student receives a similar type of problem and the ideas are the same but are given a unique set of variables to calculate to help you check your own understanding and mastery of the concepts at hand.
We also have literally hundreds of supporting podcasts of every major lecture topic and fully solved(!) example solutions explained from start-to-finish of every major problem type—you are encouraged to work on problem sets until you have fully mastered the concepts, or move on if you quickly finish!
To further help you stay organized, there is a mastery “Checklist” next to each activity / homework assignment on my website—as you complete assignments you can either manually check them off or the system will automatically help track completion status for you.
Source: Sophia.org
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