One of my goals for the year is to start a teaching blog. I have learnt so much reading different people blogs, namely Joel Speranza's blog and Tech Tip Tuesday ideas, and a number of different ideas educators have put up on Twitter and different Facebook groups.

My modest goal for 2017 is to write one article a month. I'm hoping that through the process of writing I will be able to solidify my ideas and give method to my madness; provide meaning to the processes, actions and thoughts behind why I teach the way I do.

Please feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of the page. Trialling embedding a form into the page. Thanks!

One of the current trends in education is a shift towards more Formative assessment practices, (think on the move, knowing where kids are, what you need to show again etc) from a more Summative model (here's your test at the end, you can do 30/70 questions, lets move on). The shift has a lot of momentum, and as a teacher of almost 20 years, it's taken a bit of a mind shift for me to move away from the test at the end as the indicator/measurement of success, particularly as a Maths teacher, but one I feel I am embracing.

One of the key ingredients in Formative assessment is feedback to the kids; what can they do, where do they make mistakes, what can they now do to improve, etc. The ongoing cycle of learn, assess, feedback, repeat ensures better learning outcomes for students, and as a teacher, a better understanding of where they are at.

Feedback is crucial and it drives improvement.

So I decided to ask my students for some feedback on one of my Flipped Classrooms (my Yr 10 class, top 5.3), and I asked them 3 questions:

1. What are some positives about a Flipped model of delivery?
2. What are some negatives about a Flipped model of delivery?
3. If you could go back to a traditional model of teaching (me explain up front, you do in class and then finish for homework), would you want to? (Likert scale response: 1 (Definitely not, stay with flipped) to 4 (Absolutely. Ditch the flipped)).

I was wondering if they were enjoying the flipped classroom, if they could see the positives I was seeing develop in their learning, and what they perceived as some of the downsides.

Overall, the feedback I got was pretty positive. Not overwhelmingly, but enough to want to pursue this style of teaching for the remainder of the year.

Some of the positives, and these are verbatim, include:

You work at your own pace and get don't waste time, We also get to practice being organised.

You can go back and rewatch videos if you didn't understand it the first time and you can have it explained as many times as you want. Also makes taking notes and doing homework easier

I like the flipped model because I can rewatch videos if need as well as pause and replay parts to take notes.

Much of the other comments were similar, with an overall feel of "I can work at my own pace", which as a teacher is a wonderful affirmation of differentiated learning.

Some of the negatives were:

Sometimes it's difficult to watch the videos and start the exercise as homework because I have sport 3-4 times a week after school and sometimes it's difficult to get home late and start on homework.

its hard when i get alot of assingment and i have sport and work, its hard to find the time for it because if i dont watch a video one night i fall behind.

Which pretty much sums up most of the negatives; what happens when I don't watch the video and fall behind (as compared to previous years when not doing homework simply meant you didn't do the last few, harder questions)

The overall response to should we stay with flipped or go back to the traditional sage-on-the-stage approach results are below: 1 (Definitely not, stay with flipped) to 4 (Absolutely. Ditch the flipped)

So about 80% said stay, and 20% said go back. As I said before, not overwhelming, but enough to suggest to maintain current course.

So the next big question was what do I do with the feedback I got? All the positives were nice to hear and very affirming, but how could I take those negatives and make the classroom a better environment for all the students.

Mostly, how could I look after those kids who found it hard to watch the video I assigned that night and couldn't do it through commitments to sport, work, family functions etc.

What I did was this.

Rather than drip feed the kids a video every night and say "Tonight, watch Lesson C on Fractional Indices, take notes, do a few questions", I gave the kids all the videos in one big hit ("Here they all are. All 13 lessons") and told them they have 3 weeks to complete the chapter. They could do two videos on Monday, none on Tuesday (Rugby training is important), catch up a bit in class, smash a few more out on Thursday, etc. In short, they had to manage their own learning a lot more over the next 20 days.

My main concern was being able to monitor where the kids were up to and were they tracking along as expected. To combat this, the students have 3 checkpoints they have to hit and answer a set of questions. They self mark, tell me their mark, and then fill out a Google Form identifying which questions they got right and wrong. This will inform me of which style of questions the class had trouble with, and determine what I might need to hit together as a class, or at least a subset of them, at another stage.

I'm interested to see whether they all meet the expected completion date, or if they still need me to drip feed them. Hopefully the feedback I got from my students has let me adjust my teaching strategies to better meet the learning needs of more of my students. This is the power of timely feedback; the ability to adjust on the go and fix it before it is too late.

Time will tell ... in two weeks!

On a rainy Saturday night I sat down to punch out a few videos for the next topic I am teaching in my Flipped Classroom. I tend to get on a bit of a roll and knock out about 2-3 weeks worth of videos, and I try hard to stick to a few guidelines:

1. Try and keep it short. 3 mins is good, 5 mins okay, 7 mins is stretching the friendship.
2. Talk fast. The students can always pause, rewind and re-watch if they missed it the first time. Or second time.
3. Model best setting out. Having moved to a document camera, I can better model how I would set out a solution on paper. Using a writing tablet was fun, but the way I wrote, the space I had available, etc was not similar to the students workbooks. Particularly beneficial for extension classes where the working out is far more important that getting the right answer; the journey is always better than the destination.
4. No post-editing. Once I click stop, its converted to a mp4 immediately, and if it's something the students can see straight away (lessons, extension work) and not to be delayed (solutions to homework sheets) then up on YouTube it goes on my channel. I start all my files with a particular naming convention, so everything from Extension 2 gets added to a smart playlist of Ext 2 work etc. Makes it easier for the kids to find down the track.

Rarely do I ever stop and redo a video. If I make a mistake in the first 15-20 seconds I will probably start over, but if I'm half way through a video and my phone rings, one of my kids walks in the door asking me why I'm on TV or I'm interrupted by a thousand other lifetime happenings, I just press pause, deal with it, then continue on our merry way.

However, just the other day I made an unusual type of mistake. Something that I could see coming from about 10 seconds before it happened. Like I had superpowers for a split second, and I could sense the answer I was going to get wasn't what I was expecting and it wasn't right.

My stomach did a little flip.

Time slowed down.

I was in the Matrix-version of flipping my lessons.

And I'm pleased to say I didn't panic. I embraced my mistake and plowed on, taking time to outline to my students why I knew it was a mistake and what I had done wrong. In essence, I had neglected to write a negative at the start of the question, and as I motored through some initial calculations, I realised the answer I was going to get wasn't the right one. I've put a link below at the time I realised my mistake if you'd like to see the moment unfold, but it's not that riveting to watch; I paused, thought about it, and kept recording afterwards.

It got me thinking afterwards, should I re-do this video to eliminate the mistake? Is it better to have the lessons I do eloquent, free from ambiguity and as clean and tidy a solution as possible?

My response was probably not!

My lessons are littered with snippets of funny little moments when the script goes off track.

My voice breaks as I've got them in the palm of my hand and summarising the key points of the lesson ("I'll be a big boy when I grow up one day", I often remark). A student asks something that has been asked before, and again before that, and I pretend to die a little on the inside. I forget to carry an algebraic term, and I am informed by conscientious student front and centre my answer isn't the same as B.O.B's (Back of Book).

All of which are followed by me fixing it up in the classroom, and moving on, because we all make mistakes. To believe we should be immune to them is to admit that we are not challenging ourselves, extending our abilities and instead settling for what we can already do, rather than pushing ourselves to achieve that which we cannot.

I like it when students make mistakes. It means they are trying. As long as they learn from those mistakes, dust themselves off and get back on that horse, and try again, then I'm happy. If this is what they do every lesson, then I think we are humming along nicely..

If they are expected to dust themselves off everyday, after lots of mistakes (far more than I fortunately), I think I can to. Embrace your mistakes, and let the students see them. We're all human, and mistakes and learning is what makes life, and our Maths classes, so exciting!

One of the great things I like about teaching is the opportunity to re-invent yourself. A lot of people may think teaching the same thing year after year would get boring, but as I often reply the kids are different and the way I teach is different. No two years have ever been the same, and perhaps no two lessons either (but many classes do follow a familiar and well worn path I must admit).

Technology, however, has had an enormous impact on my evolution as a classroom teacher and has been the single biggest factor in flipping my teaching style on its head (see what I did there).

There are so many things that have changed over my career as a teacher, which I will admit is now entering the experienced phase, despite the fact that I sometimes see myself very much as a new teacher fumbling their way through the term. The technology available to me is making me re-think the time honoured tradition that has been the crux of 95% of my lessons which is model-the-problem, work-on-the-problem and sum-the-lesson-up sequencing, interspersed with me getting bored when they work without me and the snippets of opportunities we get to laugh and learn about each other.

Having just finished a topic in a class I have flipped, I gave the students a formative quiz designed to inform them and me about the level of mastery they had achieved over the content. After swapping and marking, the students came and gave me their results which ranged from very impressive to pretty concerning.

I did what I usually do and I made some time in my next class to talk to students one-on-one to discuss the types of problems they were having difficulty with, and I made the quiz available to those wishing to have another go, with the answers so they could self assess.

But I wanted to do more.

I wanted to show each and every one of them where they made their mistakes.

What they could have done to get better.

Where they could go to now to try and improve.

But I often find myself time poor and needing to keep moving; the syllabus isn't going to teach itself. So I plugged away and kept teaching, hoping those left behind in that topic would somehow see what a good student could do in that topic and practice those skills. How this was going to happen I wasn't so sure.

About a week later I read Joel Speranza's post on using time more effectively as a teacher. In his article I re-read a phrase he uses regularly ... The Answer is a video. And I had myself a truly light bulb moment!

Having set a weekly homework task that I post on Google Classrooms, students upload and I mark online, I wanted to model best responses with issues they seemed to face in the completion of the task. I always post solutions so they can check back later if they choose to, but I wanted the students to hear me explaining why I did things certain ways and what common mistakes were. Then I remembered that the Answer is video!

Having put the worksheet up for a week on the Classroom and marked online (response rate of 27 out of 33. Not bad for early on in the year) I submitted both written solutions and a video of me doing the worksheet. I took a video of me doing it, took a photo of the worksheet, waited for the due date and time to pass and then put them up. Below is a screenshot of what I post in the Classroom.

It doesn't take me long to create as I always write out solutions anyway, but this time I'm just recording me doing it. Here is my first one, and whilst not a lot of questions, I'm going to try and use this weekly Google Classroom Assignment "homework" as a way of getting kids to meet a regular online requirement, and ask them questions that might not be usual or typical of the work they have done. My aim is to always a provide a video of me doing the homework and post that, and a copy of the solutions, as soon as the homework is closed.

I haven't yet asked the students if they found it useful or worthwhile watching me do their homework afterwards (I only did it for the first time a few days ago), but I feel as if I am doing more in the pursuit of giving students more opportunities to learn on the journey, rather than the summative snapshots Maths teachers have been so fond of over the years (guilty here your honour, but if it pleases the court, I am trying to change).

Maybe video really is the answer?

Having started out life in Corporate Banking as a brand spanking graduate student, I learnt very quickly the power of databases and spreadsheets. Not many in my unit could really navigate their way around an Access database, let alone set up a table, design a query, and generate a report, I quickly found a skill-set that people were keen to tap into and utilise.

However, teaching called and I listened, and a career at the chalkface was one I thought I could give a go.

My love of using technology and passion to stay ahead of the tech curve was an area I thought I could provide some tangible benefit to the students, and I found myself using Excel spreadsheets whenever possible, doing my best to teach the basics of Access to help analyse numbers and see patterns, and give students the tools to ask the mightiest of questions in a Maths class ... "What if I just tweaked this number just a little bit ...?"

Twenty years have almost passed, and I'm honest enough to say my interest and enthusiasm for using technology in the classroom has risen and fallen. Some years, I'll have plenty of time and motivation to build awesome spreadsheets with student on almost every topic we cover. Other years I'll get to mid Term 4 and realise students don't yet know the difference between a row and a column. It's moments like this I bow my head and apologise for missing the chance to really excite students.

I'm not entirely sure why I dip in and out of technology use in my Maths Classroom.

Spreadsheets, more recently Google Sheets, seems to be the tool of preference for its wonderful ability to model data and stimulate that "what if" mentality. Some things I've thrown myself at, only to see it die a slow and painful death, leaving me with a raft of useless resources, all filed meticulously in Year/Strand electronic folders (yes I'm looking at you Promethean whiteboard). Not that these technologies are bad, but moving schools, going interstate (bye-bye CAS enabled calculator), access to computer rooms (yes they did exist!), teaching different year levels, teaching different courses, all contribute to a change in the waters that might mean the ship you were on before may not be so good in these newer, different waters.

So what do we do? Abandon the use of technology? That's definitely not the answer, especially given the access students have to devices in class today.

I think the key to maintaining sanity in the constantly evolving climate (both things I can and can't control!) is to pick what works best for you in the classroom and roll it. Be prepared to take some hits and lose a few lessons in time and momentum, but kids remember the things that excite and interest them, and using technology ticks all the boxes.

So, want to build a Loan Repayment Table in Google Sheets. Go right ahead.

Want to find the area a shopping centre nearby takes up, bust open Google Maps and measure some distances.

Want to collect work samples and email to parents, get out your phones, snap away and email them to me.

Want the kids to have a weekly summary of things that are important, challenging or interesting? Set up a Twitter account, create a #hashtag for your class and get students to summarise weekly learning.

Or if in doubt, ask the students how to do something. They invariably surprise with their tenacity and ingenuity when solving a problem.

Maybe not everyone will be excited by it, but some will.

And I think that is a pretty good teaching day.