Saturday, October 31, 2015

Changing the Face of Instruction


I am a member of several Facebook teacher sites and am in the midst of adding to one where a teacher said his administration has banned front of the room teaching.  A number of the teachers are saying how awful that is.  Truth be known I have a few minutes in front of the room, but have mostly moved away from it.  Consider today's lesson in my economics' class

  • The kids watched a flipped video on graphing perfect competition
  • We started with a quiz where the kids had to draw four graphs and could use their video notes. 
  • In my class I won't count the quiz unless the notes are acceptable and occasionally make them redo it - but I always let them redo it and always give full credit even if it is late and most of the work is turned in on time as the kids know I will call parents if 2 or more assignments aren't done in a two week period - and I rarely have to call!
  • Then four different kids went to the board to draw the graphs.
  • Next the kids worked on their problem sets.
  • I walked around the room and answered questions from the previous day's work and the current ones.  
  • Oh I should say that my room is set up in 8 pods of four desks so the kids can easily help each other.  Each group is set up with different levels of students.  
  • Should I add that we have not opened a book this year either so it is not only cost efficient, but videos are how kids teach themselves now.  
  • We took our second test of the year last week and my average score is up 10% over last year's kids. 
  • I use this format (flip video, quiz, interactive, walling around the room) in all of my classes now and wish I had figured this out years ago!  

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for your post. I too am trying to move away from lectures. My problem is balance. I teach 7/8th grade American History. When we work on skills, I am on the side in my class, letting the kids work with the sources and each other as I move around the room. My difficulty is in introducing the content. I still get caught in that storytelling side and worry that I am talking too much.
Any strategies for communicating that new content without spending most of the class lecturing?

eLearning Blog said...

Your needs are why I have them watch video the night before. I also think there is nothing wrong with talking to the kids as a group which I still do, esp. if we are going over something.

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