I’m not one to make New Year resolutions. They amount to so much wishful thinking, empty of any conviction. The gym where I work out will be packed with “resolutioners” for the next month or so, people sitting on machines texting and chatting away, mostly in the way, believing they have some resolve to exercise more or lose weight. By mid February, their numbers will dwindle away.
This year, however, I am resolved to flip my classroom. The motivation to execute this flip comes from two places. Our school’s recent work and thought around CCSS has me frustrated, has me wondering why, if we are serious about affecting meaningful change at the classroom level, we are treating these new standards in exactly the same way we have treated the standards and accountability reforms preceding CCSS.
Secondly, I believe there is an important connection between space (place or environment) and the learning and living that happens in that place. The design of classroom space sends clear messages about the work and expectations of that place. Further, I have become more disciplined in articulating what I believe about literacy and learning. I have become more deliberate, principled in designing and enacting lessons aligned with those beliefs. If I believe that literacy learning is an active process - enacted in social contexts, realized through our use of language, and influenced by place/environment – then it makes little sense to isolate people in individual desks all facing some font of all that is good and standardized.
This flip we are about to enact is not solely of my making. To simply rearrange the desks, revise my syllabus, and plod along as before would be nothing more than new clothes for the same old wolf. We have to enact this plan together. We are, as the sign says in our school’s entry way, a community of learners.
Therefore, we spent a semester building empathy. We have worked our best in the former space trying our best with the former design. We often shoved desks around or left the room all together for more accommodating space – the library or computer lab.
As semester one developed a death-rattle and wheezed its last breaths, I asked my classes to take a few minutes and create a list. I asked them to write about what we do in our classroom. Students paired up to merge their lists and begin a conversation about the work of a reading and writing rich classroom. Together then, we roamed the landscape of that first semester looking or patterns, routines and rituals, habits of mind. I wrote their synthesized list, the actions of readers and writers, on our white board.
Next, I gave each student a large sheet of construction paper and these instructions: Given this list we have created, I want you to redesign this space to accommodate those actions. Anything goes. Nothing is too ridiculous. Should we all have ipads? Do we need live music? Room service? Imagine this room completely empty. Map out your design for a new space.
With the new designs mapped out, I asked students to write a brief description of their design pointing out key features and their connection to a reading and writing rich classroom. Using a “crowd sourcing” protocol we rated each design and identified the top three ideas in terms of creativity/innovation and feasibility. As great as it would be, I can’t get ipads for each student. With our rationale articulated and some concrete design plans, I set about scrounging, begging, and stealing in order to realize our new plan.
Here are some pictures of the redesign in progress:
Not pictured is an open mic / stage space which we will use for “open mic” Fridays and for CP4s dramatic interpretations of the plays they’ll be reading this semester.
Speaking of open mic and dramatic performances, I need to point out that redesigning this classroom space is only phase one of my resolution to flip my classroom. This whole process has recalibrated my thinking about the hows and whys of what gets enacted in my classroom. We have a new classroom space, now what?? My students and I will begin exploring and envisioning new possibilities on day one. I can’t wait to see what happens.
This just may work IF you have deep respect in that very room! I’d like to be a mouse peeking out from under the desk (that’s if you still keep desks!!). Keep us up on the adventure.
Nancy
Response: Flipping a Classroom. i did not prepare the ground work authentically enough. I did not make the change process anywhere inclusive enough. I was not mindful enough of my situation personally or professionally. And in places, deep down that you really don’t want to know about, I wasn’t honest, especially with myself.
Nevertheless, I “flipped” my classroom in many of the same ways you are doing yours. The first thing that happened is my class size when from 25-30 to 15-18. My flip was making all classes open enrollment. That is any student could take any class any time it was offered, no pre-requisites. My theory is one of the things public education should be is real training for adult life in the real world. That training cannot happen if public education is segregated by age, grade, and gender. In collaboration with that theory was the notion of diversity. In public education, diversity is a hot button issue. Some see it as dumbing down the curriculum while others see it as enrichment. I believe it is enrichment.
To pursue that belief I went to great lengths to expand the diversity in my classrooms. Age diversity was expanded enormously by bringing in senior citizens to take a writing course along side the students. A public school classroom should not be unique because of race, gender, age, ethnicity, or language. If it is unique then let it be for the practice and pursuit of literate behavior. That practice and pursuit will distinguish itself quickly enough.
Another idea I had was to make classes relevant. For students, the only relevance of 10th grade English or 11th grade English is to measure how much time before this uselessness is done. I like to think what I did broke into that sphere of boredom and to some extent I know it did. But your idea of student generated inquiry holds deeper, higher promise than my attempts to expand inquiry.
Our over-all concept was to build avenues of investigation under over-arching pursuits of language arts goals. Namely, literature, reading, writing, speech, and drama. Something incredibly interesting is how your students designed a stage to be permanently located in your classroom. That was something I thought was badly needed and when we built our new school I lobbied hard for at least one English classroom to be built as a small stage with raised seating, a light and sound mixer, back lighting, and a projection screen. That, of course, was not possible.
What we were able to accomplish was to change the culture if our school from freshman English, Sophomore English, Junior English, and Senior English with two tracks – college bound and vocational English; to a robust collection of semester classes, 34 in all, that ran from English Literature to Sports Literature, from Public Speaking to reader’s theater, to drama class, from Nature Reading and Writing Workshop to Finding Your Voice writing class, to Writing for Publication.
And so for 15 years we had open enrollment, diversity seeking, no re-requisite, and at least 50% student generated inquiry and study literate behavior language arts at New Glarus high school.
There were obstacles to doing this. For example, a couple of school board members did not like the idea of a freshman girl attending class with a senior boy. I understood their concern since they were both men with daughters in our high school. My answer was, when and how will your daughters learn to handle, or protect themselves from arrogant, manipulative, domineering, predatory males? Well it be in college when they are naive and vulnerable, or will be on their first job when they come in contact with sexual cohesion? If that kind of behavior should erupt, I am in much better position and much better prepared to handle it now, than your daughter will be alone, on her own. The school board members gave their grumbling consent.
Today, this seems a much bigger issue than it did 25 years ago. But I hold the theory behind it is still solid. I know one of the biggest failures of public education is instilling and supporting the idea of voluntary compliance. It is not oversimplifying to say, voluntary compliance is the one indispensable behavior necessary to have and maintain a democracy. A society without voluntary compliance is anarchy, a society with forced compliance is fascism.
Where do we show after 13 years in public education that child walking across the stage has suddenly changed from a raging hormones adolescent to a responsible adult? We can’t! And consequently, generation after generation goes through the same process, actually it’s more like manufacturing, and comes out lacking all the things we said we were putting in them.
I certainly didn’t solve all these public education problems. But I did create a literate behavior rich environment, I did have standards that my students helped me identify and prioritize, I did expect and demand voluntary compliance to our rules for good writing, and as much as possible, the rules society expects all citizens to abide.
Your ideas about student centered content, student centered approach, and student centered methods goes several steps farther than I did or even thought of. Of what I’ve written here you already know and know about. Now, you are taking a huge next step. It’s the right step but its dangerous too. It will be interesting to what and who challenges you.
I have spent a large part of our break thinking about ways to make my classes more interactive. When I asked my Senior class to give me feedback at the end of last semester, they had some good suggestions. One was to have more presentations, which will put the focus of learning the material more squarely on the students where it belongs. I am always looking for ways to give students more choices about what they read and discuss. I am hoping to build a classroom in which students take a much more active role in developing strategies for their learning. We will see how this progresses. I am open to any suggestions and/or ideas.
I have a user friendly lesson that I did last week in Sophomore English that I thought others might like. After teaching sentence combining using appositives and participles and reading Anthem, I decided to put the two together for a lesson that was student driven. In groups of 3-4, students constructed 10 sentences. Five of them had to include appositives, and five had to include participles, both groups with correct punctuation. The theme of the sentences had to center around the evolving characters of Liberty and Equality and how these changes furthered the plot or unfolded the theme. This way we covered one of the essential skills of sentence combining for fluency and one of our core standards for reading which centers around the idea of character development. The classes did well on these, and I saw them really discussing the book. They also asked me a lot of questions in the process. This was an easy lesson for me, but the rigor for the students was more difficult.
I love this idea of a classroom makeover to facilitate authentic learning, discussion and tasks. I have always been frustrated with my classroom. Now to be completely honest, I am not known for my organizational skills and most of the chaos is self-created but I have never found a room layout / seating arrangement that I have been happy with. I have tried putting the desks in “pods,” and pairs to more easily accomodate the communicative nature of our classroom but it never seems to work. I love how much instructional time is saved by not having to move desks and students for group and pair work but the students always struggled with the seating arrangement during individual practice / direct instruction. I taught classroom behavior norms and we practiced what each level of interaction looked like but it never stuck. Eventually I always seem to come back to my traditional seating of half the class facing the other, allowing me a “runway” in the middle to access the board, the technology and giving me a teaching platform.
I have to say I love the “vibe” of your classroom, Jeff. It sends the message that work is to be done, opinions and voices will be heard and intellectual growth will be valued. It inspires me to continue brainstorming about my own classroom “flow” and try new things again. Heck, for now I’d just take a lighting makeover. These fluorescent lights are draining me of my energy and creativity!