Back to School Crunch Time: Three ways to avoid flipping out in the new school year!

Flipped classroom, blended learning, personalized learning, active learning spaces, dynamic learning environment, 1:1, 3:1, and BYOD… it’s enough to make you flip out. Right? As a 4th year social studies teacher, I constantly found myself at crossroads of all of these words that, after a while, seemed to just blend together. At times it just seemed overwhelming to think about fitting 10,000 plus years of world history content into just 80 short days AND include technology. Additionally, which methodology is right for me and my students? There were so many questions I had about this topic. I’m sure you as a new or veteran educator have many questions too. So what do you do when you have questions?  You find answers.

Why are these methods important? Let’s take a deeper look and see how each of these are defined and go from there. Below are the most commonly used definitions of the words mentioned above.

• Flipped Classroom: “The flipped classroom is a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions.” (Educause)
• Blended Learning: “Blended learning, with its mix of technology and traditional face-to-face instruction, is a great approach. Blended learning combines classroom learning with online learning, in which students can, in part, control the time, pace, and place of their learning.” (ASCD)
• Personalized Learning: Personalized learning seeks to accelerate student learning by tailoring the instructional environment - what, when, how and where students learn - to address the individual needs, skills and interests of each student. Students can take ownership of their own learning, while also developing deep, personal connections with each other, their teachers and other adults. (Gates Foundation)
• Active Learning Spaces: spaces that are designed to support teaching and learning in an atmosphere conducive to engaging students actively in their own learning. (McGill)
• Dynamic learning Environments: A dynamic learning environment is characterized by change, activity and progress. It is intentionally designed to meet the needs of all students while challenging them to enhance existing skills, interests and understandings, as well as meaningfully building new ones. Such an environment incorporates inclusion, learning styles, technology and real world applications. It encompasses the classroom, school and broader community under an umbrella of mutual respect and collaboration. (PWPSD)
• 1:1, 3:1, and BYOD: These are all ratios of student interaction with devices. (i.e. One device to one student, etc.) BYOD means Bring Your Own Device.

In my situation, I was “flipping out” because I felt behind the digital curve in education. With that thought in mind, I wanted to share my top three ways to avoid flipping out:

• Teach from the heart. As I began to reach out to and chat with other educators in addition to doing research on my own, I stopped flipping out because I realized that teaching comes from the heart. Teaching does not solely come from sitting in a methods class or professional development session. However, teaching does come from listening to your students, hearing their voices, and designing lessons that are engaging and bring them to the table of decision making. For me the bottom line was, whatever teaching method is going to do that the best, that's what I’m going to do and as a teacher moving forward from that point, I did. Through the digital learner surveys at the beginning of the year I asked students how they learned best, what they loved and didn’t love about the way tech was used in the classroom, and how they wanted to use it in my social studies class. That helped me as a teacher know where to go with flipping the class all the way, focusing on blended learning, etc. Doing this also helped with student buy in and gave them ownership of how they learned.
• Research and reflect on your own. Researching the topics above helped me to understand how to better improve learning in my classroom. However, in order to truly get a grasp on what would make the biggest impact in my classroom I had to reflect on my own practice. Reflecting on your own practice as an educator is one of the most important parts of being an educator. Teachers must embrace learning in themselves so that we can model this for our students but also understand what is going on in the world around us.

• Take risk and step out of your comfort zone. As teachers, we have to be willing to step out of our comfort zone and tap into not just trends but the hearts of students in our classrooms. Digital learning is something that is not going away so we as educators much adapt and change to the new world around us and be facilitators that model growth for our students. This means giving up control and realizing that we are no longer the sole source of knowledge in the classroom. We also must learn to model for students how to find and curate information in the digital age so that they can teach themselves and others around them with quality resources. Personally, I have come a long way from flipping out about digital learning and teaching and have embraced the ever crashing waves of new technology and ideas surrounding how we should teach.

At the end of all this, the point is that the flexible teacher is the most impactful teacher. So don’t worry about making sure every educational buzzword is used in your lesson plan but rather focus on teaching from the heart, researching and reflecting on what works best for you and your students, and take risks. That’s what our students, and education in general, need the most.