Saying Goodbye and Thank-you to my students

I recently accepted a new position as an academic consultant at the Ingham ISD.  I have spent the last couple of days cleaning out my classroom.  For those who do not know, I spent the last 9 years teaching math and social studies at Charlotte High School.

My favorite class to teach was always AP Government.  I developed this course as a second year teacher and have continued to teach it ever since.  Ever since my undergraduate days, it was my dream to teach AP government since I loved this subject so much.  However, looking back over my 8 years of AP government, it was the students who truly made this class what it was.  I was taking down senior pictures from my "wall of fame" and each face was a story.  The girls who "googled me" during my second year of teaching and came in knowing my parents and all of my extra-curricular activities in high school.  The group that bought me my beloved Constitution scarf.  The group that let me pilot the flipped classroom.  The ones that taught me how to play 2048 after the AP test.  I could go on and on.   The ones who gave me the nick-name T-Becks.  The kids I took across the country to Harvard Model Congress.  Those that I coached in volleyball.

I was especially fortunate to have many students for more than one class since I often taught freshmen algebra and junior AP Government.  The relationships I built with these students have lasted long after the class thanks to social media.  It was these relationships that made my time in the classroom so rewarding and now, so hard to leave.  I only wish I had stumbled upon the flipped classroom earlier in my career as it made building relationships so much easier.

So, to my students (every last one of you), THANK YOU!  You will never know how much you impacted me as a person and as a teacher.  Your insights, humor, and passion are inspiring.   You are the ones who kept me in the classroom for 9 years and are the ones that I will continue to think about as I work with other teachers.  Please keep in touch as you go out and change the world!

Create a classroom community...but it'd better be differentiated!!!

It's no secret that I love flipped learning.  One of the things I like the most about it is the many forms that it can take on in K-12 classes.  In fact, the two flipped classes that I teach look incredibly different from each other.  I teach AP Government and Algebra 1, and they don't just look different because of the content.  AP Government follows the traditional flipped model where all students are on the same video each night and we discuss that one topic in class the next day.  Due to the collaborative nature of this course, it really has to be done this way.  I can't run Mock Congress with the 3 kids that are at that standard on a certain day.

However, math is a different beast.  This year, as the MTSS math coach, I co-taught with several teachers who were flipping their algebra and geometry courses.  I would pull out students who were struggling, often from multiple classes during one block.  This means I might have students from up to 3 different teachers who were all on different sections due to absences, not doing their homework, etc.  Students naturally paired up with others who were in the same class and were on the same section as they were, but it was pretty individual.  There was not a lot of time for group collaboration in this type of setting, but no student ever felt rushed or left behind.  If a student did not understand a section, they knew they could spend an extra day on that topic.  If a quiz (0% of the grade) went very well for a student they knew they could continue to move on and even get "ahead" of the class schedule.

So I guess what I struggle with is knowing which is best for a general education class.  Should we be pushing collaboration with the risk or pushing kids along when they are not ready?  Or, should we allow each student time to work through the material at their own pace, knowing it will limit the amount of collaboration time is available.

Thoughts are welcome!