Week One

My name is Andy Montgomery and this is my record of my attempt to start changing the way I teach by flipping my classroom.

My plan this year is to work towards flipping some of my classes regularly. I believe that this will allow me to do more interesting things during class instead of lecturing and managing to make sure that the students understood the lecture.

I teach in an independent, private school and am lucky enough to be able to try new things without having to ask too many people for permission. I teach four classes of history and one class of math. I have been teaching the same classes for most of the past thirteen years and while I always included new ideas and material I felt that this was the year I should really shake things up and get the students more involved.

I started this summer focusing on my math class and started to make my own series of videos that mimic Khan Academy. The main difference is that mine and clearly focusing on the lessons that we are covering through the textbook instead of having to pick and choose from Khan. I worked using a Mobi board and started to put lessons on a YouTube account (andymoteach if you are interested). It took quite a bit of my summer but I was able to create videos for a about a third of the way through the year. I will continue to build on this whenever I can. I planned on having the students watch the videos at home and do most of the work in class. As they got used to it and we got past the mundane process of decimal addition through division I hope to start to do more explorations in class and have the students watch the videos at home. I will keep you posted on how well this works and the adjustments I will have to make.

In my other classes I decided to start setting up wikis so I could post interesting material that supplements the textbook. My hope is that my students will soon start to scour the Web and find additional resources that we can then use to expand our understanding of the material.

So those are my goals and this is my record of what worked and what did not for the year. Hopefully others that follow down this path will avoid the many mistakes that I am sure to make and be able to feel like they have someone else out there that was as daunted by the challenge but bravely tried to do something different to help their students.