Troy Cockrum - Flipping Your English Class to Reach All Learners

I was distraught. I had found myself in that troublesome spot where many other teachersmaybe even youhave been before. I was just into my fourth year of teaching and was on the verge of quitting the profession. I was teaching middle school language arts and felt like I spent endless hours grading papers, managing classroom behavior and staff meetings, and trying to find ways to encourage students to meet certain standardized expectations. I realized these various tasks are part of a teaching career. The issue wasnt so much that I minded doing them. It was more problematic that I wasnt seeing the learning results. I wasnt seeing my students achieve those Aha! moments we teachers so tirelessly work to get. I was passionate about student learning and it seemed I spent more time focused on student accountability.

I continually asked myself the question, What is the best use of my class time with my students? I knew individualized instruction was essential for quality learning. But how could I achieve that with 25 or more students in a class? I knew that being able to guide students specific questions while they were working on an assignment was important to their success. But how could I be available to all my students when they were working and creating? Many teachers, having 50150 students or more, even if they made themselves available via e-mail, could spend hours of their personal time answering all their students questions. I knew that I wanted my students to do more high-order thinking and to be creative. I wanted to teach problem solving, critical thinking, and collaboration, but how could I find the time? How could I challenge the higher-achieving students to go deeper without at the same time ignoring or discouraging the lower-achieving students? How could I support students at their pace while still meeting all the standards the teaching field required? How could I encourage students to guide their own learning when I had so many of them to assess for standards? In short, how could I create a personalized learning environment for each student so that all of the students could grow and develop to the best of their ability? All these questions were answered, to my surprise, by the Flipped Classroom.

Now, Ill be honest. The first question I had hoped to answer with Flipped Learning was: how could I gain more class time to cover the material I needed to cover? That is what originally drew me to Flipped Learning. Answering all these questions kept me using Flipped Learning and brought me to where I am today, which will probably not be the same place six months from now. Flipped Learning is a process that consistently improves you and allows you to do things in your class you never had time for before. Its like a spouse who constantly demands you be a better person. Flipped Learning constantly demands you be a better teacher.

Let me back up a little. My journey into Flipped Learning started before I made the actual decision to flip my class. Prior to 2010, I had been gradually introducing more technology to my classroom. One piece this year, another piece the next. It was a very hodgepodge approach with little consistency. Id hear about a great Web site or online tool and jump on it. I didnt put a lot of thought into how technology supported learning; I was just enamored with the tool. Then, I decided one of my strengths as a teacher could be my ability to infuse the curriculum with technology in an organized, meaningful way. I worked formerly in the mass media industry and was required to continually learn and be on the cutting edge of technology. I was stupefied to come into the classroom and see such an aversion to technology in a lot of areas of education, from the classroom to professional development. Whether it be because of fear or budgets, technology was not at the forefront for a lot of education professionals. I decided to take the leap to more technology by cannon balling in and stopping the piecemeal, disorganized way I had utilized it in the past. However, you dont need to be particularly innovative in your use of technology to flip your class; you just need to be willing to step out of your comfort zone and learn. As with any teaching method, reflection of practice is a key component for a successful flipped class.

I already used the Writing Workshop model (discussed more in ). I started using that in 2008 because I saw the value of working with students in the classroom. But it wasnt quite meeting all my needs. Then I read The Digital Writing Workshop by Troy Hicks and got inspired to forge forward (2009). In November of that year, I attended the NCTE convention in Orlando for the first time. One of the biggest highlights happened on day one when I saw Troy Hicks, Bud Hunt, and Sarah Kajder present a session titled Creating Opportunities for Learning with Newer Literacies and Technologies: Three Reports from Cyberspace (2010). Hearing these speakers not only gave me great ideas and inspiration to bring into my classroom, it also validated my decisions on the uses of technology and the importance of building twenty-first-century skills with my students. If youre reading this book, you probably agree.

Later during that conference, I stumbled into a session called Using Google in Ways That Havent Even Been Invented Yet: Visionary Reports from Cyberspace (Zellner & Beauchamp-Hicks, 2009). In this session, I watched Andrea Zellner, Sara Beauchamp-Hicks, and, again, Troy Hicks talk about their uses of Google Apps for Education. I sat in that session seeing small snippets of what these teachers could do and said to myself, I want to do that. Their presentation inspired me to not only use Google in my class a lot more, it also inspired me to attempt to become a Google Certified Teacher. I was fortunate to be accepted into the Google Teacher Academy a year and a half later. It probably seems like Im rambling here. What does this have to do with flipping? you may be asking. Well, I bring up my Google experiences because that is when I first met Ramsey Musallam, who has greatly influenced my views on how my Flipped Classroom currently operates.

As my teaching and technology infusion progressed, I came across the concept known as the Flipped Classroom sometime in December 2010. I saw a video made by TechSmith on YouTube (http://www.youtube/2H4RkudFzlc) of Aaron Sams talking about his Flipped Classroom. A friend of mine who taught middle school math had been looking for ways to differentiate his classroom, and I passed this video on to him as a suggestion. He got very excited about trying it for a variety of reasons and began asking me questions since he believed the model sounded very similar to what I was already doing. It was at some point during those discussions, and after subsequent research, that I realized I could blend the flipped model with the workshop model and buy myself more in-class work time while still delivering the necessary content that would have been in the mini-lessons. And that was the birth of my foray into Flipped Learning.

As I researched more during that semester, I followed the Flipped Classroom Ning (flippedlearning.org), and came across the Flipped Classroom Conference (now known as FlipCon) in Woodland Park, Colorado put on by Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams. On a whim, not really expecting to get it approved, I showed it to my principal (including all associated costs), and to my surprise he said, Sounds great. Go for it!

Attending the conference was the best decision I could have made because when I decided to go, I still wasnt fully sure I wanted to flip. I absorbed so much information from Jon Bergmann, Aaron Sams, Brian Bennett, April Gudenrath, Jason Kern, and several others at the conference. I saw the passion these educators brought to their classrooms. I saw the nuts and bolts of making it work. It brought a great deal of clarity and confidence to the potential of this model.