Uses of Data

This week my family took a trip to Kyoto.  My hotel delivered a daily paper, which was nice because I never read the newspaper.  I stumbled onto this article by David Streitfeld.

The article was about a few textbooks that have offered digital access, and then reported to the professor how much a student was using their textbook.  The findings are not surprising, the more time a student spends in the textbook, the better they do on tests and quizzes.  Often the results from data are not surprising.

The article also points out that a student can increase their "engagement index" by "leaving their book open and doing something else."  I agree that it would not be beneficial to make the "engagement index" part of a student's grade, because students will merely go through the motions.  However, I do believe that the data can be used as a discussion point with these students.

This is how I frequently use the data that I collect about my students.  I share my findings with my students and I talk to them about the characteristics of successful students.  I will discuss these findings in a later post.  I want to collect data over multiple units before I draw conclusions.

Explore, Flip, Apply

Recently I have discovered something called the Flipped Learning Network.  Especially because I was looking for some pod-casts that I can listen to while doing the dishes, driving in the car, or something else that doesn't require my full concentration.  Listening to other educators has made me want to start blogging again and also networking with other teachers through twitter.

I have really liked the ideas of a San Fransisco educator named Ramsey Musallam.  He has a Ph.D. in education and has studied learning cycles. Which has made me think about the learning cycle that I use in my class.

The learning cycle I use in class:
1. Delivery of content
2. Practice
3. Check and Fix mistakes
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until sufficient mastery is obtained.
5. Move on to the next set of topics.

This is when I realized that motivation and reflection are assumptions in my teaching.

The learning cycle that Ramsey uses is:
1. Explore - students have an opportunity to explore new ideas and get as far as they can until they get stuck.
2. Flip - once students are stuck and need his help, he gets involved and gives them some content.  This is either done in class or using a video.
3. Apply - Practicing these ideas is done at home.

Ramsey is a huge advocate of higher level Bloom's Taxonomy to happen in class and lower level Bloom's Taxonomy to happen outside the classroom.

I want to apply more of these ideas in my teaching.  My only hesitation is what I saw happening during my student teaching.  We spent much of the class exploring that there wasn't much time to help student's apply.  So I think I will begin units in an exploratory activity, and then have the students watch videos and practice at their own pace so I can help them apply.

I still want to spend the majority of my class time helping students apply these new ideas.  Not explore them.