In the classroom, I have focused for the past two weeks on "what historians do." Most activities are based on items from the Stanford History Education Group because they are terrific. My favorite involves a fictional cafeteria fight between two boys, in which my students use a list of "interview transcripts" to determine which boy deserves punishment. This is a terrific in-class activity, because it gets strangers talking to each other, and sparks vivid conversations about justice, relevance, and reality. "What if Jamie is just a spy? Or an alien trying to trick the human race?" I heard one boy say to his group. (Jamie is a source in the interview transcript.) I leaned in and said, "What if you are just a figment of my imagination? Maybe none of us really exists. Is there a clue on this sheet that Jamie is a spy, or an alien? [No.] Then let's just use the evidence we have." That activity forces the consideration of context, because some interviewees suggest that one boy has been picking on the other for days before the fight. Does that affect your historical judgment? This is the type of in-class, face-to-face, teacher-monitored learning that flipped instruction facilitates. I could not do this before.
Meanwhile, outside of class, I gave two school days (plus a weekend) to watch their first flipping video:
I might not get to do this every quiz day, but it seemed important on the first quiz of the year. These were the questions, to be answered in 2 or 3 sentences each:
- 54 students (66% of the class) gave satisfactory answers to all 3 questions
- The other 34% needed to improve their answer to 1 or more questions. There is a 15-point penalty for making quiz corrections. [more about that in this blog post]
- 23 students did that during our intervention period or a special ed academic support time.
- 4 students have not yet done so, including 2 who were absent the rest of the week.
- successful ways to learn independently from video-based instruction
- essential elements of the discipline for my course (thinking like a historian, etc.)