All flipclass teachers have this moment of existential crisis once or twice per semester/per year, depending on how long you have your students.

The kids don’t get the methods, they don’t want to get the methods, they just want you PLEASE TO TELL ME WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO DO AND STOP IT WITH ALL OF THIS LEARNING HOW TO LEARN BULL.

This happened to me today. I am supposed to be an expert in this flipclass business. I am sharing this story because this moment happens to everyone.

And like everything else, this story comes back to relationships. In years past, when I got this kind of pushback, I would have thrown in a towel or six, gone back to teaching the way I always had (which was pretty good, but not as good), and let months and months of hard work fall by the wayside. Instead, after school, Cheryl and I talked through what happened.

(Confession: I didn’t have nearly this much clarity at the beginning of the conversation. I was angry, I was frustrated, sad, and felt like a complete failure.  She reminded me of the fact I am now reminding you of: this moment happens every year. Keep going.)

So instead of quitting, tomorrow, we’re going to do a “here’s what you’ve actually learned” activity, then have them use one of those answers as the theme for a period-contained Genius Hour project.

Instead of letting me quit, she reminded me that their pushback came in the form of a 45 minute whole class discussion-- something they could not have sustained at the beginning of the year. She reminded me that guess what!? : not only were they talking with me and with each other, they were using actual claim/evidence/commentary as part of their arguments. 

They are getting it. They may not know they are getting it yet, but they are. And that’s a great thing. It’s also the reason we need teacher relationships to pull us out of the holes we dig for ourselves.

Flipclass is tough. Teaching is, too. We need each other to make it through.

(Note: here's the Vi Hart video this blog post centers around. She's awesome.) 

So, today in class, for the first 30 or so minutes, we watched a video on how to make super elaborate paper snowflakes, then I gave students space and time and scissors and paper and let them make their own. (See photo.) 

Yes, this is an English class. 

And yes, it's still important to do active, silly things like this, even if most observers would question the educational validity of cutting paper and making art projects in a Junior English class, particularly art projects that don't seem to have any connection to the text(s) we're reading or the analytical processes we're learning. 

Here's the thing: I got to see a class of 34 sixteen and seventeen year olds regress to about third grade playfulness and be creative. (No, not all of them engaged, but a majority did.) And there are actually lots of English-related and #flipclass-related standards embedded.

For example: 

• Students often screwed up a couple of snowflake attempts before they got one they liked. This helped them practice the revision process, and gave them a safe, non-graded place to "screw up." It helped them fail; more critically, it helped them see failure as just part of the learning cycle. 
• They watched a how-to video and they followed the steps. This wasn't just "learning to follow directions." This was also parsing an informational text and recreating a process. And the coolest part--since Vi Hart talks crazy fast-- is that many of them didn't get the process on the first go-round. So what happened? They tried once, didn't get it, and then a group of 6 students crowded around my laptop to rewatch the video, and when they struggled understanding that, they looked for other examples. Looks very much like the research cycle to me. And those students who researched more videos and learned how to do snowflakes effectively? They then turned around and taught other students how to do the same. 
• It's a great example of metacognitive learning-- it helps them examine and refine their thought processes around learning. Even if they didn't know that's what they were doing. 

But my favorite part? There's lots of research that indicates creative work, even silly things like making snowflakes, activates neural pathways and helps humans make connections in other parts of their lives and days. That's all well and good, but I have some important anecdotal evidence to add: 

Without exception, the days in which we do silly creative projects at the beginnings of class-- those are the days my students do their best, most focused, most creative work in ALL aspects of class.


Today, for example, I had students re-do analysis videos on a chapter of Looking For Alaska. They had tried last week, and many were low-quality. We did a little scaffolding in class today after the snowflake project, and then they re-made their videos. I watched several before they left, and these videos were better, more thorough, more insightful, and more useful to a wider audience than their originals. 

Really, it's the same failure cycle as with the snowflakes. They did one attempt, without a lot of instruction. They did a mediocre job--you could say they "failed."  They learned (from me, from a great video Cheryl made) how to find patterns and how to make their analysis much better. They tried again, with vastly better results. 

And those are results that are worth every minute spent. 

The tweet above was the last straw, the tipping point that told me this blog post just had to be written.

If you have followed the #flipclass journey that Cheryl and I have been on, then you know two words show up over and over and over again in our speaking and writing and tweeting: collaboration and community. Many educators would call these soft skills--skills to ignore/gloss over in service of more rigorous academic content. 

However, we believe that collaboration is critical to explicitly teach, and that true collaboration can't happen outside of a community-like classroom atmosphere. Building classroom community is something that I have traditionally been very good at, but for the last couple years, I have really struggled in this respect. In years past, I have had entire classes almost completely based on discussion; however, many of my recent students have been in really awkward, slightly antagonistic groupings that don't have a tremendous amount of investment in anyone but themselves. And this had to change. 

Yesterday in my English class, we had the first real discussion of the year--10 weeks into the semester. We've done a lot of work with informational texts around brain science, cognitive psychology, fixed/growth mindset, and the ways in which people learn.  We watched the video about the Independent Project (which you need to watch if you haven't)--the story of a group of students who have a self-run, self-taught semester as a school-within-a-school.  

My students initially reacted much in the same way as previous classes had when shown the video: "That's really cool, but I could never do that." So we had them brainstorm a list of the academic/personality characteristics of the Independent Project students. They came up with things like "creative, visionary, determined, hard-working, self-directed."  I then asked them how many of those characteristics applied to them individually and the class as a whole.  Not surprisingly, they said "Not that many of them."

This is a class, mind you, of some extraordinarily talented artistic spirits. In that one class (of 34), there are graphic artists, a calligrapher, guitarists, athletes, pianists, writers, coders, mechanics, actors, and a ton of singers, including a new student who introduced herself to the group less than a week after she moved by shaking the walls with an a capella rendition of "House of the Rising Sun."  The point is, these are exactly the kinds of students the Independent Project was designed for--students who are creative, visionary, and incredibly driven when talking about their artistic passions. 

But they didn't think those terms applied to them. And worse, up until yesterday, they have been completely unable to have any kind of meaningful conversation with each other about anything as a whole class. So what I was working with was a very full classroom of individuals, all very talented, all pretty isolated in their own bubbles.  And the type of class that Cheryl and I want to run is completely impossible without a community at the center of it. 

Which is why what happened yesterday was so important. They sat in sort of a circle. They talked to each other. They got frustrated with each other, they aired grievances, they self-policed.  They kept each other on topic, for the most part.  We talked about how frustrated some of them had become with the class culture, the noise, and the lack of care they had demonstrated for each other. We talked about how most of them had come to view school as a competition, as a zero-sum game.  

So there has been a lot to overcome. Many of these students had come to 11th grade having gotten through previous years without a whole lot of mental engagement, and they were used to just looking out for themselves. They were used to the zero-sum game, where one person had to be diminished in order for another to have an A. And our class demands of them that they engage; it demands that they are present; it demands that they work together in real and meaningful ways, ways that are loud and messy and chaotic and completely antithetical to that kind of toxic competition. 

And that's really difficult. But yesterday, we took a step. Communities are not built overnight, and I'm glad we're finally moving in a positive direction. 

Here's an update of the past couple weeks:

• The Photojournal project that my kids worked on has concluded its first few phases-- they have turned them in, the Desktop Publishing kids have built their mockups, we've sent them to Ms. Morris's classes for review, they've responded, and we picked a winner of the bid.  After all of those steps, the winner (only one guy!) got to solicit applications, pick a design/project team, and now, they are actually building out the site.  I can't wait to share (via Twitter and in this space) the final project. 

• At Cheryl's school (East Bay Arts), they host the Great American Smokeout, an event designed to get kids (and adults) to quit smoking.  My Public Speaking and Desktop Publishing students are writing and filming PSAs (mostly using iPhones and editing in WeVideo) to show at EBA in a couple weeks. The Desktop kids have also created print ads/flyers (on Google Draw) for them.  I will share some of those in this space when they're done as well. 


• The Desktop kids are also at the very beginning of a new design/proposal cycle to make an online literary magazine for a Creative Writing class at Highland High School near St. Louis.  Thanks to Patti Swank for helping to make this possible.

• The junior English class is finishing their reading of Looking for Alaska. If you haven't read Cheryl's blog about her experiences in class with LfA, you should do that.  They are also into about a million other things--brain science, good learning practices, how to take notes, imagining characters complexly, writing a personal narrative about something they're good at-- which will have to be fleshed out in a separate post. 

Anyway, a couple days ago, I was feeling kind of doldrum-ish-- that kids weren't learning anything, nothing I was doing was working, etc. A student (who is not in my class) came by after school to ask me to look over one of her papers, and she asked me what all we were doing in class. I started listing off the stuff I just shared above, and her eyes got wider and wider and wider. 

"That's so freaking cool, Thomasson. Can I just be in your class?" ( I wish.) 

Sometimes I forget how much new stuff we're actually doing in our classes. Sometimes I forget that being out on the edge of educational pedagogy-and-practice-Land means failing. A lot. It means doing things that don't work, or that don't work the first time, or that students don't really get. I have to keep telling myself that's okay, and when I forget to tell myself, I am grateful that I have Cheryl and Karl and all of the other #coflip AllStars to remind me.  

So thanks. Truly.