The closest to being an artist I will probably ever get..

Spare time lately has been spent finding some great resources (Twitter is my best friend) and squirrelling them away with Evernote. It's so exciting that there's so much great stuff out there, but wow, so distracting. I need to learn to manage my Twitter addiction - finding great resources is way too much fun. Turning those resources into useful and manageable plans takes a bit more concentration.

So this last week (with many, many lapses into Twitter-play) I pulled out my Inquiry model and began to put together a skeleton plan for my first Unit of Inquiry. It's like walking a tightrope. Too much planning and it's no longer student-driven. Crazy control-freak teacher takes over and every second of learning is choreographed. Too little planning and I fall off the other side of the high wire into freakout land, where no learning happens because nothing is organised and I can't remember where or what the awesome stuff I bookmarked is.

I am sure that there are teachers out there who can plan for inquiry with their eyes closed, hands tied behind their back and dancing a jig, but I need my skeleton plan. This is not the same as the PYP planner - I am a linear, chronological thinker and while I am a big fan of backward design, when I'm in the midst of teaching I need to have all my ducks lined up nice and tidy. This beautiful beautiful document outlines all the important info (Central Idea, Inquiry Lines, guiding questions, phases of inquiry, reporting outcomes, cross-curricular links, resources) I need to stay on track, while still leaving plenty of time for student-directed learning. What it looks like at the beginning of a unit is something that would probably have earned me a 'fail' at Uni - it's a big table with all the 'have-tos' filled in and lots and lots of blank spaces. In the sparsely populated 'filled-in' bits, there are notes for activity outlines, there as a 'fall-back'. These lessons will be adapted (or completely scrapped) as needed - they are my support for when everything inevitably snowballs.

So now that I've got all my skeleton bones neatly arranged, I plan to print it out, blow it up to A3 size and subject it to lots of wanton scribble and many additions and crossings-out as the unit progresses. Last year, I trialled doing all my planning and amending online, but it didn't work for me. I am a scribbler - there's just something so satisfying about taking a nice tidy word-processed planner and scrawling revisions all over it in pen. It may be the closest to being an artist I ever get :).

Why I haven't flipped my Maths class.

I started last school year really excited to try flipping my Grade 4 class for Maths. I had done loads of research - read the articles, watched the videos and read plenty of flipped classroom blogs. I met with my school Principal and got his go-ahead. This was a big step for me - ours was the first class in the school to take homework online.

Then I met my class.

My class in 2012-2013 were an amazingly diverse bunch. We're talking something like 18 different nationalities, most of them fluent in 2 or 3 languages.

Concurrently, there was a lot of variation in students' confidence, knowledge and understanding in Maths. This ranged from kids who really needed to revise basic concepts to those who were racing ahead into middle school territory. I quickly realised that I didn't have one class for Maths, but several groups. Introducing a new concept via homework video could only work if that one concept was appropriate for every learner in the class. So I went back to the drawing board.

What really helped my planning was a quick pre-assessment every time we moved on to something new. These little pre-assessments turned out to be much more useful than the beginning of year number assessment I'd done. Each pre-assessment told me where each kid was right now, and allowed for fluidity in student groupings throughout the year.

So then what? In any Maths lesson, there might be a group working on an introductory or revision lesson with me, another one or two groups consolidating or revising independently and another working on extension activities. I was lucky to have an excellent support teacher working with me to help me 'get around' my groups a few lessons each week. At the end of the mini unit, a quick post-assessment told me where to go next.

You can take a look here at last year's homework website to see what I ended up putting together for Maths homework. Each week's homework incorporated a revision video, sites with games for skills revision, a Google form 'worksheet' and a Maths Challenge for extension. At the beginning of the year, activities were specific to the previous week's classwork. By the year's end, we were revising content from throughout the year. Those needing extension could try the problem on the 'Maths Challenge' page. It wasn't 100% perfect, but it worked pretty well.

I want to finish up by saying that I do believe that the flipped approach is a great step forward in teaching and learning. I can attest to the fact that children find the online format motivating and value being able to 'replay' their teacher's words. Feedback from parents at the end of last school year was also pretty positive overall. That said, I think a little evolution is necessary. In my class, introductory videos aimed at 'grade level' would have left some to flounder and others bored stiff. Differentiated groupings in class allowed plenty of scope for problem-solving and discussion as per the flipped approach, but scrapping the introductory video meant that those kids who weren't 'bang on' grade level didn't end up frustrated.

Parent Information Prezi

At the beginning of the school year at my school, parents are invited into the classroom for an information evening with the class teacher. Generally, turnout is pretty high and (I hope like many other teachers) it can be a bit nerve-wracking. Ask me to speak in front of a group of children and I'm fine; put me in front of parents and I'm a knock-kneed, trembly-voiced wreck. So I like to be prepared.

This last week I've spent many of my spare moments (read: while my toddler is napping) recreating my parent presentation.

Last school year, my Prezi for parents included lots of specific details about school routines and procedures as well as more general information about curriculum and learning in Grade 4. So, for much of the time we were together, I talked about timetabling, who to contact when and how, procedures for discipline, absences etc etc etc - all those institutional necessities. I also talked about general goals for language and maths (spelling program, goals for writing and reading, consolidation and some extension of basic facts, problem-solving) and our Units of Inquiry. And of course, I talked a bit about my own background with a few lame attempts at humour here and there. All in all, it wasn't a terrible presentation. Except that parents left that night without really knowing what learning was going to look like in my classroom.

At the time, it made sense to structure it like this: I was just coming back to teaching after two years out of the classroom and quite a bit of professional development so I didn't feel ready to give specific details about what learning would look like in my class. I was working in a new grade level with a new team and I wasn't sure how all of this 'newness' would pan out. Too many variables.

However, this year I'm going out on a limb and making quite a change.

First up, all the time spent outlining routines and procedures will be significantly reduced. I am putting together a handout for parents with all that information in bullet points. I'm not going to go through each point on the handout, just say 'It's all there, if you want to talk about it, we can, but I'd much rather take the time to talk about learning.'. I feel a bit nervous about this; after all, if I hammer the point home that all children must be at school by 0830, then no child ever has an excuse to be late, right? Even so, I've decided I'm going to give these 4th grade parents a break - I'm guessing they know the drill by now.

Second, I'm going to use a bunch of photos from last year's class. See, parents? This is what Maths class looks like, and this and this and this. Here we are taking photos and video, this is us learning about how search engines work and here we are looking stuff up in books and writing stories longhand. And here's reading and writing and discussion and all the other great stuff that we do.

Third, and this is the one I'm feeling good about: we're going to have the laptops in class with us for the presentation. Parents are going to have a turn with the online homework, I'm going to run them through the Maths revision video (my class is not flipped, but that's for another post), the Google form for Maths problems and the games. If they want, they can even see how the Maths grading works, and I'd really like to give them a few minutes to write some comments on the class blog.

Anyway, here's a look at my Prezi so far. It's clearly a work in progress and you can't see my photos for privacy reasons, but you get the idea, I hope.

Next on the Back to School agenda: organising excellent activities to get to know my students, refamiliarising myself with my first Unit of Inquiry and beginning of year Maths. Oh, and continuing to LOVE my holidays :).