An Inside Look at Flipping the Classroom for Common Core

With their emphasis not only on core math and English language arts skills but the application of those concepts in real-world situations, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) require teachers to develop a curriculum that engages pupils, encourages them to interact with lesson materials and, ultimately, enables them to grasp the importance of key concepts in a wider context. Thankfully, the explosion of educational technology products in recent years gives teachers more options than ever for making learning relevant and fun. School instructional technology specialists can facilitate this by working hand-in-hand with teachers to sift through the various options and find what works best for the students.

One particularly successful example of such a partnership is that between Relton McBurrows, the instructional technology coordinator for Lake Zurich Community Unit School District 95, in Lake Zurich, Illinois, Marcia Day, an eighth-grade science teacher at Lake Zurich Middle School North, and Elizabeth Schoo, an eighth-grade science teacher and the science department head at Lake Zurich Middle School South. For the past two years, with the assistance of McBurrows (during the current school year), Day and Schoo have run a pilot “flipped-classroom” program they say has increased comprehension of course materials among their students and helped them develop the kind of higher-level thinking skills the CCSS seeks to cultivate in the nation’s students.

While it varies from teacher to teacher and from school to school, in a flipped classroom, students learn lessons by watching videos of lectures (often created by the teacher) or other forms of media as homework, then work on assignments and projects related to the lesson in class with the guidance of the teacher. For proponents, it’s a much more personalized approach than the traditional lecture, and engages the students more readily with the material, making it more relevant to them.

McBurrows, who came on board at District 95 in August 2013, a year into the pilot, spearheaded the deployment of iPads to all eighth graders at Middle School North and Middle School South, as part of District 95’s recent 1:1 iPad initiative. Since then, he has worked closely with Day and Schoo to find and implement technology best suited for a flipped classroom- and CCSS-based curriculum.

“We’re always exploring new tools and options for the iPad, as well as ways to work toward an efficient communications platform for assignments to be distributed and collected, and for students and teachers to communicate with one another,” he says. “So a lot of my role has been collaborating with teachers and students to figure out where they want to go and how they want to get there and what tools we can use in order to get to that point.”

For their part, Day and Schoo have a clear direction and objectives for their flipped-classroom pilot. “We’ve adapted it to our own teaching style and to incorporate more Common Core,” notes Schoo. “Our goal was to increase student engagement in our classes, gain more face-to-face time, to help all abilities in our classes to excel, and to expose students to various sources of information. We wanted to spend more time interacting with students instead of lecturing to them.”

“Homework” in Day and Schoo’s classes, then, might be to watch a pre-recorded lecture, a video demonstrating a scientific principle or a simulation, manipulating a graphic on an interactive website to see how something works, reading text or clicking through a PowerPoint presentation, among activities, right on the iPad. Both teachers usually give students an objective or goal to work toward while working with the content, which they’ll then discuss in depth with students during class time.

According to McBurrows, the iPad is key to enabling this kind of environment. “Having that tool in the students’ hands to use 24/7 has really made this all possible. Now that we have the 1:1 from the district, we can guarantee the kids have a device in hand to explore the resources given to them.”

Day and Schoo agree that the iPads are an invaluable part of their teaching strategy. “The students do a lot of what we call synthesis writing, where there is a statement of something, and they have to back it up with different sources,” says Day. “So they need to gather sources, not just from the textbook or from me, but from experiments and simulations and other sources that we provide them or, in some cases, that they seek out on their own. Then they have to pick the sources that best support the statement, not just the first few statements that they find. So it’s great to have all of that information literally at their fingertips with the iPad.”

Students often use the Pages app on their iPads to create lab reports, graphs and other written deliverables, along with Google Docs, which lets them work on shared documents for a collaborative project. Day and Schoo also source course work from The Physics Classroom, Physics4Kids and PhET. Especially helpful is PhET, which generates physics and chemistry simulations at the middle-school level.

While the CCSS currently covers English language arts and mathematics only, they call on students to acquire knowledge in other disciplines, such as science, through reading, writing, speaking and listening, and to practice applying mathematical ways of thinking to real-world issues and challenges. For Day and Schoo, helping their students achieve these objectives requires a great deal of interaction with pupils. Beyond classroom discussions, they use the Edmodo learning management system (LMS) to keep the lines of communication open with students.

Designed with the look and feel of a social media platform, Edmodo, which is free, allows teachers to post assignments and other course materials, post Facebook-style updates and provide feedback on specific assignments and lessons. Students can also reach out to teachers on the system if they need help on something or provide an answer on an assignment.

“It really allows students to chime in on assignments,” says Day. “They feel more comfortable posting questions, questions I was not aware were issues in the past. The kids also help each other with questions. They might point out a video or other source for solving a problem. There really is a lot of that type of collaboration outside of the classroom.”

Edmodo also features tools for measuring student progress. Teachers can ask for student reactions to quizzes, assignments and discussion posts to find out who has mastered a topic, and who might still need help. “Since one of our goals has been to give students immediate feedback, I really like that about Edmodo,” says Day. “I can really break it down into who understands the material and who needs more help.”

According to McBurrows, most of the teachers he works with, including Day and Schoo, use Google Drive to organize and store their assignments and course materials. “There is definitely a need for some sort of cloud storage,” he says. “If the storage capacity of the [main computing] device is limited, it’s much harder to share what you have on your device with others. Obviously, a big part of our flipped environment involves using videos, so you really need that storage capacity.”

That isn’t going to change anytime soon, as students and teachers alike in District 95 continue to move toward more video content generation. Day, for example, is starting to experiment with video capture, using the iPad camera to record instructional sessions and the screen capture app Explain Everything to annotate the videos. Both she and Schoo also use iMovie to create and publish projects to YouTube.

McBurrows says that one of the reasons the pilot has worked out so well is because the thinking behind it emphasizes how can technology can best compliment the curriculum, CCSS- or flipped-classroom-based or not. “Trying to shape the curriculum around the technology would be limiting, and might not be the best route to go for the growth of the student. Instead, we take a technology that’s going to compliment the curriculum and shape the technology around that. As we move toward Common Core and enabling that within our district, we’ve been actively searching and applying the proper technology and resources toward supporting the curriculum.”

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