Beggars CAN be choosers

As an instructional coach, it is part of my job to build relationships with teachers and support them in the areas in which they wish to grow as a professional. Over the past several years, I have consistently suggested to every teacher in the building to take a risk, mainly to try any kind of innovative teaching method. Most of my suggestions steer towards some type of blended learning. The responsiveness of these teachers has been hit-or-miss; there are definitely those who have tried some blended learning and love it, while most teachers want to focus on a specific classroom management tool or instructional strategy (which requires a lot less investment on their part...).

This trend, however, has been completely disrupted so far this school year. From the very beginning of the year, teachers are asking and asking for resources and help to build Flipped lessons and establishing a classroom culture that lends towards the Flipped model. Our school district has each teacher working with both face-to-face and virtual students, so a lot of their instructional delivery has to be recorded for those virtual students. Because they are already having to record their mini-lectures, their face-to-face students can also benefit from those videos which can now maximize the amount of interaction they experience when they are in the classroom. To this I say - COME ONE, COME ALL!! It is exciting to see a school-wide shift towards embracing these types of teaching practices.

There have been some learning curves along the way (and we are just two weeks in). Some teachers started by wanting to record their entire class period and post a 45-minute video for their virtual students. Common sense tells you that no 12-year-old is going to stare at an iPad watching a biology lecture for anywhere near that long. Those videos need to be brief in order to hold students' attention, but also to quickly get them interacting with the content, rather than just hearing about it.

In my PL model, I also plan to keep any sort of video short and to the point. I want to maximize the time spent with learners interacting with the content and with each other.