Solving the Split with a mini version of the Flip - part 2

Late fall 2010. I'm getting to that point in my two split classes where the Intro 11s need to move away from the exact material the Spanish 9s are learning. How would I make this transition as smoothly as possible for all of us? It's hard enough trying to divide yourself in 30 to meet the needs of each individual student, but now my challenge was to divide myself into two different teachers in the same class of 30 students - one third working on finishing up with Spanish 9 and crashing through onto Spanish 10 and two thirds cruising through Spanish 9 at a busy enough pace.

This is when I started to think back to my practicum school and their unit booklets. It was going to be an overload to develop these unit booklets with all the updating and tweaking I was doing to my personal resources on a day to day basis. Also, I was teaching Spanish 11 all the way through for the first time, so a lot of my time was going into developing the course for my students and myself (also while trying to incorporate more social justice into the dry textbook curriculum). Of course, I still had my Spanish 9s to focus on too!

I decided I would plan ahead for 2-3 days of work at a time, so that I was always able to keep up to date with them and not lose track of who is where since I was still teaching the 9s in the traditional model just a few steps away. My Intros didn't have a unit booklet, but they did always have their "learning intentions" guide for each unit (some teachers call it Traffic Lights, but I took out the actual picture of the traffic lights, so it didn't seem to kiddy-ish for the 16-17 year olds). This example is one of two pages. We would go over the guide together when I would give it out and I would remind them to look over it again before any big assessments. Some students were really good about it and got into a routine with it; some students filled it in on the first day and, I'm sure, never looked at it again after that. This gave them a bit of the responsibility for learning. If they couldn't shade the 'AFTER' box in green (or write 'G' because..."Sra V, I didn't bring my highlighters today!") towards the end of a unit, then they knew they should really come in for extra help.

The other part of MY solution involved my class website I had started up that year. I had been using it more for Spanish 11 and some social justice projects they would be working on, but I thought it was a great way for my Intros to stay organized and keep in touch with me in a virtual way if they didn't get a chance to speak to me in class. Also, instead of just giving them the lecture notes to the solve the 'how am I going to teach them?' problem, I converted my notes, as we went along, into PowerPoint presentations. They broke down everything I would have gone over at the front of the room, but now they were seeing it either on their own time or during class time. Their lecture notes consisted of guided notes that had some portions filled in and some of the more important points left blank for them to fill in. Vocabulary notes were on the website as well, but I encouraged them to work together on vocab before going right to the answers.

The website became their routine and my classroom computer became the Intro 11 hub. Sometimes all 11 or 13 (two different blocks) of them would huddle around the computer and they would watch the lecture notes together. As the time went by a few of them picked up on the idea that I updated the website everyday after school, so they started checking for the notes that night instead of waiting to see daily plan on the board the following day. They would come to school ready to work or ask questions. Other students worked at a slower pace, so after the first group had watched the presentation in class, they would come to the computer and watch it after so that they could pause it. Those students were usually catching up on the previous day's work before watching the new presentation, so it all balanced out. There were times when we stopped the normal routine and all came together as a class for a game or a review exercise. This was important to me to keep the class feeling like one and because it helped the Intros review concepts they may have covered a week or two or three before.

So that was my mini-flip. I didn't realize what I was doing at the time, but I like to see it as a pseudo-flip. At the time, I felt guilty that I could not be there directly for the Intro 11 students, but I made sure all of their notes were very easy to follow along with and broken down in the same way I would have explained it standing in front of the class. I don't have any data prepared to show that my Intro 11s from the previous year (when it was a stand alone course) out-performed my split students, but I don't feel like any group performed necessarily better than the other to begin with. I'm sure both groups got something different out of the course and of me as a teacher. It was really hard to get over the fact that I didn't stand up and teach these Intro 11s face to face like I was doing for the Spanish 9s in the same block, but I did my best to be present for them. I'm not sure if this approach makes students become more independent as learners, or if I lucked out with a group of independent learners, but for some reason what I thought was my shot-in-the-dark solution worked.

Could I have improved something? I'm sure there are one million and one things I could have improved on. I also could've tried the same with the Spanish 9 students, but at the time I thought the way I was teaching the Spanish 9s was the only right way and my poor Intro 11s were paying the price for a split. However, both approaches worked and when I stumbled across this idea of a flipped classroom...I thought what? For real??!!




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Solving the Split with a mini-version of the Flip - part 1

In my second year, being the newby Spanish teacher amongst the two other INCREDIBLE Span/French teachers in my department, I had the 'luck' to take on a split class (they had done it before and politely passed on it this time around): Spanish 9 and Intro 11 - includes grade 11 and/or 12 (Intro 11 is basically Spanish 9 and 10 crammed into one semester). Yay for me...

I'd never fully taught a split. How do teachers even teach splits? I'd taught Spanish 9 four times in one year, Spanish 10 twice, and Intro 11 once (as its own course) - now I had to cram two semesters worth of material into one while at same time teach the other two thirds of the class one semester worth of Spanish 9...what? That was obstacle one. Obstacle two ended up not being quite as big an obstacle as I thought as the semester progressed and they got to know each other (eye rolls did occur every now and then though). How were the 16/17 year olds going to react to maturity level of the 13/14 year olds? Because we all know, even though you were that age once YOU were NEVER that immature...

The semester started out smoothly. We were all working together on the same lessons. Sometimes the Intro 11s got more challenging activities and a few extra vocabulary words, but for the most part we were all on the same track. After two units, I knew I couldn't keep the Intros on this pace; things had to pick up for them if they were going to be able to get through the entire curriculum. Panic.

I had seen other splits in action, but either it wasn't the same kind of split or their solution didn't quite appeal to me. I had had a short term placement that included a split that was Spanish 10 and Intro 11. Method: intense review of Spanish 9 to get everyone caught up with either last year's material or, in the Intro's case, to get an intense overview of the basics. This was followed by a more in-depth focus on grade 10 content. By the time I covered the class, the students were all in the grade 10 curriculum. It seemed to work. The students were closer in age and the class could work in such a way that everyone would always be (almost) at the same point in the curriculum. During the Spanish 9 review period, apparently the Intros took on more work to get extra practice.If I was going to have a split, this would have been the more favourable grade break to me...but this wasn't an option in my case.

Another short term placement I had included a Span 11/Span 12 split. This class was used to the following method: the teacher teaches the Spanish 11 students; the Spanish 12 students come into class and expect to see their daily plan on the board. They write it down and promptly leave the class and take off for the 'library'. Sometimes they would stay in class, but they had become so accustomed to not having their teacher around that when I would approach them to discuss where they were at and if they needed help, they took it offensively....like I was "checking up" on them. Well...I was, I guess, but because I thought I was their teacher. One day I sent a grade 11 student to the library to ask for the grade 12s to come back for an announcement. Not surprisingly, I think it was like 3/7 students that ended up actually being in the library and were able to come back. This wasn't my favourite solution to a split. What was I going to do?

The Spanish department in the school I did my teaching practicum at was SUPER organized. I mean, like wow. They had black duo-tangs with the basic schedule of a unit, so that on any given day you could flip the little black duo-tang open and see that if you are on day three of unit 5, you should be covering such and such using such and such activities. About two years after I finished my practicum, I went back to the school to cover the early portion of a maternity leave. My mentoring grounds had become even more organized! They now had unit packages. Stacks and stacks of paper were photocopied into booklet form and the students were free to work ahead, however they wouldn't have the notes until the day it was covered in class, but the entire unit (notes for grammar with fill-in-the-blank gaps, vocabulary, written activities, directions for which textbook activities to turn to, project outlines, conversation outlines, test outlines, everything) was right there in their hands. There were no split classes here, but this super organized approach definitely led me to what would become my split class solution.

I am a very organized person. Tasks take me longer because I like to be organized. I suppose another way to say it is that I am a perfectionist (I know many teachers are), but thinking back to my practicum school I knew that their level of organization and perfection was above me. My classes didn't function on a unit schedule. Sometimes full class plans got excluded or put off for a variety of reasons. However, thinking back to the unit booklet was something I found very useful. I had notes and activities already to go for Spanish 9 and 10 because I was now in my second year. There was A LOT of tweaking going on though, so I thought there is no way I can go through all of my notes and activities this much in advance and photocopy entire unit booklets for my Intros while at the same time planning for and teaching Spanish 11 for the first time, not to mention planning and teaching for my Spanish 9s.

I was getting closer to MY solution to the split.

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