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Caitlin Crouch has been an English teacher at Ben Davis High School for the past five years. She is embracing the hybrid schedule and flipping her classroom to engage her students in deeper learning opportunities.
Her Flipped Classroom
In a flipped classroom, the traditional content for direct instruction moves from a whole-group setting to an individual setting. Whole group time is then freed up to focus on deeper learning and application of concepts and content. Caitlin has done this by strategically planning at-home and in-class learning activities for her students.
Caitlin’s students are reading and completing notes for assigned texts, engaging with recorded lesson content, contributing to preliminary discussions, and participating in game-based vocabulary building activities when they are learning at home. The work they are completing at home is preparing them for a better classroom learning experience.
In class, the time that would have been spent reading, taking notes, and practicing vocabulary is now used for deeply analyzing and discussing texts. Students have time to ask multiple questions and puzzle through complex concepts together. Since the initial discussions take place online, Caitlin is able to answer common questions aloud to the group and identify and respond to common misconceptions. She then uses those questions and misconceptions to lead her students in building a collaboratively curated library of resources that interests students and helps them better understand the content.
Challenges into Triumphs
Teachers are faced with more challenges than ever before. Hybrid schedules and social distancing are just two of the hurdles secondary teachers are facing each day. Caitlin has found that the hybrid schedule has allowed for much smaller in-person class sizes, and more students are willing to participate in discussions. Moreover, she is able to focus her attention on students who need extra support in class.
With having desks in rows and students spread apart, Caitlin began using Padlet as an alternative to in-person small group work. Her class will watch a short video to get the conversation started for the day. While watching, they can add thoughts, inquiries, reflections, and answers to questions on her class Padlet page. Students are more engaged during the video because they are able to interact together, and she found there is much more participation now that students can speak up in class or continue the discussion online.