Happy Steve

Innovation and Learning

Start with clarity of intent.

Now build it out with an evocative vision. Improvise progress by tinkering: with lots of trial and lots of error. The not knowing is the best bit: the mysteries the surprises, and from time to time the windfalls! 

Hello there, I'm Steve Collis! 

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Student Self-Direction: A Case Study of My Yr 8 French Class

In a previous post I brain-dumped a description of a model that I called  "Landscape/Frame/Gateway".

If anyone can think of a more catchy name, I'm all ears.​

I want to give a detailed example of it in this post, specifically a 12-week Year 8 French unit that I teach, along with two colleagues. In the process we'll look at everything from Moodle, to Edmodo, to game-mechanics and badges, to the psychology of freedom and agency in the context of a subject that relies heavily, ultimately, on mastery of some very specific content (aka you can't learn Italian verb conjugations and expect to speak French at the end). 

In the process I hope to show how student agency can be radically heightened even while navigating specific content.​

I'll finish with footage showing a very typical scene of it all at work. Scroll to the bottom of the page if you want to sticky beak and read the last page first!

The unit of work is built around a project to perform the 'The Three Little Pigs' play in French. The core program is based on the 'AIM' approach which involves gestures associated with every French word. These gestures become a kinaesthetic scaffold and prompt to the students.

 

#1 The Learning Landscape: is the raw resources, instructions, activities, challenges, indeed learning experiences in the broadest possible sense that are 'on offer' to the students.

Here are some observations on the 'learning landscape':​

  • ​Learning management systems such as Moodle tend to become resource repositories. These build and build into a dreadful 'scroll of death'​ (see right)
  • What you put INTO ​the learning landscape is another question altogether! In this case we have a broad mix of videos, PDFs, vocab lists, spelling challenges, right through to open ended challenges such as 'record a rap song' or 'write your own script'.​
  • ​the learning landscape can, by all means, include blank slates for students to define their own challenges. ​

Our students NEVER SEE the learning landscape in this awful SCROLL OF DEATH format. All they see on the Moodle page is...

 

#2 The Frame

Next I created a jpeg graphic that establishes a visual metaphor that will map through to the elements in the learning landscape. I created this one using the 'Paper' app on my iPad. I am appalling bad with visuals. ​

​Then I took the jpeg file and used http://www.image-maps.com/ to create hotspots on it, linking through to the URLs of the resources and activities on the learning landscape (see #1).

Here is the visual:

 
 

Some comments:

  • this operates a little like a board game. It is visual map or metaphor representing the unit.
  • consider how computer games give freedom of movement, but which ever direction you head there is a challenge to complete - this is what I'm trying to achieve with the visual.​
  • I can communicate all kinds of intuitive messages using the visual, such as: A# the unit is founded on the performing of the play (the 4 visuals at the bottom, #1, #2, #3, #4),  B# each tree tends to focus on a skill, e.g. getting familiar with the play, speaking French, writing, high level writing, dictionary skills. C# implicitly, climbing up a tree is difficult but inherently rewarding for the view you get up the top (climb every mountain  etc, i.e. I am invoking a progress narrative), D# there is also an implicit left to right narrative of progress.

​Each of the trees has about 4 or 5 squares on it. 

Here are a couple of examples of what students see if they click on a square:​

 
watch play.JPG
challenge 2.JPG
 

Oh I need to do some more dot points. Here we go:

  • Notice ​I have relinquished any sense of "Okay it's Monday so this is what we're all doing"... the kids can roam freely over the learning landscape, different students engaging in different challenges. Apart from anything else this structure allows differentiation according to mood! (or weather... say a student is hot and bothered, or it's windy and they're all bouncing of the walls) Let along ability, learning preferences, etc.
  • ​AND YET freedom of movement is not absolute. It's not LORD OF THE FLIES. I haven't said "JUST GOOGLE FRENCH AND GET GOING"... I have sequenced challenges together - they can choose any tree but must start from the bottom and work their way up. (In fact I never said this to them and wouldn't INSIST but there is a general structure that I deliberately built into it)
  • NOTHING is stopping me from saying, one day: right everyone, drop everything, we're doing theatre sports! 
 

#3 ​ The Gateway

How do we sign off on mandated syllabus outcomes? Well, we make some activities compulsory. In this unit, we informally ensure all students complete the bottom rung of all trees, no matter what they then specialise in. Also, if the students click on the graphic at the top-right, it takes them to their formal assessment task, that every student must complete at some point in the unit.

​You can perhaps see why I refer to all this as giving 'structured freedom'. 

 
birds.JPG
 

#4 Tracking System

We all want to know how we're going.​

"How am I going here?" I often wonder, about life in general, or even tiny projects. All kinds of questions are bundled up into this. What is success? How would I recognise it if I achieved it?

I call this 'narrative', and it is profoundly hardwired into our thinking. (There are also GOODIES and BADDIES ​also hardwired into our thinking, which is not insightful at all, but that is beyond the scope of this post!)

​The broader answer to the students' question 'how am I going in French?' is complex and comes back to the student in all kinds of ways: ongoing informal feedback from me, interactions in the student 'community of practice', (which, by the way, is extremely active since there is so much freedom of movement through physical space, virtual space, and the curriculum itself), formal feedback via the formal assessment task, and other ways too.

BUT! In addition to these complex feedback mechanisms, everyone loves to tick a box! ​

So, we give every student a folder with a colour print-out of the graphic on it.

They get a stamp for each challenge as they go:​

 
july august 2012 023.JPG
 

Now, for the love of all small furry creatures, this is not intended to be a primary extrinsic reward system! I am WELL AWARE of the potential for extrinsic reward mechanisms to wreck intrinsic love of learning. My wife is doing her Masters thesis on this very topic. It is not as easy as extrinsic = bad, intrinsic = good. In fact, it's very hard to define the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Motivation is a big fat messy tangle!

I call this sort of logistical system a 'tracking system'.​ Notice how grittily logistical it is! Printouts, folders, stamps: this is the technology that allows me to track 28 different learning programs for 28 different students. You said you wanted DIFFERENTIATION?!

I am constantly seeing how the students are going, redirecting them to appropriate challenges, and getting them to demonstrate mastery to me before stamping their graphics.​ In among the bits of paper is a very human coaching process.

 

#5 Badges with Edmodo

If you're already cross with me, you won't like this!​

I defined 24 different badges, based on different combinations of learning landscape completions:​

 
badges.jpg
 

This graphic appears on the French Moodle page. I made it with Snag It. As the students move their cursor over each badge you can see a pop-up explanation appears. If they actually click on the badge they get taken to another graphic showing what they need to do to qualify for that badge:​

 
badge.JPG
 

​Now, although it is compulsory for students to keep track of what challenges they have and haven't completed, by coming to me and getting a stamp on their hardcopy graphic print-out, the badge system is optional.

Students can engage with the badge system as much or as little as they wish, and indeed some students engage enthusiastically, and some largely ignore it.

The system has allowed me to completely short-circuit the awful pecking order​ that develops by this time of year, as the students notice how they are performing compared to the rest of the class and begin to internalise toxic judgments such as 'I'm not good at French'.

 
earned.JPG
 

#6 The Crazy Charlie Badge

​One way I have been able to exploit the badge system is via the Crazy Charlie Badge, which is actually 4 different badges linked in a 'level up' arrangement.

You see, I regularly run 'gesture sessions' - which are basically teacher-lead vocabulary reviews. Here is one in action:​

 
 

For every session students attend, they get a stamp up in the clouds part of the unit graphic (above the trees). As they attend 5, 10, 15 and 20 of these sessions they 'level up' their Crazy Charlie badges, from Elementary Crazy Charlie, through to Elite Crazy Charlie.​

Whichever way students like to learn, they can get rewarded for it. 

​It is crucially important that I allow students not to play the game​, so to speak. No one likes to be trapped within a system. 

So, students who thrive on more face to face interaction with the teacher are rewarded for it. Those who ​do just as well working off a video recording are free to spend their time that way.

 

​#7 Teacher Talk and the Role of the Guru

Right, this is FRENCH. Essentially the students are supposed to be learning to communicate in a new language here. There is only one person in the room who already speaks French and that's me!

This whole model does not deactivate the guru.​

Rather it hyperactivates the guru. It liberates me to leverage my expertise, time and energy in more effective and powerful ways: to just the right place​ at just the right time

This is what teacher-talk looks like for me:​

  • getting in amongst the students and offering individualised guidance and input
  • being on hand and available just when needed​
  • running 'opt-in' sessions with small groups of students. I am constantly running these and get a variety of participants depending on where we are in the unit, the mood of the day, etc​
  • running compulsory sessions (especially for speaking/listening & conversation challenges) but running them 4 or 5 times over a week and telling the students they must attend at least 1. (of course the kids could come back for a repeat if they feel they need it!!)​
  • ​and yes, forcing every student to drop everything and all participate in compulsory whole-class activities. This is the closest we get to looking like a traditional teacher-centric class. Because it isn't a dish served up constantly, the students really like it. I'll run a theatre sports session, or similar, and these feel like special events or a rite of passage. 

There is still very much a place for teacher-directed input. It's really a matter of context. ​

Finally, note that every student is having a high quality interaction with me at worst every couple of lessons. When I say high quality I mean an authentic learning-conversation of some kind. This couldn't happen if I was out the front all the time, or putting all my energy into getting the students to do what they're 'supposed to' (and inevitably ensuing conflict. 

 
cochonsbadge.JPG
 

#8 Building Student Capacity to Self-Direct

If students have been going to school ​for, say, the last 8 years, and the script is: come in, sit down, and look to the teacher for direction, then you might get some feral behaviour the first time you back off and put students in the drivers seat. There may even be some tantrums. 

At my school we've worked hard for some years to build a capacity for self-directed learning in the students. Frankly, this has mostly been a detox process. Students know how to self-direct: they do it from 3pm to 9am weekdays, and on the weekends and public holidays. And school holidays. 

So we detox them from the pacifying scripts. We teach them how to make differential choices based on feedback coming in to them from the teacher, the environment (physical and virtual), their community-of-practice (e.g. peers), and their own emotional and cognitive states and preferences.​

No one asks whether a toddler is able to direct their own learning. 

You stick a toddler in a space and let their curiosity drive them. ​

Note that you don't stick a toddler in the middle of a desert and let their curiosity drive them. 

There's nothing to explore! Instead, you curate an environment for them that is rich in opportunities to learn.  Hence all my mucking around with Moodle!​

 
fluency.JPG
 

#9 A Vision of What a Human Being Is

There is something profound at stake here. What is our vision of the young person and their relationship with the universe? Is not the universe a fascinating place to be? Oh the places you'll go!

​Can we not then trust the engine of inherent curiosity and desire to learn? ​

So then we have to relinquish control!  ​

 

#9 The Final Product

To finish with, here is some video footage of my students on the job! ​

There is so much I want to say about it. It's so much about freedom of movement: through the curriculum, yes, but also through physical space, virtual space. Freedom to be social. Freedom to appropriate tools​-at-hand (e.g. using a cupboard for a puppet show, an iPhone as a projector). Freedom to block out the world and go introspective, or to harness extrovert-energy and physical movement. You'll see, in the video, some boys running around like maniacs! But it's beyond doubt: they're in flow​. They are doing just what they need, to learn. The learning has seduced them, as well it ought! As well it will, if we trust it enough to let go.

 

Dear ClassDojo, it's Complicated

PREFACE:

Just after posting this blog, I discovered Vivo Miles:

From the site "It’s the 21st century right? So, when you do something worthy of a reward at school, you want something a little more interesting than a sticker or a stamp in your planner from your teacher, yeah?"

That is OFFICIALLY more DEPRESSING than the "Day Made of Glass #2" video showing futuristic classrooms with ROWS OF DESKS FACING THE FRONT.

Anyway, on with this post:

My friend and colleague Cameron Paterson has blogged about ClassDojo and repeated the well known criticism that external rewards kill intrinsic motivation.

If you're not up to speed on ClassDojo, it sets up a very shiny list of students and allows you to award and subtract points, even via your mobile phone, with compelling sound effects. With the class list up on the big projector screen you've got a big bag of peanuts for your monkeys.

Which is, of course, Paterson's criticism. And yes he is dead right about the dynamic. It's not that it's new, either, schooling is mostly composed of similar systems that we may not notice simply because we notice new things more than the familiar.

The graphics and message of ClassDojo, at face value, has no trace of the irony I propose below, and at face value suggests a veritable caricature of behaviourism. 

Nevertheless I feel a strong urge to try to shift the discourse on ClassDojo, and more broadly on reward-mechanics to a different level. There is a distinction that screams relevance at me.

I commented on Cameron's post, and will reproduce the comment here below:

I certainly have a reaction against the smug teacher graphic on the classdojo site because it says to me “Look, I’m in control!”.

Yet I too have used it in my Yr 8 French class, mostly to see how the students relate to it, and different ways it can be framed. Gathering field data, I guess.

But the main thing I want to throw into the mix here, is that reality is more complex than “an extrinsic reward kills intrinsic motivation”.

There is indeed what we might call a ‘valley’ where, when you start offering an extrinsic reward, the intrinsic motivation drops. I don’t dispute this dynamic.

However there is a far side to that valley, and it occurs when the individual has a mental model that is able to contextualise the reward mechanism from a higher, savvy, perspective. When they can deconstruct it. I’m saying that there is a sort of literacy to it.

I’m particularly aware of this due to my extreme familiarity with computer games.

You reckon we play monopoly to earn fake cash and beat the other guy? We play monopoly to socialise. The game-dynamic of earning cash is contextualised within what is clearly a constructed, artificial system.

So, we sit above the system, not underneath it. The motivation backfire occurs when the individual has a perspective within the system, mistaking the system for reality. If they look on the system from above, from without, then they can engage with it for their own purposes. This is where the language of gaming is perfect for making sense of this dynamic.

In discussing a study where this effect was shown, Amabile and Hennessy conclude, “It would seem that as a result of their training, these children had learned to treat reward not as an element that detracts from intrinsic interest but as something that can add to overall motivation. They had learned to overcome the deleterious effects of reward – so much that their levels of intrinsic motivation (and therefore levels of creativity) seem to have increased.”

Now, would anyone dispute that our young people are going to be navigating (ARE ALREADY navigating) a world absolutely chock-block full of extrinsic reward systems designed to hack their brains, distort their authentic drives, and make them obey a third party agenda (from work to death for a company through to buy this brand of chocolate)?

The solution is NOT to ban such mechanisms in schools but to contextualise. We need a game-mechanics literacy. Students should be experiencing these systems and taught to deconstruct them, as a scaffolded experience to ‘wise them up’.

In other news, savvy computer gamer kids might be getting just this experience, yet another example of the computer game industry doing a better job of schooling our kids than school does.

But that’s a shame. Being purist about reward-mechanics does nothing to help students deconstruct a world full of them.

I’ve written at length about these issues over at my happysteve blog.

I am not, for one moment, suggesting that teachers are using Classdojo in the way I am describing – simply that the discourse around it could move to a far more constructive space if it transcended its current terms of reference. 

The reference for the study I referred to is:
Amabile, T. M., Hennessey, B.A., & Grossman, B.S. (1986) Social influences on creativity: The effects of contracted-for reward.
in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 14-23.

 

The Curious Case of the Flipped-Bloom's Meme

(This is the sequel to 'Anatomy of a (Flipped) Meme')

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Last post I dug up the history of the Flipped Classroom idea. In this thrilling conclusion I look a variant: the "Flipped Bloom's Taxonomy" meme, which isn't even a meme yet, although in the last three weeks it has looked to get enough traction via one very influential blog post.

Do a google image search for Bloom's and see what shapes you get:

The very first image has been FLIPPED upside down! This image has been around for years, but it's only the last few days that Twitter has lit up with the NEW Flipped-Bloom's MEME!!

 

Never Meant to Be One Way

 

Of course, Bloom's taxonomy was never meant to be linear or sequential.  

The version I always knew was a pyramid:

But as with the general flipped learning meme, if you look you can find plenty of examples dating back years.

This looks like a flipped pyramid right here, dating from 2001:

And the taxonomy was revised in 2000 by Loren Anderson, who also appears to have turned it upside down, although I can't get a really good reference for this. This is the upside down graphic that comes up first when I run a google images search for Bloom's: 

Much criticism has been levelled at Bloom's, but although "a more radical approach would be to have no taxonomy at all" (2003), human beings LOVE a taxonomy, especially one with a one-syllable name and a nice stable pyramid under it!

Don't get rid of Bloom's, just swivel it 180 degrees! 

 

May 5 - A Conversation with Aaron Sams

 

Aaron Sams mentioned the Flipped Bloom's idea to us when we met him a few weeks ago: "The other thing is just trying to find different models in the way this whole flipped approach works because it’s not just one way to put them."

"So, the idea is how do you approach Bloom’s?  Do you go from the bottom up, or do you approach Bloom from the top-down?  If we can minimize the remembering and understanding stuff, you start with the project, so project-based learning starts top and they tap down as needed versus starting at the bottom with content and climbing your way to the top and, hopefully, you get to a culminating it in to your project."

 

May 15 - Enter Shelley Wright

 

So, dear reader, imagine my surprise shortly after returning from my pilgrimage to my leafy Australian home, to come across this post: http://plpnetwork.com/2012/05/15/flipping-blooms-taxonomy/

 

Except that, I didn’t read it there, I read it on the Mindshift blog where it was republished: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/05/flip-this-blooms-taxonomy-should-start-with-creating/ 

Her original post was on May 15, and the Mindshift clone was May 17. 

Which of the two sites has a larger readership, I do not know, but the little bunny-meme went virile. An excerpt search shows the blog being linked to in 454 other sites as of today, May 26.

 

This is a fractal jump in scale, but it doesn’t count as full-blown viral, yet. It could be a flash in the pan, a blip on the radar.

I've been counting the tweets mentioning 'Flipping Bloom's' each day since then:

16 May - 10

17 May - 2

18 May - 80 (Mindshift blog is a super-node?)

19 May - 70 (Mindshift blog is a super-node?)

20 May - 30

21 May - 30

22 May - 22

23 May - 21

24 May - 29

25 May - 6

26 May - 19

You can just feel this new virus striving for life, pushing, pushing to jump up another order of magnitude or two into fractal viability.

 

So had Shelley Wright Spoken to Aaron Sams?

 

I logically concluded Shelley Wright must have heard the idea from Aaron Sams. So I asked Shelley, but she's never heard of Aaron! 

Detective hat on, I bounced back to Aaron and asked where he heard the idea from. He couldn't recall hearing "Flipped Bloom's" from anyone else, but said he'd been using it for about 6 months in his presentations.

He did, however, point me to Lorin Anderson's "inverted pyramid" which I've mentioned above.

Further searching by yielded another interesting find: 

Back in 2009, we have "Inverting Bloom's Taxonomy".

"INVERTING!?" PEOPLE! How many times must I tell you! Don't say 'invert', say 'flip'! The punters want 'flip', they don't want 'inverting'. 

This 2009 version got little traction.

Let this be a lesson to everyone: if you turn something upside down, and want people to pass around the idea, choose your keyword carefully. 

 

Inevitable Ideas

 

"There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come."

Victor Hugo

 

It's all context.

Bloom's taxonomy pyramids floating everywhere, sunny-side up.

Then an inverted graphic from 2001.

"Inverting Bloom's" in 2009.

Still all quiet on the western front. 

Then the "FLIP" engine, lurking in wings, catches the wind in 2010. 

How long could it be until someone connected the FLIP-engine to Bloom's pyramid? How long until someone thought "that ain't just inverted, that's flipped!" 

Was this inevitable? Aaron Sams and Shelley Wright seem to have been saying it concurrently, unaware of each other.  

And will Shelley Wright's post with its beautiful graphic be enough to tip the equation up to the next level?

I really hope so. I like Bloom's the other way around.

 

Project-Based Learning in a Soothing Package 

 

Flipped Bloom's is remarkably close to Project-Based Learning. But you try saying "Project-Based Learning" or even "PBL" a few times! Sounds a leetle beet hard! A leetle beet threatening!

It tells me I've been basing my learning model on the wrong thing. "Try project-based learning" implies "You have been basing your understanding of learning on the WRONG FOUNDATION." Aggressive!

Not a bad meme, PBL, for the revolutionaries. We might need to repackage the idea for the punters.

"Flipping Bloom's" is more diplomatic, and seductive.

"Don't worry, we're just taking something you aleady know and love, and we're putting a fresh angle on it!"

"Hey, anyone can turn something upside down! Just turn it upside down!" 

I hope that the Flipped Bloom's meme travels up the fractal scale dimension. I hope it continues to get traction.

 

Variant Graphics

 

Some crazy radicals, even since Shelley Wright's post, have been doing OTHER things to Bloom's that cannot be summed up in one cute syllable.

I give you Kathy Schrock's interlocking cognitive processes. She uses cogs:

 

And Edna Sackson dares suggest learning is not linear, and uses steps and ladders, and little people who appear to be dressed in Bloom's triangles (coincidence I think)!

(Edna has said since that this dates from 2010 - http://whatedsaid.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/constructing-meaning/. In that post she quotes Jay McTighe as advocating 'turning Bloom's taxonony on its head'. HA HA!! SO CLOSE TO 'FLIP'!! Imagine that: "so, Jay, you're saying we should... so to speak... 'flip' the taxonomy?" But in 2010 Pink and Khan had not pushed the term to its current giddy heights.)

But can anything compete with the flipped romance? As Edna Sackson says, 'Flipping is the new black.'


A Flipped Romance

 

'Flip' is  like the puppy dog version of 'change'.

Change growls, flip purrs.

Change threatens, flip seduces.

Flip implies something can be freshened, not made reduntant. It can be redeemed, invigorated, reborn, without a change in substance or identity. When you flip something, you don't rip out its heart, you look at it from a reverse angle.

'Flip' comes without a surgeon's knife. It knocks at the door like a showman, and offers to teach you a magic trick. Just put this here and that there, and tadaaaa!

No damage done.

So all the debating, blogging, playing with the language, is really giving people a paradigm that sits between death by stagnation and death by assault. From experience, stuck between that rock and that hard place is actually where I normally do grow, but if 'flip' can get in there first and tempt me out with some bread crumbs and the promise of a better world, I shan't complain. 

Australian readers may recognise the advertising equivalent, 'Don't stop it, just swap it', and recognise the limits of this method!

 

 

If Flipping Meets Occupy 

 

I predict this won't be the last thing we see flipped. 

In one conceivable future, the occupy meme will meet the flipped meme. If that happens, all bets are off! 

 

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Anatomy of a (Flipped) Meme

(See also, part 2: The Curious Case of Flipped-Bloom's)

 

You know the 'Flipped Learning' meme? 

 

Flip it?

The Flip?

The Flipped Classroom? 

Okay then, smartie, have you noticed its new iteration, 'Flipped Bloom's'? It sprung like a bolt out of the blue not 3 weeks ago.

Out of nowhere? And why now? Why traction, now?

Curiouser and curiouser. Flipped Bloom's next post, first a prequel:

 

The Prequel: 'Flipped Learning'

 

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of meeting Aaron Sams in Denver, and picked his brains over the history of the "Flipped Learning" meme. 

Sams told me, "Dan Pink ran an article in 2010, November, and he called this whole shifting direct instruction out of the class on video the 'Fisch Flip' referencing Karl Fisch.

"Karl said, 'Hey! You got to talk to these guys down in Woodland Park because that’s who we talked to.'  So we immediately got stuck to the term."

Sams and his friend Bergmann were about to publish a book on podcasting, vodcasting etc, but with Pink using the term 'Flip' they reworked the keywords in their book and called it 'Flip-Mastery'.

They put in their book for publishing in February, 2011. As it happened, not two weeks later the illustrious Sal Khan gave his Khan Academy TED talk. In the talk he says "And the teachers would write, saying, 'We've used your videos to flip the classroom.'" He uses the phrase 'flip' like it was already old news. 

So Salman Khan heard teachers using the word 'Flip' before 2011. Maybe they'd read Dan Pink's article from the UK newspaper, the Telegraph? (Or a much earlier article - see below)

Pink + Khan seems to have made the idea go high-level viral. Khan in particular acted as a 'super-node' in the network, and ideas can jump fractal scale dimensions when championed in a space that has everyone's attention.

 

What's in a Meme?

 

That which we call a rose...

A meme is an idea on wheels. It has its driver's license and its off around the world, thanks!

It can only drive Class A vehicles, and they don't take many passengers. If it's going to go viral, it can't carry much with it.

This is both the strength and weakness of the 'Flipped Learning' meme.

To my mind, mainly strength.

The literal meaning 'Swap the activities of school and home', is in itself a delightfully, scrumptiously, subversive, disruptive message; just the thing to sweep out cobwebs, challenge some thinking just where it needs challenging, because for the love of all things kind and sweet we do not need any more teacher talk, thanks universe. Swap the stuff OUTSIDE this rattling cage for what's IN IT. Amen, brother. 

THAT meaning is, of course, a parody of the term anyway, but parody is where the magic begins. 

I don't know any teacher who has so crude a view of learning that they hear 'Flipped Learning' and immediately think to literally flip class activity and home activity, lecture and application, end of story, and slap their hands together and say 'mah werk heah eez dun!' 

Rather, what happens, and I think this goes to the way the meme works, is when you first hear it and understand the literal implication, you envisage the caricature, but then, and this is magical, you bounce of the caricature into something more nuanced.

So, in a funny way, the meme works really nicely.

Step #1 Teacher hears the meme.

Step #2 They react against it as a caricature and formulate their own more balanced model.

Step #3 They pass on the meme, often in the form of criticism of it. 

('Can't talk honey, I must blog, someone on the internet is wrong!') 

Just go to google blog search and search for Flipped Learning to see this effect. 100s of blogs trying to correct the straw-man notion!

Aaron Sams told me, "I mean, I’ve been playing defense on the internet primarily because of misconceptions of people trying to pitch in whole lots, [saying] 'is it just this?'". 

"It’s 'Think about what the best use your time with your students face to face is and if you can shift something out of that time so they can access it asynchronously.'"

The meme begs this question, and it's a question it doesn't hurt to ask. 

Sams isn't locking into any model! Nor are his students or their friendly robot. 

Like every buzz-word, to travel it has to be hopelessly simplified.

The phrase, "Think about what the best use of your time with your students face to face is and if you can shift something out of that time so they can access it asynchronously"-classroom doesn't roll of the tongue.

Miraculously, the simpler phrase "Flip" unpacks itself in each brain it encounters, through an automatic unfolding mechanism called 'critique'. This story is archetypical.

In computing terms, the 'flip' virus invokes our reliable critiquing apparatus, allowing it to travel light, and poses as straw-man to intensify traction. Watch the edubloggers all take to Wordpress, one giant army, to correct the misconception! Clever meme!

It knows! 

It smiles to itself. It beckons: "unpack me, then copy me and pass me on!"

 

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

 

So Dan Pink writes about the 'Fisch Flip', Sams and Bergmann write a book, and Khan gives a TED talk, and KABOOM! The idea explodes, and the rest is history.

I hear you say, "Steve, flipped learning goes way, way back before 2011."

...and was being applied instinctively and intuitively all over the place. I was applying related concepts in 2002 via a website called 'Nicenet.org' and when Moodle arrived in 2005, I went ballistic. I dare say you did too.

 

Prehistory of a Meme

 

If you had your ear to the ground you'd know the poorer, clumsier, older brother meme, the veritable proto-meme, the (Baker's Saturn to Khan's Zeus):

"Be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage."

Too many syllables for the proletariat, but the phrase gathered traction, and when I heard it from MrsAngell a few years ago it stuck with me.  Wikipedia tells me the proto-meme came from a conference paper in 2000 "The classroom flip: using web course management tools to become the guide by the side" by J. Wesley Baker. This is pre-Web 2.0.

He even uses the word 'flip' in the title, but that didn't seem to travel at the time. 

Our attention spans were longer before Twitter came along. The brevity of 'Flip'; the sheer economy of character spaces, was not a crucial advantage. A cost of 4 units, versus the 47 of 'Guide by the side instead of sage on the stage' now makes all the difference. It's all pure-poetry now, and nimble memes exploit efficiency to dominate. 

Ha ha! 

Other authors in 2000 were referring to 'Inverting' the classroom. Yah, not so catchy. Try saying 'invert' out loud a few times, then say 'flip'. Now, which one gets a girlfriend?

The Wikipedia article pushes further back into the 1990s and Eric Mazur. Would the idea have ever bunny hopped up the fractal scale dimension without that long beginning?

Why pause the time machine there? Why stop with the internet? 

The difference between an interactive video and a textbook is only a matter of degrees.

If a 1960s teacher said 'read about calculus tonight in your book and tomorrow we'll use it to do something crazy', how is that not Flipped-Learning?

The internet just a really big book, on a continuum since some Sumerians got sick of counting sheep, grabbed a chisel and a rock, and composed one of the world's earliest web-pages.

 

Collective Brainwaves

 

So it's not that the idea is new, ain't nothing new, it's all just short shorts.

I'm just fascinated at the turn of events that lead to its fractal-jump in late 2010, from rumbling in the background to a edtech popculture icon.

You can have a great idea, but you can't force traction.

 

It's Fractal

 

When I say it's fractal I mean the meme jumped a level of magnitude in late 2010, early 2011. A google trends analysis on searches for the phrase 'flipped' seems to support this:

 

A Joke

Have you heard the joke:

Q: What's the difference between teacher-talk and a video?

A: At least you can turn a video off.

For this much we are grateful.

...to be continued. In Part 2, the meme spawns a child: "Flipped Bloom's"

Building the Education Revolution Spaces

International readers, the background to this post is a huge financial investment by the Australian government in new school capital works progams as one of several initiatives to counteract the effects of the Global Financial Crisis. The investment was called "Building the Education Revolution" (B.E.R.).

Here's a video from Balwyn Primary school in Victoria:

The video appears to be published by 'Furnware', a furniture company, but the link at the end of the video goes to the Victorian education website on the B.E.R. There are links from there to standard templates for schools. I can't really tell from the templates if they're any good, but there are some good signs. The dot points on a typical template seem to be on the right track, as does this video with key architects. They really emphasise the adaptability of the buildings to future changes. The thinking is spot on.

I'd love to hear from Victorian colleague about the templates. I'm not exactly bowled over by video footage of a range of spaces but it looks like there's some good stuff in the mix. (Me, the measure of all things, of course!)

Footage from the New South Wales Department of Education and Training, unfortunately, is another matter.

Here's an overview of one of their templates:

The concept of 'computer nooks', is of course dead in the water. That's why you soft-code your spaces. "Team-teaching" is the closest we get to innovation in the NSW video, which isn't very close at all I'm afraid. If I'm depressed by the end of it, this second overview doesn't cheer me up:

There's a complete absence of vision for what is the chance of a generation.

I beg of readers to correct me or add information in the comments. Maybe the Victorian PR machine is just better?

One thing I landed on for NSW was these reports

In this interim report (warning - it's a 10mb Word doc), page 54, we read:

The managing contractors engaged by NSW adopted existing concept design templates developed for NSW DET and prepared these designs for construction. These design templates developed by managing contractors were used in 97 per cent of NSW Government school P21 projects. In some instances the design templates were not well suited to schools with space constraints. This was observed by the Taskforce in inner-city areas

I gather, from this, that 97% of participating NSW government schools had template buildings that were already kicking around the D.E.T. when the funding program was launched.

In Victoria, on the other hand:

The Victorian Government recently developed a suite of design templates for new school buildings in accordance with that state’s Victorian Schools Plan. The Program has provided the Victorian DEECD with an opportunity to accelerate its state-wide roll out of new learning facilities and apply the new design templates. The Taskforce observed the Victorian Government design templates to be of high quality. The template development was hastened to take advantage of the Program and in some instances the designs have yet to benefit from feedback from earlier projects. 

However, nationally:

Design templates were not used by the majority of non-government schools.

The Victorian videos inspired me, expecially the first one.

The NSW one, however, made me feel I was back in the 1980s. It worries me, the cultural inertia that spaces carry with them, and therefore the braking effect the BER investment has the potential to cause on the learning paradigm-shift we so desperately need.