Week 5 - successful and not so successful

Week 5 has been interesting with flipping lessons. I still am only flipping about two per week. I am waiting for my students to  demonstrate an ability to keep up with the work and stay organized. This will be my signal to add a third day of flipped content. I am hoping to flip content at least 3 times a week. This week I also exported my smartboard class lesson as a PDF and uploaded it to Edmodo for additional review of class notes. It was handy for those who were absent too. Students had watched an introductory video on the content, and only had to answer one question with not notes. I delivered more content and examples on the smartboard in class the next day. Most of the notes came from this. Exporting the PDF allowed students to relax and listen rather than worry about writing down all the  notes. They filled  in the the remaining notes that night from the PDF. I guess I flipped the content in stages over two nights and one lesson. This was a successful way to deliver the content and still gave me more class time to work with students on problems. My end goal is to increase classroom time with practice

What was not so successful is the parents and all their questions. They are not sure about this flipping and their student's homework/classwork grades. Homework/classwork grades in my class are only 10% to track the learning progress. Parents want their children to have nothing but A's in the grade book and can't seem to understand that 10% will not impact the overall grade to any great degree. I use an online assessment tool and students get a percent of achievement almost daily. We don't expect high percents until we have practiced a concept for a few days. Parents want to see 100 percent achievement on every homework. It is a shame that learning is so grade orientated. We incorrectly teach students to earn A's rather than learn content.

One problem I have is the students who are focused on getting the answer but not learning the content. Several students in each class are copying answers from their group work rather than understanding the concept and doing it themselves. I can see this from the lack of notebook work and questioning in group discussions. This week, I will be implementing notebook checkers at the start of every class to check notebook work from preceding night's classwork/homework.

I still need to figure out how to support--

•  struggling students who are not used to thinking and just used to getting the right answer any way they can
• high achievers who think they should have an A every day on every new lesson
• parents who are having trouble shifting their understanding of the flipped classroom and class/work homework grades