“This isn’t how I was taught to do math.”
“I can’t help my child with his/her homework.”
"I was never good at math and my child isn’t either.”
As a fifth grade math teacher, these are comments that I hear from parents and guardians all the time. I wanted to try to find a way to teach math to my students that would help to alleviate the concerns of my students’ parents/guardians. After going through my Master’s courses and doing some research on my own, I decided that a flipped classroom model would be something that could possibly help with this situation. A flipped classroom means that students are introduced to be material outside of class as part of their homework. For my classroom, this means that they watched a video that went over the topic of the next day’s lesson. Then in class, we would go over questions that students had and then work in small groups on problems and on other activities that dealt with the topic that we were discussing.
When I first started using the flipped classroom model, students were excited because they did not have a lot of homework. Parents were excited because their child was not struggling with their homework and those that wanted to help their child could watch the videos along with them so they knew what was expected and how their child was being taught a certain skill. I quickly realized though that students while letting the video play would not always pay attention to the video. I used a program called EDpuzzle that allowed me to post the videos, add questions to the videos for students to answer, and for me to make it that they could not fast forward through the video, they had to watch the whole thing before they could answer the final question. I thought this was keeping students accountable, but I realized that something was still missing.
Note Taking in a Fifth Grade Math
Classroom using the Flipped Classroom Model
By Nicole Lang