Yesterday afternoon I attended CBC’s open forum which sought to discuss the topic “is public education in BC broken?” It was moderately interesting to attend and some of the comments and questions raised were very interesting. Some of my favorite moments included Chris Kennedy responding to a Little Flower Academy student, saying that it is not public education’s job to sort students for universities. I couldn’t agree more. Another comment that was inspiring came from a French Immersion teacher from Burnaby who told of the creative, engaging and differentiated learning that happens in her classroom - learning that happens without input from the private sector.

I have been reflecting on how I taught Physics 12 last year, and I’m not super happy with how much lecturing I did. In the big picture it probably wasn’t too bad and I didn’t give a lot of notes (which is a good thing). I used peer instruction from time to time, and I liked how that turned out. In contrast to this, Physics 11 is much more inquiry based course, which is great.

In this post I would like to deal with the classroom half of the flipped classroom. What type of homework that is given, be it a video, a reading or practice questions, is almost irrelevant to my musings today. The main purpose of this post is to show two examples of what a flipped math classroom can look like. One is a constructivist environment and the other is a Khan Academy classroom.

I recently had a discussion with a classmate of mine about the Flipped Classroom, and I think my comments are worth sharing. In our discussion, I pointed out a couple of problems I have with the FC, which deal with a few fundamental issues in education. I should start off with saying that I do agree with the idea of moving the long lecture outside of the classroom. Where I disagree with the FC is that the lecture, or its replacement, should be moved home.

I’ve decided to move my website over to Wordpress, as WP is so much easier to work with. I originally created my PoL website as both a blog and an ePortfolio. However, I decided to create my own hardcoded ePortfolio website, and the reasons for keeping the Joomla site were almost non-existent. I’ll be tweaking this blog over the next couple of weeks but this is essentially what my PoL website will look like.

Having looked at the academic and social/political issues around year round schooling, I think it is also appropriate to discuss some personal issues with year round schooling. To do this, let’s suppose we were to agree that all the academic and political issues around year round schooling are neutral: there are no academic gains or losses, and no differences in financials. The question, then, is how personal opinions and preferences play into it.

In my previous post, I looked at some of the research and academic arguments around year round schooling. In today’s post, I want to comment on some of the social issues around year round schooling and how it might affect our communities. I was born in a small town in BC, and growing up I had a healthy relationship with the outdoors. I have hiked many trails and kilometers in the Rockies, the Purcells and West Coast Range.

This is the first part in a 3 part series that I’m writing on what I believe are the reasons to stay away from year-round schooling in British Columbia. Through various initiatives, such as the BC Education Plan and local interest by school boards, we have the beginnings of a shift from our traditional September to June school calendar to a “year round” calendar. The specifics of how a year round calendar would work are not set, and the BC Ministry of Education has passed legislation that makes it easier for each school district to set their own calendar.

This week we had our final exams, and I have all of my Physics 11 and 12 marks in. Overall the exam marks were extremely disappointing. The Physics 11 exam was 50 questions and my class average was 61%. For Physics 12, the multiple choice section was even worse with 51% average, while the written portion was much higher at around 85%. It is difficult for me to understand exactly what happened with the exams.

Last week I had my first try at implementing Problem Based Learning (PBL) in physics. We were about to study Heat Energy and it seemed like a natural fit for presenting an authentic problem. I chose to make a scenario that was based on my previous work as a mechanical engineer. Have a look below… PBL - Heat Energy From what I understand, PBL should be based on authentic situations where the solution is non-obvious such that the students need to engage their meta-cognition.