Day 1: to flip or not to flip?


To flip or not to flip?


     All last year I tried to motivate my students to reflect on their work, their language learning habits and their learning style. Some grumbled, some procrastinated, some took it seriously, others dutifully filled the space.  They posted their reflections on their Google site and it gave me a better insight into their progress, their difficulties and their perception of what  I was teaching and they were learning.
     Now that September has rolled around once more, with it comes the inevitable task of goal setting. As always there are too many goals and too little time. Reflection, but this time my own, should be one of my goals, hence this blog. Reality, however, is forcing me down a different road. Both my 9th and 10th grade advanced French classes have 18 students in them, so in order to accommodate all, I will have to become really efficient. 
     Making sure every student gets enough of my attention will be my priority and modifying the way I run my language classes will become a necessity.  For quite a while now "the flipped classroom" has been the talk of the town. Conferences, journals, Internet, everyone is telling us teachers how it's the best way for students to learn. Clearly specialists must be right and in theory I agree. I have seen some fine examples in many subjects, but I have yet to adapt the concept of flipping to the language learning class.
     What obstacles do I feel I need to overcome? One of the bigger obstacles I see is preparing enough material to make it possible for students to work on their language development individually. I have lots experience with web tools (Quizlet, Quia, Duolingo etc.) and my student are mostly tech savvy and can use multiple tools to create projects, but creating or finding material at appropriate level will take a lot of time and effort. Still it's the management of this whole affair that scares me most. Google classroom may be the solution to this, but until I get a chance to explore it, I won't really know.
     But then I have always been a fan of the unknown. Things usually turn out for the best, so my goal for the year will be to jump in at the deep end. I will flip and hope I won't flip out in the process.

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