--Originally published at Mrs. Gibbs Flips Algebra 1
No, not the "20 out of 30" blog challenge month.
It's been a month of school already!!!
We completed 4 weeks with students last week.
Wow.
People ask me how school is going, and my answer has pretty consistently been, "Exhausting." It's been a great start and things are going well, but it is tiring. That's typical, of course, but it seems to catch me off guard every year.
I've started a little differently this year. I'm trying the Open Up Resources curriculum. There will be more blog posts to come related to this. I like the curriculum - particularly the types of questions it asks and the depth of thinking it requires - but there have been no flipped lessons, yet. GASP! I know! Like I said...more posts to come. (And, yes, there will be flipped lessons eventually.)
I have a good group of kids. Discipline challenges are at a minimum. Thanks to the hard work of their previous teachers, they have a good foundation and are stepping up to the level of thinking I am asking of them.
The kids can't believe we're already a month into the school year. I told them progress reports would go home next week, and one boy said, "That means we're 1/8 of the way through the school year!"
That made for one happy math teacher.
I am very interested in your journey flipping Open Up Resources. I am part of our district’s pilot of Open Up Resources and teachers are concerned about not having the time needed to complete the lessons. I am looking for ideas to help and with this challenge and to differentiate lessons. Have you any flipped lessons or suggestions you could share?
Hi Kaylen!
Thanks for reading! I did not flip any of the Open Up lessons. For one, I was trying to stick pretty close to the curriculum before branching out and doing anything differently with it. Also, flipped lessons lend themselves to direct instruction of skills/fluency/procedure, and Open Up lessons are more inquiry/investigation/discovery. I did not see any activities that I thought would be good flipped lessons. Now, I did discover that sometimes students needed skill practice after an Open Up lesson, and flipped lessons might be good for that. But that would not really save any time; it would likely mean an extra day after the Open Up lesson. I’m sorry I’m not a lot of help. I would love to see if someone has figured out how to effectively flip Open Up lessons!