Tuesday, July 16th

Today we talked about the flipped classroom model. We watched a TED Talk of Salman Khan, who is the founder of Khan Academy. The flipped classroom eliminates "one size fits all" lectures. It humanized the classrooms, as teachers gain time to work with individual students who need direct one-on-one assistance. Moreover, in the Khan Academy, students stay at their own levels of learning, until they reach mastery of what they are working on. As Salman Khan explained using the bicycle analogy, students are not forced to move up to another level when they simply are not ready for the next step up. This way, students will ideally have less "swiss-cheese" gaps in their knowledge.

After watching the TED Talk, each group planned a lesson using the flipped classroom model. In our group, we decided to connect this model to a jigsaw activity for a grade three lesson on the solar system. Specifically, the students would be divided into four groups, and each group would be assigned to watch a video at home about a rocky planet (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) and write down some information about the location, size, composition, unique features...etc. Once they come to class, they will be regrouped with other students who have watched videos of the three other planets, and share what they have learned. In the end, students return back to their original planet groups to share what they have learned from their peers.

This process would be repeated for the gas planets, so that students would be able to learn about all eight planets in the solar system.