In November 2014 we posted Part 1 of our 3 part feature on Rebecca DeLozier, AP Biology and Physics teacher as a Doceri Teacher who completely flipped her classes.

Not all Doceri teachers flip their classrooms. In fact, from our  2014 user survey  only 8% of Doceri teachers surveyed said they have fully flipped their classes. However, 41% of those surveyed stated they are interested in flipping their classrooms in the future. Rebecca has shared her journey to the total class flip for those aspiring to remove lecture from the classroom and save class time for group work, 1:1 work, and discussions.

Initially, Rebecca flipped her AP Biology class because the content was overwhelming and the classes just didn’t have time to complete the labs that, “get at the real meat of the content.”   As she started making her own videos she discovered how hard it is to pare down unit content.  Ms. Delozier said, “We as educators tend to overwhelm students with material that isn’t necessary to get at the learning objective.  Writing my own videos makes me focus on what is CRUCIAL and how I can present that in under ten minutes. Also, handwriting all of my lessons helps me narrow the video focus too. If I expect students to take notes from a video then I only want to present the noteworthy content.  We still have discussions and elaborative examples daily in class. However, my lessons are the cliff notes to our curriculum.”

At first, Rebecca wasn’t sure students liked the video style or found it helpful, but every once in a while due to time constraints she will post a link to a video made by someone else, or one of my old pre-Doceri videos.  “The next day, I will hear complaints about having to watch those videos, so I am taking that to be a vote of support from the students.”

Rebecca’s AP Biology is 100% flipped.  Students have assignments to watch anywhere between 1-5 short videos a week (they are typically under 7 minutes, always under 10 min). There are pages from their text associated with the video listed in each assignment and they take notes on the video. Each video is followed by a question or two applying the knowledge covered in lesson.

Physics is a whole different strategy for Ms. Delozier. Students in her physics class work at their own pace and while there is a rough flow of assignments they can skip around within each section of the course.  So, on any given day of the week she may have students working on lab, projects, taking quizzes, reading, watching the lessons…all in class. “The fact that I’m not lecturing lets me move from group to group and help out with whatever they need (lab set up, calculations, reteaching, etc),” stated Rebecca.

Rebecca goes on to explain, “I don’t do a lot of direct instruction in class. I spend about 10-15 minutes each class clearing up misconceptions from the previous day¹s lessons or clarifying concepts for that day¹s lab.  These are student driven, and when all goes well, student generated discussions take place. I have a prompt ready but we just go where the conversation takes us for a few minutes each day.

The third and final post in this series will detail Rebecca’s screencasting method and how Doceri makes her job that much easier.