Health Ed flip .... A day in the life of Mr. T

I was recently asked to visit a C & I class at UW Madison about the Flipped classroom and how I do it in a health classroom. It was a great opprotunity to share some personal information with students who were just getting ready for their student teaching esperience. They were told to read 2 articles about the Flipped Model and come up with questions. I am not an expert, but i have also done my share of research plus personal experience. I pretty much just talked about the successes and struggles of creating my flip. The students liked the fact they could talk to someone who was doing it rather than just reading about it. Also to see a different type of class flipping rather than just Math and Science. Nothing against Math and Science and I can see how the flip is awesome for those areas, but being a health and phy ed teacher it hasn't been the easiest to find others in my area with expertise/experience. I met up with the flippedcoach in Kenilworth and that was a great time to see how he has been integrating a flipped approach in Phy ed and coaching.

So far I feel like I have at least created a framework to build on and overall have been happy with the changes in my class. It is in no way perfect, and not every kid is wildly successful now but the content is being covered in a more applicable way than I have ever been able to before. Also i am not exhausted from talking all day. I feel like i know my kids alot better and most days I feel like i am actually doing something rather than blah, blah, blah .... 5 periods a day. But i digress ....

I put together a video of what my day looked like so the students at UWM could see what it actually looked like. The question i had and a BIG question they had looking at the Flipped Model was "what do you do in class if you don't lecture??" I decided to show them rather than tell them. Here is the clip I showed the UW class

The basic plan of the lesson is to get the kids to experience the failure rates of the different contraceptives we researched. I modified this activity from one developed by National Health Teacher of the Year Deb Tackmann from Eau Claire North HS called Bag of Beans. I can't take all the credit for this powerful activity. It's a great activity that allows the kids to really experience the risks. Jokingly I'll tell the class "we are going to try our some contraceptives as see how well they work ..." it usually gets a good laugh and some wierd looks. The Bag of Beads activityis usally the closing activity for the contraceptive unit. We have already done the Reproductive system vodcasts,labelingand the contraceptive chart research activityso they have everything they need to do the bag o beads activity.

I also threw in, as a review, an organizational activity for them to organize the vocab words from the vodcasts. It was a great problem solving activity for them to work at organizing all the contraceptives based on categories and types. The sticking point for many was that in the Barrer category, there were both prescription AND non-prescription contraceptives. I saw thier heads melt trying to figure it out ... and they all eventually did figure it out but I had to keep on them to not quit .. ;-)

Anyway, it just worked out to be a great demonstration of how a flip can look in any classroom. The funny thing is that the next day didn't go smooth at all ... a day in the life of teaching :-)