If you've read my post about collaborative investigation you've got an idea of what Khan Academy is all about. They've got a mission to provide instructive videos on nearly every topic, organized in an intuitively sensible way and paired with interactive practice problems. In this way, a student selects their own homework to support their work in class. These online tools allow teachers to abandon traditional lowest-common denominator lecturing and open up the classroom to deep exploration of mathematical concepts linked to real world problems. Indeed, this is the larger revolution which Khan Academy aspires to inspire.
Khan Academy is young, and they are learning as they go along. Their process is as collaborative and non-linear as that of our students. They adapt to unexpected realities, they adopt new tools when they make sense, and they model the creative problem solving which we hope to see in our students' work.
Learn how they learn here.
Showing posts with label Flipped Classroom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Flipped Classroom. Show all posts
11/13/12
Collaborative Investigation and the Flipped Classroom
Introduction
My first year of teaching was in 1995 at an innovative, elite private high school in San Francisco named Lick-Wilmerding. The math department at Lick-Wilmerding employed a method of teaching which was unfamiliar to me and to most teachers at the time. Students worked in small groups of 3 or 4, exploring geometric relationships on a shared laptop and reporting their findings in documents written as if they were lab reports. Studying algebra, students used graphing calculators to explore functions dynamically and again, report their findings in written form accompanied by detailed examples and analysis. Students would receive direct instruction when necessary, but for the most part questions were explored and answered by members of the groups themselves. I adapted hesitantly to this new structure, as I myself had been taught by teachers and professors using lecture combined with repetitive homework. Over my subsequent years of teaching in the states I explored a range of methods tailored to the various cultures of the schools at which I taught. This included straight lecture and homework, a mixture of lecture and independent class work, and collaborative group work supported by a traditional textbook. Finally, now at the American School of Valencia, I’ve developed a suite of collaborative investigations which allow my ninth and tenth grade math students to explore mathematical concepts much as they explore scientific concepts in laboratories. This is supported by online resources which include videos and extra practice problems.
My first year of teaching was in 1995 at an innovative, elite private high school in San Francisco named Lick-Wilmerding. The math department at Lick-Wilmerding employed a method of teaching which was unfamiliar to me and to most teachers at the time. Students worked in small groups of 3 or 4, exploring geometric relationships on a shared laptop and reporting their findings in documents written as if they were lab reports. Studying algebra, students used graphing calculators to explore functions dynamically and again, report their findings in written form accompanied by detailed examples and analysis. Students would receive direct instruction when necessary, but for the most part questions were explored and answered by members of the groups themselves. I adapted hesitantly to this new structure, as I myself had been taught by teachers and professors using lecture combined with repetitive homework. Over my subsequent years of teaching in the states I explored a range of methods tailored to the various cultures of the schools at which I taught. This included straight lecture and homework, a mixture of lecture and independent class work, and collaborative group work supported by a traditional textbook. Finally, now at the American School of Valencia, I’ve developed a suite of collaborative investigations which allow my ninth and tenth grade math students to explore mathematical concepts much as they explore scientific concepts in laboratories. This is supported by online resources which include videos and extra practice problems.
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