Good morning. Let's talk about Asynchronous Flipped Gameful Mastery learning. This is
how my classes are now organized and it is very different than a traditional classroom.
That is definitely true. Yeah. ♪ Flipping Physics ♪ - Yup.
There is a lot to describe in Asynchronous Flipped Gameful Mastery Learning. Let's
start with Flipped learning. Flipping students' learning basically means to move direct instruction,
or lectures, out of the classroom to allow more time in class for more student/teacher
interaction and more active learning. Put simply, the lectures are moved home and
the homework is moved into the classroom. The locations of lectures and homework are
flipped. If you want to know more about flipped learning, in the description I have a link
to my video which shows the differences between a traditional and a flipped classroom. Now
let's talk about the Gameful part. First, realize school is already a game and one of
the hardest parts for students is learning what the rules of the game are. In my class,
I lay out the rules of our game at the beginning of the year. The first rule is that everybody
starts out with zero points. When a student looks at their grades in my class at the beginning
of the year, they have a zero percent. - It's weird.
- My parents were not happy. - But, your grade never goes down in
this class. No matter how badly you do on any assignment, as long as you get one point,
your grade goes up. - That is nice.
- Yeah. - With regards to parents, I communicate very early in the school year
with my parents about the class structure and that everyone has zero points at the very
beginning of the school year.
That alleviates a lot of those concerns.
So, every assignment is based on points, not based on percentage,
and each semester has a total number of points available. Everybody knows at the beginning
of the semester how many points it takes to get what grade, and all you have to do is
do enough assignments to get whatever grade you want. Actually, I will point out that
at the beginning of the semester, I give the students access to a webpage which lists every
assignment for the semester. Some assignments are mandatory, and some assignments are optional.
All the assignments are listed in the order I recommend students do the assignments and
they are grouped by level. Each level is a general topic students need to learn. At the
end of each level is a quiz. Another rule is that, before you can take the quiz at the
end of a level, you need to have done every mandatory assignment in that level.
And another rule is that, in order to pass each level, you need to pass that level's quiz.
This is the gameful part of the
class, right mr.p? - Actually Billy, it is both the gameful
and mastery learning parts of the class. Gameful learning borrows from how qualtiy games function,
and applies that to the design of the learning environment. In a game you start with zero
points, and as you move through the game, you earn points and progress through levels.
The mastery learning part is that you have to demonstrate proficiency by passing a quiz
to progress to the next level. If you do not pass the quiz, you have to at least do quiz
corrections, you may also have to retake the quiz and possibly do more optional assignments.
But the main point here is that you have to understand the material before you can progress
to the next level. Which, from a learning standpoint, really makes sense. You should
have to demonstrate that you understand what you are learning before you can move on. That is mastery learning.
- It is kind of a pain though. - I think it's actually worse to just
keep plowing through the material when you do not understand what you are doing.
That's true.
As a teacher, I can tell you that mastery learning has been really
helpful for students' learning. And lastly, we have the asynchronous part. There are no
due dates in my class. - That's not true, remember the projectile
motion build project had a specific due date. - And the final exam has a due date.
Okay, there are a few assignments which have specific due dates because there are building
schedule constraints which I cannot change. And, the class has to end by a certain date,
so everything has to be due by the end of the semester. But what I really mean is that
the vast majority of the assignments do not have due dates. I do give suggested completion dates;
however, almost all assignments can be turned in whenever the student choses to
turn it in. This means the students are working asynchronously. The students have control
over their own learning. They get to decide what they are doing each day, not me. That is
another rule. And it means every class period has students working on many different assignments
all at once. Here is an example grading scale from one of my classes. You can see that the
total number of points from mandatory assignments only gets you to 89.5 percent of the points.
In order to get an A in my class, you need to do more than just the mandatory assignments.
And realize, there are 1012 mandatory points, however, there are also more than 400 optional
points. In other words, every semester I have students who end up with more than 100% in
the class. That's okay. They do much more than the mandatory minimum, and they get a
grade that reflects that. Let's talk about quizzes for a moment, because
this class structure completely changes the function of quizzes. Quizzes are no longer
just an assessment tool, because of quiz corrections, they are also a learning tool. Because of
asynchronous learning, students get to decide when they are ready to take the quiz. And,
because, if they do poorly, the only consequences are that they need to spend more time learning
the material, there is a lot less stress associated with taking quizzes. It usually takes a few
iterations for students to fully understand this, however, once they do, they are much
less stressed about taking quizzes. Okay, class have we covered the whole description?
Asynchronous means the students work at their own pace and decide exactly which assignments
to do and when to turn them in. - Flipped means the lectures are done at home,
and the stuff that is normally done at home is now done in class.
Gameful means the class is structured like a game where you gain points and pass levels.
And Mastery Learning is that you have to show proficiency before moving on to the next level.
- So, yeah, we've covered the whole description. - Great. Now let's take a look at what this
actually looks like. This is time lapse of one of my classes. I will point
out this class starts with the entire class working together to solve a few problems.
Sometimes I do full class activities and even lectures, for a couple of reasons. One reason
is that students gave me feedback that they do actually want some in-class lectures and
whole class group activities. Another reason is to provide students guideposts as to what
they should have learned by this point in the semester. Now that the group activity
is completed, students have begun working on whatever it is they feel they need to.
You can see a large group of students are beginning to work on a lab and I am giving
them introductory instructions for that lab. And let's pause the video for a moment.
You can see there are two groups of students who are collecting data for a lab. There are
three groups of students who collected data on the lab during a previous class and are
currently analyzing their data. I am currently helping a student who is completing a worksheet.
We have two students who are working independently, and we also have two students who are each
taking a quiz. You can there is a sign on their table which indicates they are taking
a quiz and they are not currently to be disturbed. And as you watch the class progress, you can
see that the majority of the class time has students working on whatever they feel they
need to be working on today and me, the teacher, bouncing around from table to table, answering
questions and helping students out. Please notice how student centered this type of class
is rather than teacher centered. And you can see that one group of students actually planned
ahead because they would be missing class for a field trip and decided to take data
for a second lab as well. They knew they can complete labs outside of class; however, they
cannot collect data outside of class. And now class is over.
It really is very different that my other classes.
- Yeah. - Agreed.
That is why I communicate with administration and parents about how the class functions.
It's a bit outside the norm, but traditional teaching has been around for a long time.
We can do better. Thank you very much for learning with me today, I enjoyed learning with you.