Introductions

Welcome! I teach Social Studies in a small, Christian school in the Seattle area. I am about to embark on my eighth year of teaching. Last year I began to dabble in flipped learning. I teach five preps a day so when decided to flip, I was only going to focus on my tenth grade American History class. I soon discovered the "flipped mindset" and found that it couldn't help but pour over into my other classes. I'll post some of my non-blogged reflections from last year at a later date. As I jump into the year ahead, focused on flipping my Western Civilization course, I am starting this blog as a reflection tool for myself and as a tool for other teachers interested in flipping. I know how valuable the blogs of other teachers were for me, so here I am to share my successes and failures.

One last thing I should mention, what is flipped learning? Or better yet, what is a flipped mindset? The definition I like is that of Twitter people (Cheryl Morris @guster4lovers, Andrew Thomasson @thomasson_engl, Karl Lindgren-Streicher @LS_Karl, Crystal Kirch @crystalkirch, and Kate Baker @KtBkr4---follow them) before me and originally stated and explained more in-depth here, is as follows:

• What is the best use of your face-to-face class time (in my opinion, NOT lecturing)
• Emphasize on higher-order thinking, not rote memorization
• Student-centered classroom--What are the students doing in class? Just sitting there staring into space? Or are they working, thinking, creating? It should be less about what the teacher is doing and more about what the students are doing.

And if you are really eager to learn more, get on Twitter and check out the #flipclass hashtag. The chat is on Mondays at 5pm PT. Twitter is basically where I learned everything I know about flipped learning, you can follow me @kaelynbullock.