Going Dark- the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I love this term...going dark. It means that some serious stuff is about to go down and people need time to focus on that. I am as guilty of this as anyone else.

Flipping my classroom does not mean that my life is easier, in fact I would argue that it is much harder. I have to be "on" every minute. I can't switch my brain off and drone on with lectures, I get to walk around the classroom and create relationships with my students.

It takes a lot of mental and physical energy to do this, which is why I have been living in the dark. For years, I have been successfully flipping my classes and having amazing success and keeping it all to myself. Not because I am ashamed or afraid, but because I thought that no one would want to hear what I have to say. So starting this school year, my goal is to blog at least once a week about what is going on in my classroom - the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Background: I am teaching four classes this year - one AP Literature ( a new prep for me - never taught, never trained), DP Senior English, Film as Literature, and Theory of Knowledge.

Plan: In the first few weeks to evaluate where my students are in reading and writing and set goals for them and an action plan to help them improve through my teaching.

Update: I have finished collecting the reading/writing samples and are evaluating the data. I am going to share data with the students today. I have created them score tracking sheets so that they can track their performance on various reading and writing tasks. They are going to record not only the score, but a focused improvement area as a type of metacognitive step.