YOUR EXPERIENCE
Your experience in this course should be significantly different from most other classes you have taken so far in school. I have designed your lessons around a mixture of several popular teaching methods. As you might expect, I will occasionally use the more traditional teacher-guided instructional approach to your learning; lectures, worksheets, homework problems, etc. Of course, you are very familiar with how all this works. But, I will also take advantage of the powerful impact technology can have on your ability to learn as well.
FLIPPING THE CLASSROOM
For our course, I will often ask that you go home to do the in-depth ‘lecture-type’ learning or research and come back to class with a basic understanding of each new concept covered. This type of classroom instruction is known as a Flipped Classroom and will provide us much more time to put into practice the concepts and ideas you will be expected to master in this course. Think of this more like a warm-up for the next day’s lesson. If you are a bit confused, don’t worry, there will be more on this approach as we ramp up in these first few weeks!
THE PLAN
Our course is divided into Topics, much like chapters or units. Topics will help us focus on the ‘big picture ideas’ for our course. I have planned 1-2 topic per 6 weeks with a timeframe of 2-3 weeks to complete before we test. Within each topic, you will have Lessons to complete. Lessons help guide you through the activities that teach our concepts. We will complete on average 2 lessons a week requiring both in-class activities and out-of-class “homework” assignments. Since I will not spend much of our class time devoted to lecturing about whatever, you will have to plan some time to working independently to further your understanding. Most assignments will be completed outside of class so we can put newly learned concepts into practice during class time.