Tools and resources – The three C’s to repurpose your classroom

Here at My Study Series we really advocate for a flipped or blended approach with your classes. For those starting out, this can be a real challenge to understand and implement in a way that is easy for you and your students. Thankfully it doesn’t have to be hard (particularly as My Study Series looks after all of the content creation for you!) and there are a number of tools that can support you to integrate this approach in your classes. Today we want to describe the three C’s approach to repurposing your classroom time.

Repurposing your classroom time and using the three Cs.

The biggest difference in a flipped approach is getting to grips with what repurposing your classroom time is. If we choose to remove aspects of our lesson content and place them outside of the classroom (a classic flipped approach where students watch videos at home), we now have all of this additional time to leverage authentic and meaningful learning opportunities. In this situation I like to use something I call the three Cs: Chat-Check-Captivate.

Chat

As students enter my classroom after they have watched a flipped video, they know the first thing they are going to do is jump into a small group and chat about the assigned video. All students understand that the one expectation they have while watching the videos is to develop a critical question. This question is presented to the group and really forms the basis of the chat component. This critical question may be something as simple as some content or a word they did not understand, or they may choose to challenge something from the video (which is always good to see!)

Each student shares their question within the group, and they set about answering each other’s question the best they can. After 5 minutes, each group chooses the best question brought to the table and prepare to present it to the rest of the class.

Check

The next step of the three C’s is an opportunity for me to check student understanding of the content and concepts presented in the video. If students are not digesting the content at home, then this entire approach is pointless!

As each group presents their question, I am closely watching and listening to how the class responds, checking for the type of dialogue and discussion generated,  how the questions are being answered, and whether or not students are demonstrating a deep understanding of the content or is it just surface level.

After each group has presented their question, I complete the Check component of the three C’s by throwing out a couple (three or four) teacher lead focus questions. This is a final opportunity for me to ensure students do have a grip of the concepts presented in the video and can move onto some higher order thinking tasks, or the captivate component.

Captivate

This is why we flip. So that we have additional time to engage our students with meaningful learning opportunities that are going leave a lasting impression on the students. When lessons are structured with the sole purpose of being captivating, the learning sticks. This is what we want!

For this stage to work you really need to make these lessons unlike anything you have ever done in a traditional lesson. I am sure we all know what a captivating  lesson looks like, so instead of telling you how to suck eggs, I’m going to share one of my most successful captivate lessons – and funnily enough, it involved eggs!

While working through Newton’s three laws of motion, we were discussing the law of inertia. I presented my class a challenge to come up with an experiment demonstrating Newton’s Law of Inertia using an egg. The following video was the resulting experiment. As you can see, the experiment did not work out as planned, but created additional learning and reflection opportunities for the class as they realised an external force was added during the pull phase!

If you really want to maximise a flipped or blended approach with your students, repurpose your classroom space and leverage the Three C’s approach to create captivating lessons that stick. I often bump into students from this class and they still recall how we smashed the egg trying to be scientists!


Awarded Best Digital Resource at the 2018 CLNZ Educational Awards, My Study Series is built by New Zealand teachers, for New Zealand teachers and their students. We provide targeted video content, automated quizzes and data for teachers across Physical Education, Mathematics, and Health Education achievement standards.

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