Our Story
Something had to change.
Our story is just like most schools. We were struggling to educate our at-risk students. We were asking our at-risk students to process our classroom information in environments that often times are not conducive for learning. Our committed staff, willing to try new approaches, began to assign classroom lectures for homework and have been working with the students on their homework in the classroom.
Here’s how it works:
A math teacher, for example, creates a video detailing several sample problems for a student to review and try at home. When the students arrived in class the following day, they form a collaborative learning group with their peers in order to solve complex problems together, along with their teacher. Now, any problems or questions that a student has is identified and answered by either a classmate or their teacher.
This “flipped” approach allows our staff to share “lecture type” information with their students outside of class; thus, freeing up valuable classroom time to help students master a topic and deepen relationships.
Results?
In 2010, we used the flipped classroom model with 140 freshman students. We have reduced the failure rate by 33% in English Language Arts, 31% in Mathematics, 22% in Science and 19% in Social Studies in just one semester. In addition, we have seen a dramatic reduction of 66% in our total discipline for our freshman group as well. This approach also allowed us to properly integrate current technologies, guarantee and streamline our curriculum, provide educational services when students and teachers are absent, share staff resources and much, much more…
Today, we are flipping our entire high school. We are committed to giving our students and staff the very best we have to offer and have embraced this opportunity to improve the delivery of our instructional practice.
