Student Paced Learning Reflections

I have been flipping my AP Calculus classes for the past 4 years and have had incredible success. I became comfortable enough last year to flip my Algebra 2 classes and that also went well. This year, I decided to take the next step in the flipped class and allow students the ability to control their pace. I started with my AP Calculus class becuase it was small and they were all on roughly the same level. The students were allowed to tell me when they thought they were ready to test, but they had a series of assignents to complete and a mastery demonstration sheet they had to complete and explain to me in detail before they were allowed to test. Although this was an improvement from the past, it still wasn't producing the results I wanted. I decided to go all-in and let the students control every aspect of their learning pace. While before, they were all watching the same videos on the same nights, they now decided daily what they were going to do for homework that night. Sometimes it was to practice more of what they were on, sometimes it was to watch the next video, and sometimes it was to just take a night off and come in the next day fresh. After doing this for an entire chapter, I noticed 2 things. First, test scores improved dramatically. Second, students preferred this way of learning, felt less stress, and actually enjoyed calculus!

After seeing good, but not great results in precalculus class, I decided I had to change over to the same model in that class too. My precalculus classes have a much wider gap from the top performing students to the bottom, but that is the reason I decided to change. I felt every student in my class was able to learn the material, just not at the same speed. Why should some students get an "A" because they learned something in 2 weeks and other students get a "D" because they weren't ready yet? If they had some more time, they would score high too. This allows every student to earn the grade that represents what they learned throughout the course, not at some benchmarked time intervals.

I have only taught precalculus one time and that was 3 years ago. The course also covers a large number of topics for a math class. Combine that with the wide range of student levels in the class and I have kids all over the place in every class. I have only been doing this a week and I already have students separated by 3 lessons. I'm thankful for EDpuzzle and it's data tracking system. Without it I don't think I would be able to organize my class. While I truly believe that this is the best way to present information to students, it has already sent me home more worn out than ever before. I will never go back to a one-size-fits-all classroom, I just hope I find more ways to help me stay organized.