Tuesday, September 4, 2012

A school without bells

No school bells for Joplin’s East Middle School. News story on KOAM 7, reported by Lisa Olliges Accessed on August 19, 2012 from http://www.koamtv.com/story/19288168/no-school-bells-for-joplins-east-middle-school.

 East Middle School in Joplin, Kansas is doing away with bells and specific class times to give teachers more flexibility and avoid the way teachers or students often have to end class without actually be finished. Teachers will be teaching five classes instead of six, but this is going to require more planning and collaboration between teachers. I think they must be in families or cohorts and use some coring, because I can’t imagine how this would work otherwise. We didn’t have bells at my high school, although things weren’t this flexible, and it was definitely calmer and less hectic in the hallways. I’m going to be working with a history teacher to implement some flipped classroom strategies in his world history class, so I am starting to do some research into that. This blog post, http://historytech.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/flipped-classrooms-and-social-studies/, accessed on August 30, 2012, gives an overview of flipped learning strategies, suggestions, the evolution, and a great infographic on flipped learning. It’s something I can share with other people to help them understand what is going on in his classroom and what they could do.

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