Carolina's article about failures Originally published at CAROLINA R BUITRAGO If you haven’t failed in the classroom lately, you aren’t pushing the envelope far enough. “Safe” lessons are a recipe for mediocrity at best. Dave Burgess Teach like a Pirate Had I listened to Cara Johnson in the Flipped Learning Certification Level 2 promptly, I wouldn’t have lost control of my content in my attempt towards mastery. Had I followed Jon Bergmann’s advice in his blog post and podcast, I would have been more careful about not getting drowned in papers in order to verify my student’s work. Had I listened to my own advice, the advice I give my research students about doing a thorough literature review before attempting any pedagogical implementation, I wouldn’t have messed up as badly as I did. But, I didn’t do any of those things, and the learning I got out of all of my mistakes was insurmountable, and now, I feel ready for a second try. But, what could have been so bad? Well, ehhh….everything. I’m dead serious. Everything pretty much sucked and today I strip of my ego to tell you the full story in the hope that by laying it on the table, nobody makes my mistakes ever again. Are you ready?
The mistakes I made Mistake # 1: I decided to implement flipped mastery with a very vague knowledge of it. I am a big hypocrite. I direct research for students in graduate school, and before I approve any project, I always ask my students to get fully documented and know “what has been done” in their field before going into it with a new proposal. Well, I am a big fat hypocrite because I omitted this step myself. And don’t get me wrong, I did read…a bit. I read Bergmann and Sams (2012) book and reread the chapter on mastery, and I thought I had a good idea of how things were supposed to work. You know, students would access materials on their own and I would check students mastery through mastery checks….piece of cake. Well, this fake feeling of “I know what I had to do and it is easy” led me to make my second mistake.
Mistake # 2: I went into the classroom and presented the project to students without fully planning the mastery. I worked at a Publishing house for some time, so trust me, I know my way around a “sales pitch”, so I “sold” my project. Students bought into my idea of “you will access the content for the grammar component of the course autonomously and I will run mastery checks on the different grammar points for the course, so when you are ready to take one, you can and then move on to the next grammatical structure”. It sounded easy, it sounded flawless and foolproof. Au contraire…as the semester progressed, the holes in my plan started to reveal themselves. Students started to lose track of the grammar structures they were supposed to access, life got in the way and as there was no clear path as to how to progress through the grammar, students just ignored it, I was not creating mastery checks fast enough, so students saw no point in getting ready, among others. Then my third mistake…
Mistake # 3: I didn’t prepare the mastery checks on time (big blunder). I thought I would have time to create the mastery checks as the semester progressed. Big mistake. First of all, I didn’t have a clear idea of how I would check whether students mastered the grammar structures they “were
