Year-End Summary & Suggestions for Next Year

As this year comes to a close, I think it is important to think back on the past year and look at the good, the bad and the ugly. I tried-out several new "things" to help improve my students' experiences. There were mixed results.

How this year went:

20% Time

I tried it with my 1st semester students every Friday. Some really liked the freedom to explore an A&P subject at their leisure and (more importantly) at their pleasure. Some didn't participate at all and some students were right in the middle of the pack.

I feel as though I failed my students for three main reasons:

1. I did not give then enough guidance with regards to their blogs; I am new to blogging myself.
2. I did not set aside enough time to give them good quality and timely feedback on their blogs
3. We ran out of time at the end of the semester and did not get to finish our dissections or finish learning all the A&P I wanted them to experience before walking-out our doors for the last time. 

I ultimately did not try 20% Time with my 2nd semester students. I want to revamp how 20% Time looks in our classroom first.

Introduction of Canvas LMS

I rolled-out @CanvasLMS to my two anatomy classes, placing all possible "Googleable" content on the platform at the end of 1st semester. I jumped feet-first into flipping content for two reasons:

1. We ran out of classroom time due to 20% Time
2. Now that content was able to be placed on Canvas behind a user name and password, I was able to post GSlides and videos that contained imagery from our book publisher. Previously, I was unable to share that content with my students due to copyright issues.

We started-off 2nd semester totally on Canvas. Anecdotally, students report liking the ability to access content (including daily summary of activities, handouts, videos, Google Slides and practice quizzes) 24/7 on any device. While there were some students who barely accessed Canvas, the majority did frequently (I don't have the analytics offhand to back up this claim.

Flipping

I managed to flip about 80% of the "Googleable" content from in-class GSlides to out-of-class GSlide video lectures 2nd semester. This freed-up a HUGE amount of classroom time that enabled us to do a lot more case studies and have really good and rich discussions about patient assessment. All I did was flip low-level content; it was not true flipped mastery.

Dissection journals

This year I asked my students to document the progress of their dissections in a GSlide presentation (one presentation for each lab group). As with 20% Time, I did a pretty pathetic job of providing feedback and guidance. Despite this, most of the groups did a great job of posting pictures and videos of their dissections. They can be viewed here.

Ideas for next year:

Here are some ideas I would like to implement in time for next year:

Change the name of the course

I want to change the name of the course (rebrand) from "Kinesiology" to "Medical Anatomy and Physiology". Over the years since I started teaching the course, I have changed the focus of my students to more of patient assessment, developing differential diagnoses, clinical impressions and treatment plans. We really do not learn kinesiology; the name of the course should reflect that.

Refocus the goals of the class

Thanks to Karl Lindgren-Streicher's section in Jason Bretzmann's book "Flipping 2.0: Practical strategies for flipping your class", I have once again decided to toss-out my class curriculum and start from scratch, building it from the ground up. I want students to be able to:

• assess a patient (via obtaining H&Ps)
• develop differential diagnoses
• develop clinical impression
• develop treatment plan
• reevaluate treatment plan and revise as needed

All the rest of the supportive low-level and Googleable content will be flipped.

Flip 100%

I want to flip 100% of the Googleable content to outside the classroom. I envision content to take the following three forms:

1. Read the textbook, summarize and answer questions in a study guide (written by me, focusing on key content). Scientific literacy is important. Before students can interpret scientific papers, they should be able to interpret and understand a college A&P textbook.
2. Use Visible Body software to complete a visual study guide. Visible body contains a staggering amount of animations, videos, pictures and manipulable 3D structures. Currently loaded onto our seven lab table desktops, hopefully next year I would like the software loaded onto our science department laptops (and later, when we go 1:1, hopefully on student devices).
3. Watch and take notes from instructor-generated videos. These are mostly comprised of the GSlides I used to "lecture" from in class. Additional videos are of me demonstrating various concepts such as body planes, body regions, spacial orientation and joint movements using a webcam and Screencastify. How cool would that be if STUDENTS made the videos and not me? More on that below...

Implement Flip Mastery

Lastly, I would like to learn and about and implement flipped mastery. A&P tweeps Cara Johnson and Gerry Marchand have successfully implemented flipped mastery into their A&P classes. This enables students to work at their own pace inside and outside the classroom to master content through a series of activities and tasks that satisfy learning objectives. Once the students feel confident that they have mastered the content, they can then be assessed through a variety of ways: paper quiz, online Canvas quiz or creating a blog or a mini project. Or MAKING A FLIP VIDEO FOR FUTURE CLASSES TO LEARN FROM!!! How cool would that be???

I really like the idea of flipped mastery because all students learn at different paces. Flipped mastery allows them to learn at their own pace and be assessed once THEY feel confident, not the instructor. Because different students will be completing different tasks at different times and will require assessments at different times, this could make for an organizational debacle. I have been assured by Cara and Gerry that the payout for this front-loaded effort is well worth it, both in student learning and grades.

So while I will have a busy summer on the personal side (family, paramedic job, rebuilding a fence, shed and countless other home improvement projects that have fallen by the wayside), I am really looking forward to providing my 2016-2017 students with the best Medical Anatomy and Physiology experience yet.

Meeting their specimens

Friday students got to meet their specimens for the first time. They were a turtle, dogfish shark, squid, stingray and rabbit. Although the students were excited and wanted to start dissecting immediately, I felt that I had to hit the brakes; I wanted to see their dissection gameplan first. Most specimens came with a dissection guidebook (or we purchased one); the shark, rabbit and squid came with one while the turtle and stingray did not. In the weeks leading up to the arrival of their specimens, students have been researching dissection guides and dissection videos online in preparation. Although I did not want to stifle their enthusiasm, I wanted them to understand that their gameplan and incisions needed to be purposeful, not simply "slice and dice". Just like in carpentry: "measure twice, cut once". So we (I guess, mostly I) decided that Friday would be Picture Day. I asked all participating students to take pictures of their specimen's external anatomy for every conceivable angle, as well as close-ups of various features found in their dissection manuals. They will be documenting and labeling these pictures in the day to come.

Here are some picts I took around the room:

turtle

dogfish shark (made the room smell like a fish market)

 

 

bunny rabbit

Squid. Where's the rest???

Stingray. Dorsal surface is dark, ventral is light. Hmmmm...

We've got quite the zoo going on here!

 In addition, one of my students is learning about the anatomy of her pet tarantula. While I wouldn't say I am arachnophobic, spiders would not be my first choice of pets (personally). We obtained permission to bring the spider into class as long as it remained caged. The presence of the spider in class added to the excitement and interest. Not such a bad thing, eh?

Tarantula

Project Suggestions

Based on a discussion with John Zuk, one of our APs, we came-up with some suggestions for our 20% Time students:

• Reach-out to experts in your fields (using Twitter, Skype, GHO, email). You may be surprised how many will be willing to be interviewed.
• Document in your blog your sources of information; Digital Research Tools (DiRT) seems to be a rich source for data interpretation. Readers will want to know where you found your information and if it is legit.
• Why not make a table? For example:

Concept	Link
Normal anatomy of human heart	CHOP link
cardiomegaly	Mayo Clinic link

 

• Why not include some of these links in your blog? Readers would probably like to follow along with your thoughts and examine the original materials you used.
• Use Google Scholar to find peer-reviewed research articles and the MyLibrary feature to save papers you have found.

Keep at the research. Why. Why. Why.

Why?

Last Friday was spent working on blogging skills and blogging goals. As mostly first-time bloggers, it went fairly well; co-authors worked-out editing permissions, I commented on their blogs and made suggestions (so did John Zuk (@ZukJ) , one of our APs) Today students spent their time researching their topics. Not just summarizing information. Delving. Interpreting. Slogging-through technical biochemical jargon.

I really enjoy having the freedom to not answer factual questions but instead point students in the right direction; I like driving the Struggle Bus. I like asking "Why?" Don't simply write that adult-onset diabetics either do not produce enough insulin or are are not responsive to insulin. Explain why. At the cellular level. Don't understand the vocabulary? Let your passion for your project draw you in, fight through and come out more knowledgeable.

We also had a guest appearance by JZ (actually it was a clinical observation). He took this very flattering pict of us at work. Never mind that I look like a balding, pot-bellied hunch-back. That's irrelevant.

I also showed my students tweets by @ShannonOFoster and @bobloch demonstrating the power and reach of their projects (Shannon, a former A&P instructor and current AP hails from San Diego, CA):

 Bob hails from all the way down the hall, in B-wing. It was pretty cool that the students saw first-hand, while they were looking at the overhead screen, Bob's tweet pop-up. It's nice to know that what we are doing in the confines of our classroom is being shared and critiqued by folks from across the country. And from down the hall.

Week 4 Check-in

 

Well, we are now four weeks into 20% Time.  There have been a couple of hitches (mainly technical) but overall 20% Time has been a huge success! Here are some roadblocks that we have had to overcome:

• the inability to create some blogs from within school district network (IP address? firewall?)
• inability to publish one or two blogs (not sure why?)
• forgetting sharing permissions with a fellow classmate/co-blogger
• blogging inexperience; most of my students have never blogged before (and I certainly am no wizard)

Success-wise, many of my students lose track of time every Friday during 1st and 4th periods; they are so engrossed and engaged in their projects. Here are their blog URLs. Please peruse and feel-free to comment; we all could learn something from you.

Introduction of 20% Time

After a full summer of meeting-up at #ISTE15 for #coffeeEdu, reading Teach Like a Pirate by @burgessdave and Ditch That Textbook by Matt Miller, perusing Twitter chats and connecting with many teachers, professors and facilitators, I decided to implement 20% Time in my A&P classes (I say "my" classes because I am the only one teaching A&P at our high school). I ran it by the Assistant Principal who oversees our Science Department.  Here was my pitch: give students one day every week to pursue ANYTHING they were interested in. They would research, create and present. They would learn to hone their researching skills, communicate with experts, organize their thoughts, create something from scratch, and present publicly to receive constructive criticism. Students would let their inner passions drive the process.

His reply? "Go for it."

Here is the introduction to my students:




I pitched it to both of my classes and they were very intrigued, shell-shocked and excited. We started the process by brainstorming some bad ideas (see below). The reasoning behind the Bad Idea Factory is that people tend to hit a creative wall when brainstorming. We, as humans, tend to want to fix "things". If we examine some "bad" ideas, we will have the tendency to want to "fix" them , essentially turning them into "good" ideas. In addition, once we get past the bad idea roadblock, good usable ideas tend to come to light more easily:

And this was the case!

"watch someone bleed to death" turned into "determine how long a person can survive when xyz artery has been severed" - a fantastic idea for civilian Emergency Services and military medicine.

"dissect roadkill" turned into "pick something out of our supply catalog to dissect on your own"

"bring the Plague into our classroom" turned into "can I [the student] somehow order a disease online to look at the effects of different medicines?"

"watch toenails grow" turned into.......nothing.

I am really excited to see what more my students come up with.  None of them have ever been in this situation; one free period, every Friday, no lecture, no lab, just the time to work on what interests them.