by Hoda Tavakoli

The Lilly Conference gave me a great opportunity to meet with other faculty from many different colleges and universities and to learn from their experience in teaching.

In every session that I attended I learned more and more. As a new faculty all this information was like an ocean and made me even thirstier to learn. This experience was truly an eye opener to me to the world of teaching. In each one of the workshops I learned something new. But, across all of the workshops I attended, there were two workshops that stood out for me. Given the timing of the conference, I saw that I could start using them right away for my spring semester classes.

The first workshop I took a lot away from was: “It all begins with a hook.” In this workshop I learned that I need to increase the sense of belonging of my students to my class right from the beginning. Therefore, this semester, instead of asking students to introduce themselves in our first session; I asked them to talk to student next to them, learn that student’s name and find out something interesting about the student that they like to share and no one in the class knows it about them. With this activity, I found they will become more comfortable talking with their classmates from the beginning. Specifically, this would be a great start to all the group activities that we will have throughout the semester. This workshop suggested hooks for the first day as well as everyday hooks. The idea is that hooks will allow you to build trust and create relationships with your students. This will make it easier to teach them and get them where you want them to be by the end of the semester regarding their knowledge about the subject of the class.

The next workshop that I found it very useful was: “Modifying the Flipped Experience to Enhance the Learning of Calculus”. Because I teach mathematics, this topic was very interesting to me. In this workshop, I learned how to take advantage of the flipping strategy in my classes. Flipping classrooms is based on goals. Why do we need to use the flip learning method? Some of its reasons and their benefits are listed below.
• Motivation: Have time to help the students and motivate them more.
• Content: Being able to spend more time on problem solving.
• Learning: Giving time to students to interact with each other on math problems.
• Environment: Engaging more students for group activities.

In this method, students will learn the topic and be exposed to it through some videos or activities that the instructor makes available to students before the class. Therefore, when students are in the classroom, they will focus more on problem solving strategies.
This model also has some challenges, such as:
• Students might not be comfortable with this method.
• Sometimes flipped learning fails to meet students’ expectation of the course.
• And of course, there will be some Push-Back from students.

This workshop also taught me that when I face any of these challenges, I need to sit back and see how I can modify my flipping strategies to best fit my class needs. In this method, you will learn from experience. You also need to ask for students’ feedback on what changes might help and prepare them more with the topic so they will be able to walk in the classroom with the information that instructor expects them to know.

As of result of hearing about the Flipping classroom strategy, I looked around, and I found a series of great new courses created by The Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The center created 4 new courses over the past year all based on flipping learning method. I am piloting one of UT’s courses by the name of “Quantitative Reasoning”, and currently I am teaching it at the Huston-Tillotson University this spring semester. So far, it has been a great experience for both me and my students. I am looking forward to have my PowerPoint presentation of the Lilly Conference on flipping classroom and share the knowledge that I learned from Lilly along with bringing my own experience with this UT course to the ACC mathematics department. My goal of this presentation will be to grab our full-time faculty’s attention on this new and effective style of teaching, so we can start engaging the other faculty members to take advantage of this valuable course and technique to teach our students here at ACC more effective with long lasting results for them.