Sams and Bergman asked a fundamental question: why are lectures delivered at school and problems worked at home? It's always been done that way, but it doesn't have to be.

They flipped the classroom to make it more flexible and dynamic, matching it with the needs of the students.

With class time liberated from lectures I was able to incorporate more hands-on activities, projects, and helping students better understand confusing and challenging concepts.

I love incorporating Twitter into my professional development for teachers. To do this I share the Twitter tag with participants and ask them to Tweet before, during or after our time together depending on the task at hand. I provide the tag for Tweeting to give my students a place and way to share their thoughts and ideas. This serves as a great way I have specific times I check out the Tweets (i.e. work time) and when I bring participants back together we build on those Tweets.

weet to capture reflections during field trips. If you're in a school where cells are banned, you may be able to have students bring them on field trips. If that is not allowed, the chaperon's devices can be used. Rather than have students walk around taking notes. Have them Tweet their reflections. You can set up a tag for your tweets if the place you are visiting doesn't already have one. Give parents the feed and they'll instantly know what their child did at school today and can have robust conversations about it. When students are back at home and/or school a review of the tweets could lead to powerful conversation or could serve as a launch for further study i.e. pick the most interesting tweet or set of tweets and create something to share with others about the topic you are tweeting about. This could be a podcast, video, blog post, etc. These digital creations can all be posted in one place as a reflection collection and even shared on the website of the school and place visited.

A classroom filled with student posters may suggest that students have engaged in meaningful learning. But it is the process of students' learning and the depth of their cognitive engagement— rather than the resulting product—that distinguishes projects from busywork.

A classroom filled with student posters may suggest that students have engaged in meaningful learning. But it is the process of students' learning and the depth of their cognitive engagement— rather than the resulting product—that distinguishes projects from busywork

That’s not to say, we don’t value the work and the commitment of those who have been fighting the long battle. We do, tremendously. But we also believe that sometime an “outsider’s” perspective can help us see what we don’t see. Wasn’t it Henry Miller who said something like ‘One’s destination is a new way of looking at things.’

I believe we need to reframe the problem and the conversation, from one about re-forming schooling to one about re-thinking education and re-imagining learning.

In this sense, we need to expect that students will write beyond themselves. By this, I do not mean that students will necessarily try to write more lengthy, complex pieces than what they are ready for, although that can sometimes present them with welcome challenges. Instead, what I suggest here is that students write beyond themselves first by focusing on external audiences and purposes and, second, by learning how to respond to others, especially through digital means.

First, I believe that students should write for external audiences

Cultivating a community of digital writers is a task that teachers need to take seriously, which leads to the second point. A digital writer needs to be both a writer and a responder. When trying to learn about their audience, students should take the opportunity to get to know them by reading what they have written and then engaging in response.

Lectures at night, “homework” during the day. Call it the Fisch Flip. “When you do a standard lecture in class, and then the students go home to do the problems, some of them are lost. They spend a whole lot of time being frustrated and, even worse, doing it wrong,” Fisch told me.

Why not, Godin has proposed, put out the cheaper paperback – or even an e-book – first? Readers are more likely to gamble on an unknown author when they can risk £8 rather than £25.