I am closing my 30th year of teaching, my 10th year of on-line teaching, my 7th year of being vice principal and my 2nd year of flipping. And I do not want to stop!
I have mixed feelings about the end of this school year. For 30 years (plus the number of years I was a student) I was attached to St. Patrick's High School. St. Pat's is a very dynamic English high school in the midst of a French speaking community.
I am ending this relationship..well kind of ending..
Starting in August, I will be working full-time with my present passion, on-line teaching/learning. I will be completely attached to LEARN, an organization in the province of Quebec that provides English resources to educators. I teach math to secondary 4 (grade 10) students. These students come from the four corners of the province. The learning, for me, for the past 10 years, has been phenomenal. I will blog about what I have learned in later posts.
Today, I want to reminisce about this year's learning. This year, I completed my 2nd year of flipping and I have become extremely passionate about it. Again, I will blog about this later. I have become so passionate that my mission is to spread the word about flipping and the tools I use to facilitate student learning.
My colleagues at LEARN, Audrey McGoldrick and Kerry Cule are great collaborators. We presented at STEM (a MELS organized workshop for high school teachers), CQSB (the English school board in Quebec City) QPAT (an annual teacher's convention in Quebec), QACVE (a vocational ed organization), CanFlip13 Conference in Kelowna. And we facilitated a webinar on "the flipped class" through LEARN.
I learned that there are so many people who are passionate about the same things I am passionate about; learning and how students learn. The contacts I made this year is unbelievable. I learned that "collaboration", the key word.
I said, I was ending my relationship with St. Pat's..well...I am keeping my office there. Yesterday was my last day at St. Pat's and I took a picture of "My Wall of Accomplishments" for this school year. My relationship with the awesome teachers at St. Pat's will never end. I will continue to collaborate and learn with them.
In August I will take down the 2012-2013 memories from my wall and I will start "My Wall of Accomplishments" for the 2013-2014 school year..... with LEARN ...and ...the amazing staff at St. Patrick's High School.
