The biggest lesson from the flipped classroom may not be about math – Casting Out Nines – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
I started out using the One Minute Manager approach over 30 years ago, have experimented with a wide assortment time management systems and most recently have been using David Allen’s Get Things Done (GTD) time management method, and I can still honestly say I find time management to be one of my biggest challenges. So when Robert Talbert identified time management and not Math as being the biggest challenge for his student in his flipped classroom I realized that this is just one more life skill that we are ignoring when we strive to cover the content of the curriculum.
The timing of this blog post couldn’t have been better. Over the past few years my two teen aged boys have been taking on more complicated or sophisticated projects and this fall they are finding that they need to be better organized if they are to fit everything into their days. My older son Levi commented on the challenge of working at becoming a professional downhill bike racer and an extreme athlete while trying to fit in his final year of high school studies. My younger son has always felt the pressure of large projects so we started working with them on building To Do lists, categorizing and prioritizing their school and training responsibilities. This may be one of the most important skills that they will learn.
Talbert suggests that:
a good co-requisite for any flipped class is a mini-workshop on GTD principles, to train students how to think in terms of projects, contexts, and tasks and to free their minds up to work well.
Perhaps he isn’t going far enough. Training students how to manage projects, tasks, and free up their minds to work well is fundamental to self regulated learning which is at the core of life long learning and personal growth.
Sharing the fundamentals of the GTD approach with my boys has just moved to the top of my To Do list. Shouldn’t this be on the top of all parents and educators lists?
