Summer is such a luxurious time to reflect on my teaching and get fired up to make improvements. It is so nice to feel my excitement growing as I get my class materials together for the fall semester, which is only a month away.
After settling into the decision NOT to flip Human Biology this fall, I decided to make use of all the extra time I would have to re-record my Human Anatomy video lectures. I feel this is a little bit insane…this will be my 4th time teaching (and flipping) Human Anatomy and my third time re-recording my flipped video lectures. It seems more than mildly insane to re-record lectures this often, but I understand that I am not only ironing out the wrinkles in my flipped pedagogy, but I am also ironing out the wrinkles in my presentation of CONTENT. I have taken it for granted that in a traditional classroom I get to re-work my lectures and improve on my craft every time I teach the course. This is a fantastic assurance that I will constantly GET BETTER. But in the flipped scene, improving the lectures is much more time consuming. Nonetheless, I am clearly in need of creating a “new edition” of my lectures, though I am sincerely hopeful that THIS set of videos will last more than one semester.
As I prepare to record lectures, I can already tell that the videos will be better. I have a better understanding of the big picture, which will make the individual pieces fit together more cleanly. I have more experience with the tricky parts which allows me to emphasize the concepts that will be most helpful to my students. And I am hoping to record the lectures at a more leisurely (and reasonable) pace, without the imminent deadlines that inevitably means I end up trying to present content in front of a video camera in my office by myself, exhausted and delirious, at two in the morning. Ahem. My fingers are crossed.
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