A day at Clintondale!

By Christine Garland

Many of you may have already heard of Clintondale HS. They were featured on CNN in a segment on flipped learning.

Clintondale High School is a flipped school in Clinton Township, MI. Before the term “flipped” had ever been coined, Principal Greg Green realized that the old way wasn’t working (a song we all know very well), and it was time to try something new.

Using TechSmith’s screen capture tools, Clintondale teachers began creating video lessons to be absorbed by students at home, and freed up classroom time for activities and assignments.

After flipping the ninth grade (their initial pilot grade), Clintondale’s student failure rate dropped by 33% in one year. In English, the failure rate went from 52% to 19%; in math, 44% to 13%; in science, 41% to 19%; and in social studies, 28% to 9%. So they flipped the entire school, and have remained “upside down” ever since.

Today the school is a mecca of enthusiasm for flipped learning.

I was lucky enough to be invited out to spend a day at Clintondale on a recent visit to Michigan. I’m proud to say Clintondale uses Remind101, and our relationship with the school has earned me many interactions with Greg over the past year. I’d been wanting to put together a video for Remind101 on how students and teachers have been using the service, and why they like it, and he graciously offered to serve up his school as my subjects.

I should mention - I’m personally a very big advocate of the flipped model. My passion for the change is a direct result of my own experiences falling behind as a student in a traditional learning environment. So when the chance came to both make my video, and experience a flipped school, I was eager for the opportunity.

My first reaction when I arrived at Clintondale was how very normal it was. 

There are no 1-1 iPad classes, or even technology carts. Classrooms are not equipped with fancy interactive whiteboards or media stations. The school does not even have Wi-Fi.

None of which has kept them from flipping.

My second reaction was how proud the school was of their success. Teachers, students, and administrators were overjoyed to share the stories of their flipped classrooms.

My third reaction was probably the most important, I’d never seen so much engagement. Classrooms were bustling. 

Teachers who had previously worried that they were being evaluated based on how much time they spent lecturing (because that was what a classroom “looked like”, right?), were now enjoying their day moving from table to table interacting with kids directly and experiencing the material in an entirely different way.

But the interaction didn’t stop at the teachers. The students were sharing, guiding and collaborating too. In one class students were put into groups that evenly distributed them based on their grades. Students with A’s were able to help struggling classmates by re-teaching the lesson, and in-turn benefiting themselves with a deeper understand of the material.

Unsurprisingly, the most common response I got from students when I asked if they liked being at a flipped school was that they loved not having homework.

Partaking in lessons at home doesn’t feel like work to them. It doesn’t involve the frustration that trying to complete a worksheet based off a lecture they hadn’t been able to follow used to cause. They repeatedly told me, “If I don’t get it, or I lose track of what the teacher is talking about, I just rewind.”

I’m so appreciative of the Clintondale community for hosting me for a day! The interactions continue to be inspiring.

Check out the fantastic video, filmed and edited by the exceedingly talented Colin Marshall and George Henry, that came out of my day at Clintondale!