I bet this title made you think - woah, what’s happening here Mandy? You are all about the flipped classroom - and you’re not wrong.  I still stand by the statement I made on a recent Youtube video that the flipped learning model is the BEST way for 90% of teachers to be effective with their post-pandemic students in ways that are sustainable for them.

So, why am I all done with it then?

Yes, let’s talk about that and more in today’s episode.  Here we go.

Why I'm All Done With the Flipped Classroom

1. Quick story time - I am working with teachers at a local middle school, delivering PD on a monthly basis during their students’ early release time and although we talking about the flipped classroom, we’re talking more about using the flipped learning model in ways that work inside each of their classrooms but that also allow them to breathe and be more sustainable in their daily teaching lives.
1. My husband asked - wait I thought you...

 I recently was driving in the car sans children so it was very peaceful and serene.  Not to say my time in the car with my three boys isn’t wonderful - it’s just a louder version of wonderful where I don’t get to sit in quiet or do what I ended up doing on this particular drive which is downloading a book that I forgot I had waiting for me on Audible and click play.

I’m going to recommend this particular book to you in this episode so I will talk more about it later, but for now I need to share how the book struck me in a way I was not anticipating.

So I’m driving along and I’m listening in as the author tells a story and brings wisdom to something I had been feeling for most of my life, and she gave such clarity I didn’t know I needed.  I was even brought to tears - not tears of sorrow necessarily but tears of feeling seen in what I thought was just all in my head.

And the book, so aptly named, is Jennie Allen’s Get...

Welcome back to the Sustainable Teacher Podcast, I am your host, Mandy Rice, a ten year teacher turned biggest teacher supporter in building sustainable classrooms so you can stay there longer, and today on the show we have Andrew Sharos, the author of Finding Lifelines and All 4s and 5s, a teacher then administrator, and now an administrator and teacher and school supporter, providing professional development and support to schools around the country.

In today’s episode, Andrew and I are talking about his book, All 4s and 5s, whose title is referring to the highest scores a student can get on the AP Exam.  For those who don’t know, AP stands for Advanced Placement, and is a global curriculum in over 30 courses run by an organization called CollegeBoard, and at the end of each course, in the month of May, across the world, hundreds of thousands of students take a summative test to prove how much they learned in that course.  That test is scored on a scale of 1...

During the ten years I spent in the classroom, I taught AP® Psychology all of those years.  I attended numerous content-specific professional development opportunities, flipped the entire curriculum that is readily available for free on my YouTube channel, as well as built resources that many teachers find helpful in my Teachers Pay Teachers store or in our Sustainable Psych Teacher membership.  I’m sharing all of this to say that I became, and hopefully remain, well versed in the AP® Psychology curriculum - I would even venture to say I’ve got my 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell teaches about as indicating expertise, at least in the curriculum that is… but certainly not in the field of psychology.

So as much as I know and love psychology, I am by no stretch of the imagination a psychologist, psychiatrist (shout out to my psych nerds who know the difference), or a mental health professional.  No advice I give today in this episode is advice...