How to Do a Flip
North Carolina New School 2015 conference
A few weeks ago Sam Seidel taught a crowd of 1,000 educators how to do a flip: how to take one thing and “flip it” into something completely different. Sam brought his knowledge and love of hip hop education to the North Carolina New Schools conference. Sam provided insight into how principles of hip-hop could be used for education by showing educators how you use the principle of “flipping something” to create better learning environments for students.
How can we innovate within education when we have a limited amount of resources and time? These challenges provide an ample opportunity to look at hiphop principles for solutions. Just as young African American and Latino young people in the South Bronx in the late ‘70s flipped a community that was not provided with necessary resources, and a lack of work to create the rich culture of hip hop, we can take our current situation, as educators, with limited resources and move forward by being innovators and change makers.
Sam used examples of how hip-hop artists continue to flip their current situation to innovate. Little Wayne’s embrace of file sharing technology by putting out free mixed tapes as prototypes allowed him to gain insight into what his fans wanted, and create an album that turned out to be wildly successful. Sam believes we can use thesesame innovative processes within education, and provided the audience with cases like some schools flipping the classroom space so that schoolwork was done from home, and homework could be done with the help of educators at school, especially useful for students who had little academic support in their homes.
The High School for Recording Arts (HSRA) was one such example. David “TC” Ellis, a hip hop artist and HSRA founder, flipped his recording art studio into a school to provide for all the diploma-less youth who had been hanging out around the studio. The High School for Recording Arts was one of the main focuses of Sam’s book Hip Hop Genius.
To help talk about HSRA, Sam brought two students, Ishrafeel Wilson and Cameron Keyes, from the school. They both gave deep insights into the struggles they faced in their lives, and how HSRA allowed them to grow and create a path for their success. HSRA uses a value system that teaches the importance of family, community, respect, and education. At HSRA educators seek to understand the experiences of the students to help create strategies for their learning. Weekly community meetings help educators understand what students are going through, and also bring in people from the area to the school to let them know what is going on in their neighborhood.
One student shared his transformative story of being shot 16 times, and finding the support at HSRA to accomplish his goals of making good choices, getting his diploma and getting into college. It is clear that elements of hip hop can have meaningful and sustaining impacts on young people’s lives. One of the students even offered a suggestion to all the educators: “Don’t judge. Every morning when we come in, we got things that we’re dealing with outside of school, and it’s real life stuff. You guys couldn’t go through some of the things we go through, and we do it and we get up everyday and we come to school.”
After laying out some examples of how hip hop principles can be used in education, Sam provided some tangible lessons that educators can use to flip their classrooms, schools, and communities.
Lesson 1 — Sample
You don’t need to adopt a wholesale education model to innovate. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can borrow one great idea from another school. You don’t have to just look within education either. You can look into different fields for inspiration. “In education we focus so much on having the right answers, when we should really be asking the right questions,” Sam mentioned. He left the audience to ponder the following questions before moving to the next lesson.
- What can you sample from educators in other schools?
- What can you sample from outside of education?
Lesson 2 — Keep it real
Sam showed how hip-hop culture places a high value on being authentic, and how educators can learn from that. Real work that involves real world challenges, and institutions, Sam believes, can both allow you to engage with students and teach what you are obligated to teach while still keeping it real. Make it real for the students — let them connect with it on a deep level, he says, before giving the audience a couple questions to take back to their classrooms. He encouraged educators to ask their students:
- What do you love to do and make?
- What changes do you want to see in the world?
If we know the answers to these, we can get closer to engaging students and providing meaning and purpose in their learning.
Sam doesn’t stop there, though. Also pertaining to keeping it real, he says, we have to, as educators, have conversations with young people about race and racism. Even if these conversations make us uncomfortable, we need to talk about these things with our students, because if we don’t we are leaving them to figure it out while not providing the history and tools to address it. It doesn’t matter what race you are; it affects everyone. “If we want to make sure that none of our students end up like Michael Brown or like Dylann Roof, we really have to keep it real with them and have these conversations and talk about race.”
Lesson 3: Swaggitate
Sometimes you need to be an agitator to be innovative. Educators need to be, as Sam coins it, swaggitators. When you are an agitator, he warns, you will inevitable rub people the wrong way, but you have to continue.
- If you had nothing to fear, what is it that you would flip in your classroom, in your school, in your community?
This is the question the Student Experience Lab asked educators in Philadelphia, Chicago, and across New England in our Teachers Design for Education (TD4Ed) project. Over the course of several months, we co-created a curriculum and online platform that would help educators use design thinking to collaboratively solve problems in their classrooms, schools, and communities.
The TD4Ed website houses all the curriculum materials which are free to download and print, or to work on using the platform. After going through the 6 different stages we used for design thinking, the platform captures your work on the website which can be viewed by others to offer feedback or gain inspiration.
To give a taste of TD4Ed, Sam led a workshop for the audience to help them learn about the design thinking process. Individuals were to choose something they always wanted to learn, and their partner (a stranger if they were following directions!) would use human centered design to create a learning experience for them. They would switch, and through the design thinking processes create a learning experience for each other that was personalized for them, utilizing the ways their partners best learned.
There is nothing more rewarding than seeing so many educators inspired by Sam’s work, and all the projects we are doing at the Student Experience Lab. We hope that educators were able to use this inspiration, and their newfound knowledge of flipping something to create a better environment for their students to learn back in their classrooms.
