Tuesday, June 21
Tagged: flipped classroom, student engagement, video lectures
The Flipped Classroom
It has been called “flip teaching”, “reverse teaching, “backwards classroom”, “reverse instruction”, and the inverted classroom. Instead of listening to the instructor during class and homework at night, a flipped classroom is just the opposite – watching lectures at home and homework in class.
Lage, Platt, and Treglia (2000) introduced this model in 2000. Their initial premise was that individuals learn with wide variety of learning styles. “The general principle is to provide a menu of options for the students to use in learning. The instructors focus on the desired outcome (for instance, having the student prepared for discussion) and allow the student to choose the best method to reach that outcome.” (Lage, Platt, & Treglia, 2000)
Examples in the Classroom
The idea has strong proponents and is gaining momentum in the K-12 environment. One of the early adopters Karl Fisch (of “Did You Know? Shift Happens” fame) implemented this model last year.
Fisch said in a recent interview: “When you do a standard lecture in class, and then the students go home to do the problems, some of them are lost. They spend a whole lot of time being frustrated and, even worse, doing it wrong.” He later adds that by doing homework in class it allows for students to work together, not necessarily something easy before.
Aaron Sams and Jon Bergman, high school science teachers from Woodland Park, CO also flipped their classrooms.
Where it succeeds
Initially, my main “hang up” was that this wasn’t anything new. A teacher would still lecture and students would have to listen passively. The only thing changing was the mode of distribution. However, I realized that a video lecture could be MORE engaging (for some students) because students can control the pace by which they are learning. In this on-demand society, the ability to pause, rewind, fast-forward is almost second-nature. Enabling that type of interaction with lecture can make it much easier to consume, especially with difficult topics.
For whatever reason, it seems these particular buzz words have gained some decent momentum. I’m certainly in favor of anything that helps create significant learning opportunities in the learning environment. It appears that in Mr. Sams’ and Mr. Bergman’s classroom (from the video) that the students seem to be engaged and learning quite effectively, and that is definitely great.
Where it falls short
While learning seems to be taking place, I’m unsure if it is the method that is truly impactful. From what I’ve seen, the “success” stories come from entertaining and animated teachers, and I’m curious if this method would be as effective if a “boring” teacher created similar videos.
The same argument is made by scholars to discount the success of the Khan Academy. (If you haven’t checked out the Khan Academy, it is worth your time.) Are the students learning because they are being presented the material through video format which can is consumed at home and enforced in the classroom? Or is it because they simply have good teacher?
Conclusion
While I’m glad many educators seem to be jumping onboard with this model, my concerns are that some teachers may simply transfer their lectures to video and then have their students write papers or fill out worksheets during class. To me, that is bad pedagogy. However, if significant learning opportunities are capitalized on during class time, this could truly change learning and solve the problem, at least temporarily, of engaging students with material outside of the classroom.
What are your thoughts? How do you think your course would do if it were flipped? Would it allow for you to create some truly significant learning activities during class or would it not change much at all?
Lage, M.J., Platt, G.J., & Treglia, M. (2000). Inverting the classroom: a gateway to creating an inclusive learning environment. The Journal of Economic Education, 31(1), Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1183338
About the author - Chris Faulkner
From July 2009 to October 2011, Chris Faulkner worked as Faculty Development Specialist for the CETL. Chris is now an Instructional Design Consultant for the University of North Texas and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Educational Computing at the same institution. Chris earned his Masters of Educational Technology from Pepperdine University in 2009.
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