In 2007, Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams, two teachers from Woodland Park, CO, came up with the idea of a flipped classroom as an easy way to help students who missed class. This project soon became a popular teaching method that made its way across the country.
In a “flipped classroom,” short lectures are pre-recorded and are watched online by students every evening. The next day, students come into class and participate in discussion, practice problems, and group projects about the material learned at home. Something similar seems to be happening at IHS.
Even before the rollout of Chromebooks and the Google Apps ecosystem, many teachers had been using classroom portals to share class materials, which many students who missed class have found useful. Now, although not for all of us, the flipped classroom has made it to IHS.
Whether every one of us supports the flipped classroom or not, when teachers adopt it in their classrooms, we are having to evolve and change our way of learning. We don’t have a choice to opt-out of it. It is therefore important for teachers to understand that the theoretical advantages may be outweighed by the drawbacks of using this model.
Several math teachers at IHS have adopted the flipped classroom model. Their students now learn the information and mathematical concepts at home using online resources, and then they work on problems from the textbook in class, honing their understanding through application.
In theory, this gives students a lot more control over what we spend our time studying. In math classes, we need teachers present to answer questions or to provide help if we get stuck on an assignment. With a digital textbook or video recording, we can pace ourselves and spend more time on material that is difficult. Doing problem sets is absolutely better with a teacher who can help when we are stuck. In class, we even have peers with whom to work together.
But when watching a video, the teacher can’t answer more fundamental, higher level questions about the material or connect concepts with other fields of study spontaneously. Asking during the learning process is as valuable and important as it is when students apply the learned material to solve problems. The value of a live teacher, able to take questions and explain things in different ways or make tangents to other interesting perspectives from which to look at the concepts, is underrated. Lectures by a real teacher help us understand concepts far more intuitively and with excitement than videos, which are static and fixed, and often made by complete strangers to us. A passionate lecture by a live teacher in a classroom is the best quality student-teacher time possible.
When teachers use class time to reinforce concepts in students’ weak areas through projects and discussions, the flipped approach does allow teachers to be available to answer questions as they arise. In the traditional model, teachers may incorporate time for questions into their daily lectures but students are left in the dark about homework until the next day.
In practice, we students often find ourselves with our hands raised up at our desks, waiting for the teacher to finish helping out another student. One teacher simply cannot possibly answer individual questions to all 32 of her students. There is a limit to how efficient individualized learning can be. The time could be better spent with an activity or a moderated class discussion to answer common questions and misconceptions and extend our understanding of what we learned at home.
Ironically, contrary to its basic goal of “individualizing” the learning process, the flipped classroom still seems to disadvantage a large group of students. When an entire course is converted into a flipped classroom model, it disadvantages those of us who process information best through hands-on experience and demonstrations. Videos are only appealing to auditory and visual learners.
As with any new teaching program, there are both benefits and disadvantages to a flipped classroom. Some students really enjoy it, others don’t. There are downsides to shifting control from teachers to students. The model requires us to be responsible for learning the material at home and paying attention to the videos. Though the teacher’s life is still no easier than before since to achieve good results, teachers do just as much preparation as they would traditionally.
If integrated into a teacher’s curriculum, style, and pedagogy effectively, there is potential in the flipped classroom for enhanced, personalized, and efficient learning, but not without acknowledging the inherent and practical flaws in the approach.