How to make flipped learning work in practice: Unconditional love.

Flipped learning is one of the most exciting, and most poorly implemented teaching practices in modern education. This piece covers my personal methods in teaching social change to 2nd year uni students within a science faculty.

I this article I’ll start go over my goals with flipped, look at the nuts and bolts of practice, and cover some common in-class mistakes and tricks.

Note: This piece isn’t about the setting up a flipped classroom, there are tons of articles about that online already. If people demand it I may write another on prep. We’re going to focus instead on in-class practice.

Maddy and I working through her social media strategy lesson together.

First, the goal: Counterintuitive intuition.

Complex topics are often counterintuitive. Modern skills are especially so, and we teach students to put the cart before the horse, then question the horse’s motivations and buying behaviour. Paul Graham has a good ~50 min lecture on this stuff.

Some example dichotomies from startups:

1. If you want to raise money to build a product, you should instead build a product and team worth investing in.
2. If you’d like to ask people if they’d buy your product, you should quiz them on behaviours they’ve made in the past without mentioning your product.
3. If you want to build a tremendously scaleable product, instead you should pour your early effort into grossly unscalable activities.

How can we teach counter-intuitive thinking?

I believe this is an issue for most teaching, and comes down to the fundamental difference between learning and education:

Or: Learning is intrinsic, education is extrinsic.

The flipped classroom essentially gives students the resources to do the learning bit in their own time, at their own pace, so that in the very valuable time in workshops can focus on the highest quality education possible.

1. Learn: Figure out things on your own out of class.
2. Do unexpected and counter-intuitive things in class.

Therefore, a solid goal for flipped learning is to give students the time and space to deal with being uncomfortable.

While anyone can get a decent theoretical understanding of knowledge through reading books or watching videos, it’s hard to get it to stick without being stretched by a caring and uncompromising tutor.

The structure and habits of impatient cohorts.

The following structure is based on one class per week, 3 hours per class, over 12 weeks, for 25–30 students.

Each class goes like this:

1. A catch-up (or retrospective) on last week.
2. An activity that integrates last week’s work.
3. Something different so we don’t get bored.
4. Enthusiasm and something to do for next week.

I rarely if ever use a projector/screen for slides. I feel students drop back into ‘passive learning’ mode and fall asleep when slides appear.

Live sharing of real work is better. A student’s work from last week, my own personal workflow, or collaborative document editing.

I often ask students to keep a chat window open in all classes so I can paste links to things we can discuss within class, then spend the rest of the time jumping around the room waving my arms and getting excited.

We like to use Google Docs for a good 80% of class resources, but we use a bunch of other stuff as well, as needs be.

“Paste it in chat and we’ll all go through it together” is an oft-heard phrase…

Students pasting links to canvases in chat so we can discuss them in class.

Habit 1) The retrospective:

Each person (or one person from each team when they’re in team) gives a quick update using roughly the following structure, to the whole group:

• What we did last week.
• What we learnt.
• What we’re going to do this coming week.
• What is getting in our way.

It’s a simple agile retrospective, in a group setting, which is essentially much of what a good mentors does:

• Help you debrief objectively on what is and isn’t working,
• Get a cadence of progress and a feeling of velocity;
• Note some possible shortcuts to make next week better.

This it will take a frustratingly long time the first time. You can get it down to about 1–2 minutes per team as you all improve, including feedback from the teacher. Getting through this faster each week is part of the learning.

Good retrospectives = consistent character:

As facilitator of a pretty messy process, a consistent “character and narrative” to the retrospective can help. For example:

1. Fewer value judgements:
   The only wasted week is one where students don’t learn. The teacher’s job is to tease out the learning and help everyone in the room learn from one another, not highlight ‘good’ or ‘bad’ work.
2. Be honest and impatient, keep the tempo up:
   If a student takes too long, I will kindly cut them off and move on. This may sound rude or mean, but if you’ve done the hard work of building social capital with your students you can get away with it. It’s important to be consistent and treat every student the same, and time limits also help. One student who wastes everyone’s time should be shut down tactfully, so the group can have a better experience. *
3. Sharp feedback, finished with a question mark.
   Feedback like “that was good result, well done” is pretty useless, as it focusses on the outcome of learning, not the process. Better feedback might be “That sounded difficult. Was it? Why?”, which gives the student a platform to share their pains and process with the group.

Pro tip: Peer feedback, en masse.

While giving people your own feedback on their work, ask other students to give them rapid fire typed feedback via a chat mechanism. In a class of 30, this means one individual can get ideas from 29 other people in the two minutes they’re talking, plus your ideas. That’s a phenomenal diversity and quantity of information in a short space of time!

NB*: It’s up to you how you can be impatient and fast without being offensive. I enjoy the term “I love you but we agreed to keep it snappy”. Being interesting, with brevity, is a life skill for leaders, and learnt via praxis.

Habit 2) Integrate last week’s learning:

If you’re running a flipped classroom, the juicy stuff is delivered at home, usually in video format. Prepping this is an easy job for me as I just use — shameless plug — Fitzroy Academy videos for each week, and mix it up with extra stuff depending on how students are travelling together as a group.

What happens when we’re face to face?

I don’t have a strict structure for this each week I must admit, and prefer usually to take each week as it comes. This gets easier each week as I get used to the students. The retrospective helps immensely for this, and it’s usually pretty clear what areas we need to dig into more, through conversation or looking at real life examples online together.

Basics for flipped learning:

1. Every person / team must have a project.
   And any flipped learning material must be applied to a project, not in simulation or theory. If there’s no focus for the learning it won’t stick. Simulation and theory are useful to deepen learning, but I think it’s best to make things applicable fast.
2. Start with sharing.
   I like to start classes with the question “Who found this difficult?”, and give lots of attention, empathy and time to people who speak up. Facilitating a conversation between students about the various tactics people tried and failed at gets students used to helping one another.
3. Mix success and failure, but focus on discovery.
   Like the value judgements on retrospectives, it’s good to dig into what was learnt and what was difficult, not what came naturally. Luck is dangerously common in success, especially so with complex skills, so it’s good to find shared pains we can learn from together.

The killer question is “what did trying that teach you?”

Once you’ve read the room, persevere or pivot.

“Are we done, or do we all need to dig into some more?”

If I feel the class either isn’t up to speed, or has a need to deep dive, we may take up as much as a few hours working through questions and ideas together.

At this point, teachers with a wealth of experience will be at an advantage.

Habit 3) Something different.

Or as my students hear it, weekly: “Wanna try something weird?”

Certainty can be good. Joyful uncertainty is a mainstay of complex work, as is joyless uncertainty, unfortunately. Fun, weird stuff is almost always good.

Simple card games, five minute body-scan meditation, balloon games, one-off prisoners dilemmas, phone games, rock paper scissors tournaments, anything that breaks the monotony and reinvigorate the brainy bits.

Where possible, I like activities to relate to the flipped content from the previous week, but the big goal is to keep workshops up beat, fun, and surprising so that class time is something everyone’s honestly excited about.

It’s useful to have a bunch of these games / tricks in your kit bag; anything that takes a couple of minutes, even just asking students to go out of the room and come back in again is a great reset.

Two cool databases of this stuff:

• The Hyper Island toolbox.
• Liberating structures.

Short body scanning meditation is super easy to do. A few minutes from a 3 hour workshop isn’t ‘lost’ this way. The remaining time is gained.

Habit 4) Enthusiasm for next week.

This is such a deceptively simple point and such a beautiful one, which I’ve stolen from Clare Carmody, who probably stole it from someone else:

“All you need is enthusiasm and something to do.”

When everyone leaves / starts each week with this, you’re golden. While the “thing to do” and the enthusiasm usually falls out the workshops naturally, here’s some ideas for helping it along.

Ask students to spend 5 minutes at the end of class reflecting.

What are they excited to do? Ask them to figure out how to say it in one short, clear sentence, and then ‘check out’ for the day by saying it.

A nice framing is commitment.

1. Commit to one thing:
   “This week will be a good one if I’ve made a shitty prototype by the end.”
2. Commit to every day:
   “I’ll make one 5 minute phone call every day to test our idea”
3. Commit to a support role:
   “This week all I need to do is help Sarah, she’s in charge.”
4. Commit to the hard thing:
   “I am up for a challenge, I’m going to do the scary thing I’ve been avoiding”
5. Commit playfulness:
   “I will be completely unproductive and let myself be creative.”

Okay, that’s it.

All done. Four things to flip happy:

1. A retro on the last week.
2. An activity to do together.
3. Something weird.
4. Enthusiasm + something to do.

Too easy, all done. You can do it, I believe in you.

In conclusion:

The theme, that makes flipped work: Unconditional love.

As Ben so vividly puts in The Hard Thing about Hard Things, saying that there are two kinds of friend in this world:

The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong — when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call.”

The unattainable goal of a teacher is to be both those people.

(I also think it’s a decent life goal, and teaching is a solid training regime.)

A quality flipped class requires an exhausting level of focus during workshops, and deliberate, individual attention outside. I wouldn’t treat it as a time-saver or a way to cheap out on preparation time.

I benefit by learning more about each student each week, having a constant, self-moderating challenge, and finding a deeper connection with the students and body of knowledge. It makes me want to teach more and better.

I think it requires focus, unconditional love, and investment in the happiness and success of the students, for their definitions of happy and successful.

🥰

Addendum) Common blunders.

Blunder #1: Having crappy resources.

If your flipped learning resource is a poorly lit video of you speaking in dull monotone over boring dot point slides, it will suck just as much as you speaking in a dull monotone over boring dot point slides in person.

I really do hope this is obvious.

Instead: Mix it up, grab YouTube videos, find blogs and timely real world content and news. As a general rule I like to have a 60/40 ratio of ‘timeless’ to ‘timely’ content, with the timeless 60% delivered as homework.

Knowing where students are at, what they’re interested in, and what is interesting about the world makes the 40% timely stuff easier to create, and again I usually just paste links into chat as I find them.

Blunder #2: Getting context wrong.

If you’re offloading your teaching onto video, do your students the service of re-watching the videos yourself, even if it’s at 2x speed if you’re impatient like me. Skim the blogs and articles you’ve posted, and try to remember how you felt the first time you learnt this stuff.

Write some notes about how embarrassed you were when you first got this stuff wrong that you can share in class. Embarrassing stories are fun.

Good teachers in danger of falling into the ‘expert gap’ in direct correlation to how experienced they are.

Teachers can get so excited about the high level strategy and meta-cognition stuff that we forget how learning things felt the first time around.

At worst, you’ll be prepped for any hairy questions. At best, it will get you thinking about the content, and you may be able to bring some new synthesis to the class, and keep it fresh for everyone including yourself.

Blunder #3: Segregating interesting vs. examinable content.

Especially if the rubrics you’ve laid out are very specific, it can be hard to keep a consistent, examinable set of content alongside timely or interesting information as the world changes.

If a student asks “will this be in the exam?” something has gone wrong, and we’ve decoupled activity and examination too far.

Instead: Substitute huge end-of-semester exams or big assignments with incremental, week-by-week and peer assessment.

Tying results directly to effort creates a sense of progress. My buddy Jason (who does this stuff for a living) tells me it’s one of the clearest ways to make the deep work engaging and sometimes even enjoyable.

Quoth Dr. Fox:

“I’d say that we have a finite amount of time, energy and attention each day — it makes sense that we invest it into the things that provide the richest sense of progress. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the deep or important stuff, which is why tying results directly to effort (or: reducing the latency between effort and meaningful feedback) is so important.”

Blunder #4: Unidirectional feedback.

Flipped classrooms can involve changing stuff up on the fly and requires you to be in tune with the room and how people are feeling. It can also be exhausting and it’s easy to miss the mark without realising it.

I have a dreadful habit of going off topic with something I think is fascinating, for which my students can see no relevance whatsoever. Students are usually too nice to tell you when you’re wasting their time.

Instead: Get feedback every single lesson. Every single lesson.

A group chat is our home for class comms and the single point of control that allows everyone to paste links, get updates, and ask questions outside of class.

While chat is generally “public first”, i.e. everyone sees every question and that’s a good thing, I’ll usually give students 30 seconds before the end of class to answer this question to me via privately in chat:

“On a scale of one to ten would you recommend me as a teacher to your friends?”

The big benefit of this being private and immediate is that I can ask follow up questions like “anything specific you’re willing to share?” and start a private dialogue (that is objectively recorded and accessible by any powers that be) that the student can use to voice concerns or ask questions.

Side note: Designing feedback is hard:

Hamish Curry, who proofed this piece, rightly points out:

Feedback often requires its own design and testing to find the things you really want to know. I used to get people to name two things they loved about the session, and one thing they wished had been different.

Often feedback is better when it has a little detail. Scoring is just a subjective measurement, that often doesn’t allow the presenter to make any meaningful change. Using a ‘Feedback’ channel in chat might work — or an online form.

Hamish is right, which is why I like to treat the 1–10 game as a starter for a more informal and personal chat. I find I get better feedback from casual conversation, but your millage may vary.

A short-form version of ‘Liked, learnt, lacked and longed for’ can work.

Two useful things with this:

1. If someone says an interesting point or asks a good question in chat, I can ask “Are you okay with me asking you to share this insight with the class next week?”, which is easy ammo for provoking debate, and allows me to gently nudge some of the more introverted voices into the conversation.
2. If the students haven’t figured out what a net promoter score is (yes yes, I know it’s a flawed measure), by the end of a semester I can give them an object lesson in said, with their poor teacher as object and lesson.

Bonus #2) Office hours.

This is another tactic stolen directly from accelerator programs.

I set aside two hours after class in 15 minute increments that students can book via Calendly, either individually or as a team, which I take in a quiet but public space like a co-working area or cafe. 10 mins each for big classes.

I try to guide each session toward a variation of this question:

“Okay, great idea. Now, can you do it 10x faster?”

If the office hours are with a team, the followup is usually:

“Awesome, I love it. Who is in charge of what?”

It’s not about leaping to conclusions or judgement, it’s about challenging students to constantly stretch beyond what they thought they were capable of, and share that burden and excitement with their peers.

Less debate about the validity of our fear of failure, and more getting out there and mashing our assumptions up against reality.

Office hours are otherwise freeform. I have two personal rules:

1. Absolute limit of 15 minutes per person or group;
2. Feedback given from a position of unconditional love.

P.S. Please do get in touch directly with any advice, thoughts, commentary, criticism or article ideas: will@fitzroyacademy.com. Thank you! \o/

P.P.S. Disclaimer: I don’t have a dip ed or any kind of degree and I’m grossly unqualified to give any sort of advice. I’ve learnt this stuff mostly from on-the-job learning with kids, adults and employees. Use discretion!

P.P.P.S. For the education geeks: The above ideas are more strongly aligned with andragogy than pedagogy, which I think is a must for post K-12 students, and highly desirable otherwise.