Flipped teaching seems pretty relevant at the moment, especially when you’re doing a PhD in chemical education. However for those not immediately in (relatively) modern education research ‘Flipped Teaching’ could appear confusing. I intend this article to be my go-to copy-paste link for that specific question: “What is flipped teaching?”

Summary

• Flipped teaching reverses (or ‘Flips’) the roles of homework and classwork.

Teachers take what they would normally do in lessons: teaching or lecturing for basic factual recall and get students to do it outside of the classroom — namely through video lectures. This could include vocabulary in languages, equations in maths/physics, or the parts of a cell in biology. Then what would be homework is put in the class time: problem sheets, questions, tasks. This means students can learn at their own pace, stop, rewind, and replay their teachers to make the best notes and gain the most understanding. Then, if they have a problem in the application, they’re surrounded by peers, and by you the educator. It also means they come to class with some idea about what they know and what they struggle with.

• Flipping is not appropriate for every class and every subject.
• It is important that flipping remains about pedagogy and student learning, and does not become about the technology or flipping itself.

The Birthing

The creation of the flipped classroom is largely attributed to Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams. In 2007 at Woodland Park High School, Colorado — the two started recording their lectures. What inspired them was this [Flipping Your Classroom, 2012, p.3]:

“In all honesty , we recorded our lessons out of selfishness. We were spending inordinate amounts of time reteaching lessons to students who missed class, and the recorded lectures became our first line of defense”

For whatever reasons, be it sporting or illness, Bergmann and Sams found a lot of students were absent and required reteaching, so began simply recording their lectures. From there, the idea very quickly got out of hand and they started to record all of their lectures for their Chemistry and Chemistry Advanced Placement (AP) classes. The two split the workload of video production at high initial investment, but it paid off.

They found students were no longer taking the 95 minutes of a class given to them to complete assigned work, but using only 20 minutes of it. This means much more effort was placed into making larger, and more challenging tasks — taking students beyond remembering and comprehension, but into analysis and synthesis; the higher level learning (at least according to Bloom).

By getting students to turn up to class, having already acquired knowledge of the subject at hand, students are being challenged more and in a more supportive environment. It allows students and teachers to identify individual weaknesses, and then the teacher to help students through these areas — tailoring their teaching into meaningful learning. It provides a much lower pressure situation in which to ask for help, as the teacher’s time can be spent walking between students or groups to really gauge understanding, and not just looking over a sea of (hopefully nodding) faces. Teachers and students are interacting and connecting with themselves and each other — this is the vision on which Flipped Teaching has gained so much of its popularity.

Popularity

Things have come a long way since 2007, with many teachers hearing Flipped Learning as a buzz-word and contemporary issue. This web-page infographic does a much better job at explaining it than I do. The idea of learning the basic facts outside of a classroom has become ubiquitous within the technology ecosystem. The early onset of Khan Academy (which I seem to mention every week or so); the rise (and maybe fall) of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) provided by real life institutions such as Harvard; or internet based Coursera which offers the chance for educators to get money from their courses; and even schools are now getting involved, starting to make their material available online for anyone to watch.

I’ve already started my bookshelf for the subject Bergmann and Sam’s own book Flip Your Classroom provides an excellent overview of the model, Flipping 2.0 is an excellent collection of chapters which provide practical tips for flipping a classroom for a broad range of subjects. And then there’s the blogs and internet resources, which I can’t even begin to list — just look for the #flippedlearning or #edtech hashtags on Twitter to find relevant material and start being involved.

The Debate

The novelty of Flipped Teaching leaves a number of people are unsure how they feel about it, and if it’ll really live up to its hype. These fears are definitely grounded and worthwhile — it appears that some people are just blindly using flipped teaching or ed. tech as a solution, as opposed to one (of many) tools in their box. This also applies to many 1:1 schemes (where each student has one device — iPad, net- or chromebook), where educators are just throwing money at students and resources hoping students will just magically learn. Sadly this isn’t that case, and we need to really think about what we’re doing and why, and then more importantly and how will this help students learn?

However before passing judgement (optimistic or cynical) it’s important that you are fully informed about how flipped teaching could work for you, the educator. That is to say: how would it work for subject? And more specifically your students — age, current knowledge, and technological ability? To ignore technology altogether would be irresponsible, and to say it has no place in learning would be ignorant, but to think it will be your savior would be naive.