Education Reform: How to implement the ‘flipped classroom’

Education Reform: By Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, May 21st, 2012, Via eSchool News

Editor’s note: Flipped learning, in which students watch instructional videos for homework and use class time to practice what they’ve learned, is catching on in many schools. This is an excerpt from a new book by two pioneers of the flipped approach, titled Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. Copyright 2012, International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and ASCD; reprinted with permission from ISTE. The book can be purchased in the ISTE Store for $19.95, or $13.97 for ISTE members.)

Despite the attention that the videos get, the greatest benefit to any flipped classroom is not the videos. It’s the in-class time that every teacher must evaluate and redesign. Because our direct instruction was moved outside of the classroom, our students were able to conduct higher-quality and more engaging activities.

As we have seen teachers adopt the flipped model, they use the extra time in myriad ways depending on their subject matter, location, and style of teaching. We asked some of our colleagues to share how they have changed their class time. Following are some examples.

Foreign Language Classes

In foreign language classes, teachers are recording grammar lessons and conversation starters so as to create time in class to use the language more practically. This includes having more conversation, reading literature, and writing stories, all in the target language. We visited one of these classes, a level 1 class, and observed students actively speaking Spanish. They were responding and gesturing in ways that corresponded to the teacher’s instructions, which were entirely in Spanish. He would then ask students questions, and they would respond in Spanish. He reported to us how the videos had freed him up to do more of these engaging activities in his classroom.

For more on flipped learning, see:

Engaging Students with Flipped Learning

Math Classes

Math teachers are finding the time to really help their students engage with deep analysis of mathematical concepts. Others are embracing math manipulatives and emerging technologies where students are engaged not just in learning the algorithmic computation, but in deeply wrestling with the intricacies of the math concepts. Flipped math classes are becoming laboratories of computational thinking, inquiry, and connectedness with other STEM areas (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

Science Classes

One concern about the flipped classroom that has been recently posed is whether flipping is compatible with an inquiry approach to teaching science. We and others have responded with a resounding yes. Flipping a science class creates more time and more opportunities to include inquiry learning. In science classes, teachers who flip have time for students to engage in more inquiry-based activities and to conduct more in-depth experiments. In the chemistry education community, POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning; www.pogil.org), has become a powerful tool for students to create conceptual understanding without direct instruction. The flipped classroom is ideally set up for this type of learning, and we have incorporated many POGIL activities into our classroom. When a well-written POGIL activity is conducted well, the students learn all they need to learn via guided inquiry, and there is no need to teach the material with a video. In cases such as this, we use the POGIL activity as the instructional tool in lieu of a video. However, we have found that some students still use our instructional videos as a secondary resource for remediation.

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http://www.eschoolnews.com/2012/05/21/how-to-implement-the-flipped-classroom/

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