Learning & Leading Through Technology

Chances are, when you read the title of this article, one of two things happened:

1. You dived right into the text hoping to find some nuggets of information about flipped classrooms because you are interested.

2. You rolled your eyes and muttered something about yet another flipped classroom article.

Educational media outlets have recently been full of articles, blog posts, and interviews—including a couple with us ( blog.iste.org/author/ jbergmann and goo.gl/wXd0VH)— about flipped classrooms and flipped learning. A cursory search for flipped classrooms brings up blogs and webinars with titles such as “Seven Steps to a Flipped Classroom” or “Five Things to Remember before You Flip Your Class.” The information can get confusing, largely because there is lack of clarity about what a flipped classroom actually is. For many, it feels like the flipped class is just the newest fad in education, destined to go away when something else captures the attention of the educational community.

Is all the hype warranted? Are
flipped classrooms really making a
difference in the lives of real students
in real schools? Because we are some
of the pioneers of the flipped class-
room movement, you might think we
would shout a resounding “Yes!” to
these questions. But in fact, we believe
that flipped classrooms are not the an-
swer to these questions. Instead they
provide a way toward the answers.
You read that correctly. A flipped
classroom is not a goal or a place to
stop. It is a path to move toward some
of the powerful learning and teaching
strategies that many educational prac-
titioners are interested in adopting but
have struggled to implement.

To make the case that flipped classrooms have a place in education and can lead teachers to better practice, we look here at the historical precedent for flipped learning, its current state, and the possible practices to which it can lead.

Where Have We Been?

Flipped learning critics have called it a
repackaging of old ideas, and to some
extent, that is true. Most learners in
the past couple of centuries have at
some point received a reading assign-
ment to complete at home, with the
expectation that class time would be
spent developing and discussing the
ideas in the reading. One group of
economics professors at Miami Uni-
versity of Ohio who assigned Power-
Point slide decks for students to view
prior to class coined the term inverted
classroom in the late 1990s ( goo.gl/
lDvJls). In fact, the term inverted
classroom model (ICM) is used syn-
onymously with flipped classroom in
many non-English-speaking countries
(apparently the word flipped doesn’t
translate well).

Since 2012, Jurgen Handke at the University of Marburg has been hosting the ICM conference, where teachers and professors from all over Germany come to learn how to leverage the power of pre-teaching tools to recoup valuable class time ( goo.gl/ YuJmFP). In his doctoral dissertation ( goo.gl/xErqaM), Ramsey Musallam outlines how using media-rich content as a pre-teaching tool can help learners establish schema that they can build on in class. And Alison King has been telling educators to become the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage” since her 1993 article in College Teaching ( goo.gl/4OsXDf). Clearly, assigning a short video lesson in lieu of, or in addition to, any of these examples accomplishes a similar pedagogical task of pre-teaching.

So if pre-teaching is nothing new, why is there so much hype surrounding flipped classrooms? Is it because flipped classrooms typically leverage video as a teaching tool?