Learning and Leading - August 2012

Inventing the Flipped Classroom
CONNECTED CL ASSROOM

T he Flipped Classroom is an instructional strategy that is receiving considerable attention. A flipped classroom dedicates more class time to hands-on learning, replacing lectures with supplemental materials, such as screencasts and videos, that students can view outside of class.

Thoughtful observers note that the effectiveness of this approach depends on the skill and pedagogical strategies you use. You can’t magically transform an ineffective lecture by transferring it to video. Teachers are implementing flipped classrooms in a variety of ways, and some methods are more effective than others are.

Educational leaders such as Stanford, MIT, and Harvard are now experimenting with variants of the flipped classroom. The crucial question is: How can we use this instructional paradigm to best effect?

ISTE book authors Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, two high school science teachers who pioneered the concept, are quick to note that their use of the method is still evolving. They observed that students who stalled on chemistry problems at home were not able to complete subsequent problems until they received help at school the next day. So Bergmann and Sams created more time for students to work on problems during class by transferring their lectures to video.

A glimpse of the videos shows, however, that these teachers are taking full advantage of the medium to create instruction that goes far beyond chalk and a blackboard. One clip shows them flying down a mountain on bikes to illustrate the effects of altitude and atmospheric pressure on a balloon. In another clip, a graph illustrates the effect of a chemical reaction.

By working together, the two teachers had more time to create innovative instructional materials that they could use in both of their classes. ISTE has just published their book, Flip Your Classroom, which describes their approach, and additional information is available on their website, http://flippedlearning.org.

Daphne Koller, a Stanford professor experimenting with the flipped classroom, developed an online platform called Coursera in partnership with another Stanford professor. Coursera embeds short quizzes in videos to test student understanding before continuing to the next segment. She found that classroom attendance doubled when she used class time for group problem-solving sessions instead of lectures. As an added bonus, the interactive video materials created for Coursera are freely available to anyone at www.coursera.com.

Most teachers are familiar with TED talks, short videos presented by leaders in the fields of technology, entertainment, and design (TED). Inspired by innovation centered on flipped classrooms, TED’s educational division, TED-Ed, developed tools to support this instructional method. The TED-Ed flipped classroom tools (available at http://ed.ted.com) allow teachers to create customized lessons using online videos. The tools allow teachers to add context, questions, and supplementary materials for use with either their own videos or video available on sites such as You Tube. Classroom management tools allow a teacher to see which students have viewed a video and each student’s success in answering related questions.

The phrase flipped classroom has encouraged dissemination of the concept because it is short and memorable. However, it also has resulted in some misconceptions about the method. The term flip implies an all-or-nothing reversal, but that is not the case for the flipped classroom. A central goal is to provide more time for interactions with students in class. Teachers can do this in a variety of ways and with different degrees of adoption, ranging from just a few class sessions a year to a complete re-conceptualization of a course. The way a flipped classroom may be most effective depends on the context of a class, so there is not a single flipped classroom method. Use and adoption depends on the instructor.