Flipped Classrooms

For this week’s blog post I’m going to talk about something that’s been mentioned a lot in our EDUC 4P19 course, the idea of a flipped classroom. What is a flipped classrom? For those of you who don’t know, a flipped classroom is one where the usual order of doing business is reversed. That means that instead of having a teacher at the front of the class lecturing for the whole time and then sending kids home with homework, they do the opposite. Often the teacher will record a lecture or assign readings to be done at home so that when students get to class they have the knowledge that they need in order to do projects, assignments, or participate in class discussions about the materials that they read.

https://learningsciences.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/flippedflowmodel.png

            The positives of a flipped classroom for students are that they can learn at their own pace, taking time to reflect on what they are reading instead of being forced to absorb information as fast as the teacher conveys it without much of a chance to slow down if they don’t understand certain concepts. For teachers it offers a chance to more effectively use class time to help students who may struggle with the material that they read at home. Students who understood the material can use the class time to work on assignments while the teacher is free to give help to students that need it. Overall it allows for a much more inquisitive and student-driven classroom instead of the traditional teacher-driven learning. 

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            On the other hand, the flipped classroom isn’t perfect and there are downsides to its usage. First of all is the fact that in a traditional classroom setting you know that every student is hearing the material you’re teaching and you can see if any of them aren’t paying attention. When they’re supposed to do the learning at home by themselves it’s possible that they will just decide not to do it and then show up to class completely unprepared for the day’s assignments. This would especially be a problem to kids that come from lower-income households and might not have parents or siblings around to help them or to encourage them to get the work done in order to be prepared for class. It also means more prep work for teachers because they need to record their lectures and have them ready for the students to view each night.

So by looking at the positive and negative traits of a flipped classroom, the real question becomes whether or not we think it or a traditional classroom is more effective. While I can see in articles like this one that there are strong positives to the flipped classroom approach, in my opinion I think it should be used along with a traditional classroom setting to make sure that students who learn better in classic lecture. When I was searching for different opinions on how well flipped classrooms work I did find this, a story of how a teacher who was very enthusiastic about trying a flipped approach found that a lot of students and even their parents didn't like it and preferred the way she used to teach. In the end what ended up working best for her was combining the approaches which meant a more blended approach where students can sometime be assigned videos or readings to do at home but where she would also give lectures to help simplify some of the concepts they might not have understood as well. Sometimes new learning strategies can be overwhelming for students and in this case, I think the best way to go is a blended approach that uses the best of both of these strategies to maximize learning.

Thanks for reading,

Dylan

References

Fruin, C. (2015). What To Do When Your Flipped Classroom Flops. Retrieved from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2015-10-06-what-to-do-when-your-flipped-classroom-flops

McCallum, S., Schultz, J., Sellke, K., & Spartz, J. (2015). An Examination of the Flipped Classroom Approach on College Student Academic Involvement. International Journal Of Teaching & Learning In Higher Education, 27(1), 42-55.