Flipped Explorers

Instead, our classroom had become a place where students discovered and shared their own resources, while engaging in projects with each other. There was no need for me to assign video homework or create portable lectures. It all happened during class.

Alfie Kohn’s book The Homework Myth.

shows that homework has no long-term impact on academic achievement

If you think it’s only about the videos, then you have a really shallow definition of what this could be. The real power is when students take responsibility for their own learning.”

Of course, the reality is that many if not most teachers who opt for the flipped classroom strategy are not pursuing a student-centred approach to teaching and learning. The traditional model of learning is simply being reversed, instead of being reinvented. The lecture (live or on video) is still front and center.

At its most basic level, the flipped classroom gives students more control over their educations, allowing them to start and stop or rewind important lectures to focus on key points.”  To me, this isn’t giving students control over their education,

They have a choice over what order they are going to work on outcomes, how they are going to learn and reach those outcomes, and how they are going to show me what they have learned.

As my students worked with me to invent our own version of student-centred learning, we realized that the three questions every student in our classroom had to answer were: What are you going to learn? How are you going to learn it? How are you going to show me your learning? This became our mantra — our framework for learning.  This is what it means to give students “control over their education.”

As Alfie Kohn states, a learning environment that promotes constructing knowledge “treats students as meaning makers and offers carefully calibrated challenges that help them to develop increasingly sophisticated theories. The point is for them to understand ideas from the inside out.”

How much

How do you balance what students need to know and how much you put in your videos and screen-casts

How deep do you go

teaching them ‘why’ is critical for their understanding

Are you using the flipped classroom to teach both the how and the why? Which is better to be delivered at home, rather than in class? Which do you give the students first, (and is this true for all students or all concepts)?

not saying we have to be entertaining but I am saying that we need to be engaging. L

Providing a flipped classroom and getting the lesson delivery out of the way so that class time can be used to collaborate, and practice concepts, and problem solve, is actually a great teaching strategy to use. I think we just need to be careful not to overuse it. We need to consider that this approach may not work ideally for all learners and with all concepts. We need to think about depth vs breadth, and also go beyond teaching the algorithm void of analysis in our flipped classroom videos and screen-casts. We need to make our lessons engaging and present them in ways that capture our students’ interest and attention.