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Debunking some myths of the flipped classroom, while providing practical tips for how to implement it. Teachers are not becoming obsolete and learning needs to be made visible.

"Preparing for an active learning class isn't more work than preparing for a lecture class".

Call it the "learning paradox": the more you struggle and even fail while you're trying to master new information, the better you're likely to recall and apply that information later. Teachers can design for "productive failure" by building it into the learning process.

There are many reasons professors who lecture don't want to give it up. Tradition may be the mightiest force. "Lecturing is just the way a lot of professors have always done it," says Joe Redish, a physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park who has done research on why lectures aren't effective.

It's a typical scene: a few minutes before 11:00 on a Tuesday morning and about 200 sleepy-looking college students are taking their seats in a large lecture hall - chatting, laughing, calling out to each other across the aisles. Class begins with a big "shhhh" from the instructor.

Andrew P. Martin loves it when his lectures break out in chaos. It happens frequently, when he asks the 80 students in his evolutionary-biology class at the University of Colorado at Boulder to work in small groups to solve a problem, or when he asks them to persuade one another that the answer they arrived at before class is correct.

"Many experienced faculty members have developed a sense of what will and won't work within their discipline; however, when faced with developing a new course or redesigning a course to incorporate more active learning, instructional technologies, distance education, core curriculum demands, and the like, they struggle with how to approach the course design."

"...looking like you're paying attention doesn't mean you are."