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Are your goals for the course significantly content-directed?

Is one of the goals of your course to introduce students to the important research and writing conventions of your particular discipline?

Is the primary purpose of your course to improve your students' critical thinking skills?

For me, the FLIP is when you “Focus on your Learners by Involving them in the Process”

This is the moment when you stop talking at your learners and “flip” the work to them instead.  This is the moment when you allow them to struggle, ask questions, solve problems and do the “heavy lifting” required to learn the material.

Students can look up the content on their own and find the answer to a question within a matter of seconds.  What they can’t always do on their own is analyze, synthesize, and experience the process of engaging in higher levels of critical thinking. This is when they need to do the messy work of learning, evaluating, and critiquing. This is when they need your structure and guidance, but not your answers. They have to make meaning for themselves. This is a “flippable moment.”

Global, online learning communities offer an unprecedented opportunity for teachers and students to follow and connect around their passions. But they also challenge almost every aspect of traditional schooling as we know it. The Powerful Learning Practice cohort model offers a unique approach to introducing educators to the transformative online technologies that are challenging the traditional view of teaching and learning. A PLP cohort for professional development is an ongoing (7-8 month), job-embedded opportunity built around emerging social Web technologies. Each cohort connects: 20 school or district teams from around the state (or world) 5 educators (administrators/teachers) from each school 10- PLP Fellows (Champions) selected from participating districts Within these cohorts, participants are supported in an intensive community building process online and in person by an passionate team of experienced educators. Outcomes for participating Administrators and Teacher Leaders By participating, you can expect your team and your leadership to gain: Knowledge: An understanding of the transformative potential of emerging technologies in a global perspective and context and how those potentials can be realized in schools Pedagogy: An understanding of the shifting learning literacies that the 21st Century demands and how those literacies inform teacher practice. Connections: The development of sustained professional learning communities and networks for team members to begin experimenting, sharing and collaborating with each other and with online colleagues from around the world. Sustainability: The creation of long term plans to move the vision forward in participating districts at the end of the program. Capacity: An increase in the abilities and resources of individuals, teams and the community to manage change.

I had the students each contribute a new entry or amend an existing entry on Wikipedia, or find another public forum where they could contribute to public discourse.

What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook?

Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers.

Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.

The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — is that it misrepresents the psychological reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is when we learn from our mistakes. Because unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong — that surge of Pe activity a few hundred milliseconds after the error, directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore — the mind will never revise its models. We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence. Samuel Beckett had the right attitude: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

I suggest it is possible to ask your students to write more, as long as you adapt your grading style

But you can also use informal, non-graded assignments to allow students to show themselves what they’ve taken in from lectures, discussion, and readings, especially at a point where they may not have fully mastered the material.

Rather than putting comments on paper after paper, you can teach course concepts and writing by featuring one or two exemplary papers.