Friday, August 30, 2013

Flipped Classroom... research I have read and implications for this year

Some time ago I wrote blog posts on the flipped classroom and my experiences with it.


As I get ready to start the school year I am asking our tech team to ensure Desire2Learn is enabled so TI-Publishview files work, that the document player loads and opens the interactive documents. But I go into the use of flipped lessons much more wiser and after reading much more on the subject.

Perhaps the most stunning bit of research that I have read comes from a study from the Stanford Graduate School of Education. I am posting a link to the summary of the research here:


I have to be honest, I have always been extremely anxious of a model where students are asked to watch videos at home and then come to class to practice what they have learned and for further elaboration. My anxiety in such a model comes from two places:

1) Students may not have an established culture of homework completion and if they do not, you are only flipping the problem of incomplete practice questions versus incomplete lecture watching. If the videos are not watched then the concept they will be practicing in class will be even more foreign than if the lecture occurred without any practice/reinforcement afterwards.

2) I learned very early in my teaching career that I hate the chalk and talk/lecture delivery for lessons but more importantly students will learn concepts better when given the opportunity to explore, question,  to touch and to do... in lieu of just watch. When teaching science we played with electrodes and electrolytes as a class using a CBL, in math we walked distance time graphs with a CBR and flipped pennies/collected data and ran regression analysis using TI handheld technologies. Students learned from doing the math and not watching the math. 

If you have not done so already, go back to the link I posted earlier in this blog and read it. It states what I have observed in my class and what research constantly validates... students grasp concepts better by doing... First! Then the videos and notes are fine to present to students. 

So, where does this leave me in terms of flipped lessons for this year? I still plan on using them. Whatever I create I will be posting inside the content manager of Desire2Learn so that I can track student use. This allows me to hold students accountable for their role in the flipped classroom.

Then, like before, I will be using TI-Publishview to create an "interactive" flipped lesson. The beginning of the lesson will consist of interactive apps embedded into the TI-Publishview document where students can click or drag to perform an action, observe the consequences of that action and I will have questions inserted that will help in the discovery process. Only at the end of the lesson will I embed a video (or link to one) where the concept is "lectured".  By doing so I think that I can replicate much closer what I did in the face to face classroom and apply it to the flipped classroom as well as integrate the findings from the study at Stanford into application/practice. I will blog on my findings.

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