Flipped Classroom
5 Keys to Flipped Learning Success
Flipping the classroom isn't easy, but many instructors have found it to be well worth the effort. Here's some advice for making flipped learning work.
Robert Talbert, a math professor at Michigan's Grand Valley State University, has been flipping his classes for seven years.
Talbert teaches Calculus I and a full-year course on discrete mathematics for computer science majors. For calculus, he is using a free, open source textbook written by one of his colleagues with flipped learning in mind, and his department has created a YouTube channel with instructional videos that faculty have recorded using simple screencasting software. For his discrete mathematics course, Talbert is finding and curating online videos that students can watch before coming to class.
In both courses, students are given a structured, pre-class activity that gets them familiar with the lesson's basic concepts, so when they arrive in his class, "they're ready to work at a higher level," he said. That's the essence of the flipped class model: Students learn the basics on their own, outside of class, so class time can be devoted to a deeper exploration of the content.
Back in the early days, when flipped learning was not very common, "I had to work very hard to get students to see that working in a flipped classroom was just as beneficial to their learning, and it was helping them out in ways they might not realize," Talbert said.
For instance, because students are responsible for preparing for class on their own, they are learning how to extract information from a textbook or a video. "These self-regulated learning skills are getting an intentional workout," he explained.
These days, Talbert finds his students to be much more receptive to the idea from the get-go: "Many students have had exposure to the flipped classroom before college, and so it's not a brand-new concept when they get here."
However, Talbert does have some students who still expect to be lectured to. That gives him an opportunity to have a conversation about the nature of education. "Generally, it turns out those students have real misconceptions about what college is even there for," he said.
It also turns out that flipped learning isn't such a hard sell, even for those students. "When I explain to them that the flipped classroom builds their communications skills, it builds their self-regulated learning skills and it builds their content skills in a much stronger way, they're very ready to buy into this."
In Talbert's experience with the flipped classroom, "I have more than enough time to adequately explore all the concepts that students need in class together, rather than sending them off on their own," he said. Students are learning at least as much content, "and very often they are much stronger in aspects of their learning that are not so easily measured, like their engagement with the course, their enthusiasm for the course, how hard they work and how well they communicate with each other and with me."
The nature of their questions changes pretty radically, too. "In traditional classrooms, I would constantly get students asking me questions like: How do I start this problem? In the flipped classroom, I'm getting questions like: What's a good resource to help me understand this problem?"
That's a very subtle but important shift in how students approach problem solving, Talbert said — and it's a direct result of learning in a flipped classroom.
Flipping your classroom isn't easy, but for Talbert and many others, it has been well worth the effort. Here is some advice for making flipped learning work.
1) What happens inside the classroom is more important than the videos.
"It's really, really important for professors to realize that flipped learning isn't about the videos — it's about what you're going to do in class that adds value and engagement for students," said Jon Bergmann, one of the pioneers of the flipped class concept and a board member of the Flipped Learning Network.
