"Flipped Classroom" in a nutshell: the lecture part of a lesson is viewed at home so that class time can be primarily devoted to student projects. The goals: 1. The teacher will be more available to work with individuals and small groups because he/she is no longer spending signficant time in front of the whole class. 2. The students are empowered to take charge of their own learning because they can fast forward or skip lectures on topics they already understand and repeat or supplement lectures on topics they find challenging. They can get personalized guidance from the teacher without having to stay after school.
In many ways the "Flipped classroom" is nothing new. It is similar to the well established paradigm of assigning students text to read at home, so class time came be devoted to discussions and follow-up activities. The 21st Century twist is that it is easy for a teacher to record a lecture and share it with the students and to tap into the multitude of free online resources already available. (Educational games, videos, simulations, Virtual Worlds, etc.). Even teachers who don't ordinarily spend a lot of time in "lecture" mode, may find it a time saver to record short instructional videos which the students watch at home or at school, as needed, instead of repeating the information over and over. ("how to format a paper", "presentation rubrics", "discussion etiquette", etc).
Flipped Classroom can be a path to personalized learning. Instead of requiring all students to read the same text or watch the same video, the teacher can give the students a learning goal, self-assessment tools and a variety of appropriate information sources from which to learn the topic. These could include videos, slideshows, practice exercises and text at multiple reading and content levels. This approach guides students to take charge of their own education and develop the habits and skills of "life learning learning.
Two major assumptions of the flipped classroom are problematic in our current school environment. 1) All students have 24/7 access to high speed Internet (home and school). 2) All students complete the ‘at home’ piece before coming to class.
We can not assume that all homes have high speed Internet nor that all students have their own devices with which to access it. We can not even assume that students have constant access to high speed Internet while they are at school! My experience from the 3 school districts where I have worked: Internet-enabled devices (personal Smartphones, tablets, eReaders, laptops from home, etc) are banned, the availability of computer labs and laptop carts is very limited and, even with these restrictions, the network gets so bogged down that video streaming is generally not feasible during the school day. There is no easy (or cheap) fix. But, the ‘real world’ has changed and education should start anticipating a day when High Speed Internet is a universal utility (like electricity), every student is required to have his/her own device, and the school networks can handle Internet traffic on a scale orders of magnitude greater than the current capacity.
The Flipped classroom approach assumes that students (and parents) have bought into the concept that the ‘at home piece' must be completed before class. Motivated students will comply because they will not want to feel lost or ‘look stupid’ during the ‘in school project’ time. But what about the rest of the students? The ‘at home’ piece will have to include some sort of activity (an online quiz, a discussion thread, a monitored interactive) where the student demonstrates that he/she actually did the assignment, but this is tricky. You don’t want to assess a student's understanding of a new concept until after he/she has had a chance to ask questions in person and to work on learning it in the classroom.
The Flipped classroom approach has merit and could be one of the ideas that transforms education, but the infrastructure for full implementation is not in place at most K-12 schools. We can, however, start transitioning to this pedagogy by setting up online learning environments for our classes and making our lectures, 'how to' videos and supplemental materials available online.
Here is an Infographic from Knewton, published 2011:
Created by Knewton and Column Five Media
The following video from the Delaware Schools provides examples of the connection between
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