Flipped Learning

Flipped learning

The latest hot educational trend from the USA is Flipped Learning. (It  isn’t exactly new; Lage, Platt and Treglia wrote a paper about Inverting the Classroom in 2000.) To oversimplify the concept: pupils watch online videos for homework before the lesson. They then apply what they have learned with the teacher during the lesson. The teacher’s role mutates from the ‘sage on the stage’ to the ‘guide by the side’.

Steve Wheeler points out that “just watching a video cannot be seen as a viable substitute for good learning”; he prefers face to face lecturing. Branzburg suggests, video lecturing such as that offered by the Khan Academy is a subset of education. But although excellent teachers can lecture better than most videos, a carefully chosen video may present material far better than the average teacher. Furthermore, videos enable a type of self-differentiation: a pupil can watch the video again and again using pause and rewind until they understand the content. Students comment that you can “work at your own pace”.

The critical part of the ‘Flipped’ pedagogy is that it frees up class time for ‘real’ learning. After all, as Robert Talbot points out, the problem with the traditional way of doing education: there is more structure, support and guidance available within a classroom but normally that is when ‘transmission’ takes place.  Since the transmissive phase of learning can only access the lower levels of Bloom’s educational taxonomy, potentially deep learning only happens in the traditional classroom when least guidance is available.

Distressingly, some of the You Tube videos extolling Flipped learning seem to suggest that what the pupil does in class is to answer tests. Assessment is also a subset of education. Eric Mazur puts the assessment before the lesson as well. Once the students have watched the video they reflect on their learning, organize their ideas and come up with their own questions about the material. They post these questions onto an online class discussion forum. The teacher then reviews these questions to prepare for the lesson (this is a technique known as Just-In-Time teaching or JITT). During the lesson the teacher uses Constructive Peer Interaction, focusing on those questions that cause most problems and misconceptions and facilitating a Socratic style dialogue between pupils in the hope that they will argue one another out of misconceptions and into enlightenment.

Flipping enables work to be set at the appropriate level of challenge beloved by Ofsted. Jonathan Bergman uses a ‘flipped mastery’ system in a US High School because he can differentiate and challenge both his rocket scientists and his strugglers rather than “shooting for the middle”.

A potential problem with Flipped Learning is that a pupil who fails to do their homework will be unable to participate fully if at all in the lesson. Much of the work done in the US relates to college students. Katie Gimbar, an eighth grade (y9) teacher, suggests that students who have not prepared are sent to a computer to watch the video at the start of the lesson but she claims that the problem is small. Because her lessons are interactive the students are much more motivated to prepare by watching the videos before.

Paul Wright at Biddenham has been experimenting with Flipped Learning as he explains in this blog post.

So do we go back to the good old days when homework was ‘prep’ and I had to spend Sunday  learning a chapter of Kings I and preparing a Latin ‘construe’ to be tested on Monday morning?

Free iPad app for ASD pupils

ReacTickles Magic

Wendy Keay-Bright has developed this free suite of iPad apps to help children on the autistic spectrum to communicate. Users can communicate using touch, gesture and sound to create a “dynamic array of animated shapes and patterns” on the screen or projected onto a wall according to producers Cariad Interactive. “For children with poor or nonexistent verbal communication, this can be a route to the outside world,” claim Wired magazine.