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?

What Assessment Can and Cannot Do

This is a summary of a paper by Dylan Wiliam originally published in Swedish in Pedagogiska Magasinet in September 2011 which can be downloaded from http://www.dylanwiliam.net/


There has to be a system for holding educators accountable to those who pay. High-stakes assessment can be used for this accountability. Strong evidence suggests that "the presence of a high-stakes accountability system raises student achievement by the equivalent of as much as an extra two months’ learning each year" but every high-stakes assessment system studied has negative unforeseen consequences. This is because (a) less than one quarter of student achievement can be attributable to the school and (b) 'Campbell's Law': the use of a quantitative social indicator distorts the social phenomenon it is intended to measure eg teachers teaching to the test ensure that pupils get better at passing the test but often at the expense of them getting worse at things that are not tested. 


Furthermore, we tend to measure what is easy to measure rather than what should be measured. Thus in languages we assess written proficiency more than spoken proficiency because it is easier to measure. "Even if the teachers try to take a broad view of the curriculum, the students will often resist, asking, 'Will this be on the test?'"


The ideal assessment system would be:

• Externally referenced ie not dependent on the standards of each individual teacher
• Distributed across the whole course
• Cumulative ie what is learned at one point of time will be needed later so that students cannot just cram for the test and then forget everything they have learnt.

Assessment improves learning when:
It helps teachers and learners to clarify, share and understand what is to be learned and how we know it has been learnt
It helps engineer "classroom discussions, activities, and tasks that elicit evidence of student achievement"
It provides formative feedback
It encourages students to collaborate acting "as learning resources for one another"
It encourages students to be "owners of their own learning"


But "weighing the pig doesn't fatten it".


Furthermore, AfL can be taken to extremes. "giving grades and scores too frequently will certainly slow down learning, but not giving students any indication of whether they are making progress is just as misguided. The important thing about feedback, however it is given, is that it should cause thinking. Once an emotional reaction occurs, the learning will certainly stop, but there are ways of telling students whether they are, indeed making progress that does not allow them to compare their current achievement with others, thus minimizing the extent to which the student reacts to the feedback by attending to their well-being rather than by using the feedback to improve."

Three dimensions of effective teaching

Ofsted's annual report 2010-11 written by HMCI Mirian Rosen in November 2011 has identified three dimensions of effective teaching: 














Planning: appropriate pace and challenge

• "The right mix of activities chosen to sustain pupils’ concentration and develop their understanding ....
• "High expectations of all pupils’learning and .... appropriate support and challenge.... rather than  insufficiently challenging activities which "occupy pupils" and are "not well matched to the needs of the pupils and often based on procedural and descriptive work" including  "an emphasis on low level tasks" and including "an over-use of worksheets and an over-reliance on a narrow range of textbooks"
• "The pace of learning is well-judged and there is no wasted time in lessons;"such as copying out the objectives for the lesson, completing exercises without sufficient reason, or simply spending too long on one activity"
• "The sequence of lessons and activities is well planned, and teachers use a good range of resources ....
• "Lessons are interesting .... and include a range of activities, including practical sessions and out-of-classroom activities ....
• "Imaginative and effective use is made of the internet, interactive whiteboards and other technical resources .... 

Interaction and dialogue

• "Where teaching is outstanding .... teachers explain things clearly, anticipate pupils’ misconceptions, select their teaching strategies judiciously, and target the use of high-quality questioning ....
• NB: It might be useful here to consider work on pupil misconceptions and threshold concepts  
• "There is a creative and appropriate balance between teacher-directed learning, which sets the framework .... and independent learning, which allows pupils to explore questions and solve problems" rather than lessons in which "pupils listen to the teacher for too long" 
• "There are good opportunities for pupils to make choices, ask questions, find answers, collaborate, listen, discuss, and debate and present their work to their peers so that others can comment....
• "The interaction between the teacher and the pupils is positive but challenging .....  teachers take care to build up pupils’ confidence and encourage them to take on new challenges ....
• "Support staff, where available, are well directed, have clear roles and provide good support for individuals and groups, which deepens their understanding.
• Questions are open ended rather than "focused on low-level cognitive activity"  which encourage pupils to "give simply factual low-level responses"

AfL

• "Assessment that clearly identifies pupils’ starting points and understanding, checks progress, establishes what has been learnt and can inform the next steps in learning" rather than assuming that "because one pupil has answered a question successfully, the rest of the class is ready to move on." 
• Effective assessment "enables pupils to demonstrate their understanding and ensures that teachers can adapt" the "direction or pace of learning within a lesson and for particular individuals"
• "Pupils receive clear feedback and understand what they need to do to improve" rather than "the imprecise marking of written work, lacking subject specific comments"
• Effective assessment "may include peer and self-assessment"
• "Differentiation is a challenging but essential task for teachers" and requires continual assessment.