The Flipped Classroom

In a traditional U.S. classroom, students come to school, listen to lectures, then go home to complete practice or application problems on their own. This works extremely well for…some students. But oftentimes, advanced students might be the only students engaging in the classroom lecture; or, conversely, they may become bored and disruptive. Additionally, struggling students who need more time or a slower pace may become lost and zone out. At home, the advanced students may whiz through homework that really isn’t benefiting them, or, those same students may see the assignments as unnecessary and not do their homework at all, resulting in poor grades despite proficient knowledge. The slower students may be unable to complete their assignment at home due to holes in their and their parents’ knowledge. 

The flipped classroom changes all of this. Homework consists of recorded lectures and demonstrations made or compiled by the teacher. At home, students have full autonomy over the speed of playback and can repeat any sections they find confusing. Then, at school, teachers can give differentiated assignments for students to complete with 1:1 assistance available from the teacher. In a perfect world, this seems ideal, but this method does require a significant amount of set up to implement.

Prerequisites

1. Buy-in

1. This method requires that administration, teachers, students, and parents are on-board. People may have any number of concerns or misunderstandings about this method which could drastically decrease the efficacy of this model if unaddressed.

2. Equipment 

1. Phones, ipads, computers at school and at home

2. Recording equipment

3. Video editing software

4. Platforms on which to share videos (google classroom, etc.) 

3. Internet

1. At home and at school

Challenges / Solutions 

Even in our modern world of technology, these prerequisites raise some logistical challenges. Firstly, equipment can be expensive. Nowadays, most schools provide some kind of electronic device for students to use at school. Some schools allow students to take these devices home; some do not. Regardless, families would at least have to provide their own internet access at home which not all families can do. One solution is that public libraries offer free use of computers and the internet, but if many students from a community are expected to  access the same public library, it might become difficult to ensure that there would be a free computer at the needed time. Regular use of a public library would also raise a need for transportation. So, right off the bat, families might have the expenses of an electronic device, internet access, and transportation. This is simply not accessible to all students, and potentially less and less accessible the younger a student is. This increases the challenge of gaining buy-in from parents and students.

Additionally, teachers might also push back. The field of education, like other fields, is prone to swinging from one new trend to another. Seasoned teachers have often found what works best (or at least what works best for them), and it’s usually a middle approach. So, the administration would have to make sure that all their teachers bought in in order for this approach to work. 

In my experience, preparing detailed lesson plans or recording lessons for a substitute to use takes much more effort than just teaching the lesson myself and adapting to the needs and mood of my classroom on a particular day. Additionally, I enjoy teaching my own lessons. I make them personal to my life and the lives of my students. I make connections between subjects and try to involve my students. The idea of recording lessons or having to comb through pre-made lessons online and find ones that I liked sounds much more complicated than just teaching a lesson myself. Additionally, the thought of sitting through an entire class period (or day of classes) and only being available to answer questions sounds pretty boring to me. So, I can understand why there is pushback from teachers about implementing the flipped classroom, even though I do see the benefits of it. 

This week, I needed to leave sub plans for a day, and decided to tip toe into this method. I went on YouTube to search for some videos I could give my students to watch for their math lesson. I easily found videos on the topic, but I noticed that the videos were really much longer than they needed to be. Additionally, I noticed that the online teachers really weren’t explaining the concept in the most simple way–that in the case of finding the surface area of a cylinder, the lateral surface area is a rectangle where the length is the circumference of the top or bottom.) Most of the videos just gave a long, garbled formula I knew my students in middle school would never take the time to memorize. (And why should they when the methodology of finding the solution is so logical?) 

In the end, I was glad that I was able to leave videos for the students and wouldn’t have to rely on the substitute to teach something I didn’t know if they knew, even though it took some combing to find videos I was satisfied with. I do imagine that, as long as a teacher didn’t get moved around too much, they could build a pretty decent library of this kind of video, cutting down on time. Or, if a teacher planned in advance to switch to this method, they could intentionally record their lessons in-class throughout the year in preparation for the next year.