I graduated Teacher’s College in 2007 and Lakehead, the school I was attending was just opening their satellite campuses that featured video links to classes in Thunder Bay. Technology was awesome; it allowed people to attend classes in different regions of the Province, but it was not quite there yet. Massive Online Courses were still around the corner. Then in the Summer of 2009, as I was catching up on my episodes of Spark, a CBC technology program, via podcast, I heard about it, the game changer: Flipped Classrooms, What is so exciting about this new concept, was that it was new; after 2500 years of teaching via the Socratic Method, there was a new way to teach and it used technology.
Simply put, the Flipped Classroom sends the students home with the class lesson, in the form of an interactive video, and they come back to class with questions about the lesson and do their “homework” as the lesson in class with the teacher right beside them to answer questions and guide them one-on-one. This model has been around now for about a decade and there is plenty of research about whether it is effective or not and if this is the future of education, or just a new tool for a teacher’s bag of tricks, to be pulled out and used alongside Jigsawing and Tribes.
The key component of the flipped classroom is the ability to go home and watch a video that contains the content of the lesson. These days there are lots of free videos on every subject matter available on YouTube and other sites. I envision that the first objections to this new teaching method will come from the parents and as I see it, it will be a two pronged attack. First, there will be objections to their child being sent to watch “YouTube” for homework. YouTube is seen generally by people as the goto place for entertainment and music videos and not an educational website. Is my child learning anything? The second objection is that a teacher's life is easy enough with a six hour work day, holidays and summers off. Now my child’s teacher is just giving out videos and no real homework. Unless you only talk to teachers, you know what people think, so why make it worse? There are other concerns that people might have, like how does this classroom flipping help my child learn? How does one video address every child’s individual needs? If the student is doing all their learning at home, on videos, what is the teacher doing in the classroom?
Everything a teacher does, is for the student. Each student is unique and teachers care about their students and want them to succeed. Great amounts of time has been spent discovering ways to increase the learning of students. We know that a child generally prefers two learning styles, visual, auditory or kinesthetic, but some can only learn with one. We know that intelligence can be measured in eight or nine ways and that some students learn better when some of those are addressed and not with others. As educators we know that unless we win the classroom lottery, about ten to twenty percent of our students will have one or more Learning Disability, or worse, be Gifted; we have multiple IEPs to juggle along with everything else. Then there is the expectations that we have to meet every day, month and year, mandated by the government. So why the Flipped Classroom and all the additional work associated with it? Because it works and solves many of the above problems. It is a lot more work to do it correctly, though.
The key to the first part learning strategy is the video. How does watching a video at home really work? For my entire learning career I have had the benefit of watching video in the classroom: Boots and Pretty in Kindergarten, movies on VHS and film, television at home. How is this any different? In a classroom videos are group experiences and until recently television one way, you watch them and they are done. Interactive video, like YouTube, has two advantages over the others, privacy and control (the ability to pause, stop, rewind, skip ahead and replay as many times as they want) and these two things make the world of difference for learners. Interactive video has been shown to be significantly and overwhelmingly superior to the standard class lecture style. Higher test results and better student performance, speak volumes for this strategy.
One of the difficulties of a student who has any learning difficulties is that their difficulties are public. An LD student might be afraid to ask for something to be repeated for clarification, because they could not hear it, or because they did not understand it. I know that as a learning disabled person, I was constantly worried that my difficulty learning would center me out for more teasing than my physical disability, being born a Ginger, already did. Solution don’t ask and struggle more. Other children fear that going the the special education class centers them out more. This was a real concern for children in the SpecEd classroom I volunteered in. If everyone is getting the same work, watching a video at home, these problems are solved. Because the video is interactive, the student is able to control the pace that they learn. They are able to repeat parts they have difficulty with and they can skip over parts they already understand. They are required to write down all questions they have and bring it to class the next day.
The next day in addition to the questions the students bring, the teacher should give them a short quiz to test their acquired knowledge. This will show that the student has done their homework and has come to school prepared, but it also allows the teacher answer their questions before they begin their days work. In a more standard classroom the student receives the “lecture” in class and a few of the questions are answered before the class ends and they go home with the rest of their questions to their parents, the internet or just personal frustration. No one wants this. In many cases it has been twenty years since the last time a parent has ‘dealt’ with the subject, the internet is a great resource, but is not always accurate and student frustration leads to other problems like low class attendance and dropping out. So, the student, gets the ‘lecture’ at home and brings the questions to school where the ‘homework’ is then done, flipping the standard paradigm of the way teaching is done.
Videos, by their very nature, combine visual and auditory learning styles, there is question that the interactive nature of the videos adds kinesthetic to the mix. Subtitles on the videos add more learning content as the student reads, the video notes can include a transcript of the video. The video can include multiple Intelligence aspects to increase the reach of the video to the interests within the class. Also, additional information can be posted as links associated with the video’s content, for increased depth and breadth, YouTube already does this on the right of the video. The internet savvy student might be aware of how to look up definitions in the online dictionary, but embedded hyperlinks can speed the process and provide the correct definition for how it is used in the video.
In this diverse world, our classrooms are becoming more and more diverse with an increasing number of cultures and languages, many of those new students are struggling not only with the subject matter, but the language as well. Interactive video provides benefits for the English Language learning students as well. Videos can be paused, words translated and the videos restarted. The addition of subtitles would provide additional clarity and the spelling of the word to be translated. Transcripts in the notes provide additional benefit, words can be copied and translated, indeed, while not perfect, transcripts can be translated into other languages with Google Translate.
Among the potential problems with implementing this as a class strategy are access and student relevance. When I was an EA in a near-inner city middle school, the homeroom teacher told me a heart rending story about one the students. His family was very poor and he did not eat breakfast. The mornings he could not concentrate, waiting in hunger for lunch. How would that family be able to afford a computer or even the internet to allow their children to watch videos to do their homework? They would not. Setting aside the need for a better social welfare system that would end poverty and hunger, there are options still open for interactive video and the flipped classroom. Interactive video can be accessed at the public library and it can be accessed at any free WiFi location. It can be accessed at school, after school. It has been shown that the larger the size of the screen increases the benefit of interactive video, but a typical Smartphone has a large enough screen size for a student to gain the benefits of this learning strategy. Smartphones mean that interactive videos can be accessed anywhere where there is cellphone service, like the hospital or vacation spot, and any used/deactivated smartphone or tablet can be re-purposed to view these videos.
Student Relevance is harder to address. The typical YouTube video rarely meets the exact requirements that the teacher wants in their lesson. Moreover, students react better to videos that involve them directly or indirectly. This means that the teacher has to make some portion of the videos that they are assigning to be watched. Making videos is time consuming and involves editing of the video before it is posted for watching, but allows the teacher to have the students learn exactly what they want them to learn and allows them to add personal references to the students that will help them keep them interested. Making the video will also allow them to make the teaching material current and add things that the students from a specific class is interested in. Making videos is good practice for knowing what you can present to a student and keep their attention. It is strongly suggested that you keep your videos short to keep their attention, about 1 to 1.5 minutes per grade of the class. Nine minutes is good for grade 6, fifteen for grade 10, anything more than that and you risk the student losing interest. One of the more compelling reasons to make videos is that students of all ages have increased satisfaction and enjoyment when they learn in this fashion.
But, it is not just about adding a video and creating a better learning opportunity for your students; it is about adding to their classroom experience as well. Students come to the class interested, with questions that they expect you to know the answer to them. Moreover, because you have given them the knowledge to learn at home and spent the first part of class ensuring that they comprehend the information, the first two objectives of education, according to Bloom’s Taxonomy, have been achieved. What is left: application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Typically these higher order tasks are culminating lessons, after you learn about building structures in grade 7, and after you understand it, you then get to build the bridge out of toothpicks. This does not happen on the first day, but it could happen a lot sooner in the flipped classroom.. After they build their bridges, the flipped classroom would allow them to analyze why their bridge worked or did not work. The students would get to see the other classroom bridges fail or succeed. With the time saved learning at home, they would get to synthesize what they learned and build a second bridge, or a third. Maybe the activities they get to participate in are debates, maybe it will be an open discussion. What ever it is that happens in the classroom it will be more fun for the student than taking notes in a lecture style classroom. Students in this class situation will begin to truly understand the ideas and this knowledge will bleed into other subjects and the lessons learned in one area will be applied to others. While the students are having fun, the teacher will be free to go between the groups or individuals and evaluate how they are participating and learning. They will be able to discover areas they need to reinforce and which students need more help and give them that help without the student asking.
The Flipped Classroom was started first over a decade ago when two teachers sought to combat the loss of class time by athletes competing in sports, but was later expanded when the videos they made were discovered to have been watched by the entire class. The benefits that educators found later for English Language Learners and Learning Disabled Learners make this strategy crucial in an integrated classroom situation. The technology is flexible in all these cases, but importantly, students like to learn this way.
There are a few problems that teachers have encountered when they have implemented their new classroom strategy. Most obviously, not every teacher can cope with this increased workload that the flipped classroom creates and nor should any teacher be forced into this change, after all, if the teacher is not on board, the students won’t have an enjoyable experience. Oddly enough, it was found that students can be turned off to a flipped classroom by a teacher that is too excited about the change. Also if the videos are unengaging, students will get turned off and not participate. Alternatively, this strategy requires a teacher to be very familiar with the material and to be an expert on the subject matter. Kids ask the darndest questions and if they ask them at the beginning of class, you need to know the answer and can't rely on the end of the class to save you. Finally, this strategy is not something that all teachers can handle. The commitment of time and the use of technology can be quite daunting for some and the editing process can be frustrating. It is important to realise that this strategy need not be an all or nothing proposition. While the established teacher who is looking to breathe new life into a tired bunch of lesson plans might be able to flip their classroom other teachers could just flip a few lessons every once in a while.
The end goal for every teacher is to inspire every student to be the best they can be and to excel later in life. We want them to be lifelong learners. We fear making that child who dislikes school and thinks that they can’t do it, that they are not smart enough. That child does not have to exist and while there are many factors that cause a student to drop out of school, we know that if a student is enjoying something, they will find a way to keep coming; this may be a strategy that helps provide interest in coming to school everyday.
References
Jon Bergmann, Jerry Overmyer and Brett Wilie, The Flipped Class: What it is and What it is Not., The Daily Riff July 9, 2013
Michele D. Estes, Rich Ingram, Juhong C. Liu, A Review of Flipped Classroom Research, Practice, and Technologies. International Higher Education, Teaching & Learning vol.4 2014,., July 29, 2014
Siti Hajar Halili, Zamzami Zainuddin, Flipping the Classroom: What We Know and What we Don’t, The Online Journal of Distance Education and e-Learning Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2015
Nipan Maniar, Emily Bennett, Steve Hand and George Allan, The Effect of Mobile Phone Screen Size on Video Based Learning. Journal of Software, Vol. 3, No. 4, April 2008.
Ahmed Mohamed Fahmy Yousef, Mohamed Amine Chatti, Ulrik Schroeder, Video-Based Learning: A Critical Analysis of The Research Published in 2003-2013 and Future Visions, The Sixth International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning. 2014.
Dongsong Zhang, Lina Zhou,Robert O. Briggs Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., Instructional Video in e-Learning: Assessing the Impact of Interactive Video on Learning Effectiveness, Information & Management, Volume 43, Issue 1, January 2006.
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