6 Expert Tips for Flipping the Classroom Tech-Enabled Learning | Feature 6 Expert Tips for Flipping the Classroom Three leaders in flipped classroom instruction share their best practices for creating a classroom experience guaranteed to inspire lifelong learning. By Jennifer Demski01/23/13 "If you were to step into one of my classrooms, you'd think I was teaching a kindergarten class, not a physics class," laughs Harvard University (MA) professor Eric Mazur. Such pandemonium is a good thing, insists Mazur, an early adopter of the flipped classroom model that has become all the rage at colleges and universities across the country. In a flipped classroom, professors assign pre-class homework consisting of brief, recorded lectures and presentations, digital readings with collaborative annotation capabilities, and discussion board participation. While technology facilitates flipped instruction, it takes both planning and experimentation to perfect the model. 2) Be up front with your expectations.
Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives “If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve,” Debbie Millman counseled in one of the best commencement speeches ever given, urging: “Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities…” Far from Pollyanna platitude, this advice actually reflects what modern psychology knows about how belief systems about our own abilities and potential fuel our behavior and predict our success. Much of that understanding stems from the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, synthesized in her remarkably insightful Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (public library) — an inquiry into the power of our beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, and how changing even the simplest of them can have profound impact on nearly every aspect of our lives. One of the most basic beliefs we carry about ourselves, Dweck found in her research, has to do with how we view and inhabit what we consider to be our personality.
Reverse Instruction: Dan Pink and Karl’s “Fisch Flip” As the internet revolution continues to build and increasingly influence everything under the sun, so too it is going to have a massive impact on teaching and learning in K-12 schools. Educators who don’t anticipate this change and work to ride the wave will be subsumed by it, I fear. Quality instructional delivery for grades 5-12– lecturing, skill training, and modeling– is especially vulnerable in our schools. Increasingly on-line delivery is not just equal but superior, and often enormously less expensive, than what happens in our buildings. To deliver true value in this environment demands we invert the norm, and one of the best developing models for this is called, I have learned recently, “reverse instruction.” I first learned of the term, reverse instruction, right here at Connected Principals, in a comment John Sowash provided on my blog post about Khan Academy. As Pink and Fisch point out, Fisch is not the originator of this concept, and others deserve important credit.
A Gradual Approach to Healthy Eating By Leo Babauta A lot of us have tried various diets over the years, with little success. I remember trying about half a dozen different diets when I was trying to lose weight, and none of them stuck for more than a few weeks. Why is that? A few reasons: You’re trying to change a lot of things at once — from learning new recipes to strategies for social situations to what to eat when you go out to what you should do when you’re craving a snack and much more. That’s a lot of powerful forces working against you, and that’s just the start. What worked for me is gradual change. Why Gradual Change Works If you understand the reasons that people fail at trying to create a healthy lifestyle, then you can see why gradual is better: Those are some good reasons. How to Transition to Amazingly Healthy Before we start the gradual process, it’s a good idea to know where we’re going, generally. A less helpful approach is to think of the perfectly healthy diet, and say that’s what you need to do.
Flipped Classroom 2.0: Competency Learning With Videos The flipped classroom model generated a lot of excitement initially, but more recently some educators — even those who were initial advocates — have expressed disillusionment with the idea of assigning students to watch instructional videos at home and work on problem solving and practice in class. Biggest criticisms: watching videos of lectures wasn’t all that revolutionary, that it perpetuated bad teaching and raised questions about equal access to digital technology. Now flipped classroom may have reached equilibrium, neither loved nor hated, just another potential tool for teachers — if done well. “You never want to get stuck in a rut and keep doing the same thing over and over,” said Aaron Sams, a former high school chemistry teacher turned consultant who helped pioneer flipped classroom learning in an edWeb webinar. “The flipped classroom is not about the video,” said Jonathan Bergmann, Sams’ fellow teacher who helped fine tune and improve a flipped classroom strategy.
The Four Hidden Habit Skills By Leo Babauta When you learn a new skill, feedback is important: if you fall off a bike, you need to make an adjustment so you don’t keep falling. But when people learn the skill of creating new habits, they usually take the feedback of missing the habit as complete failure. In actuality, it means no such thing. What people don’t realize is that creating habits is actually a skillset that can be learned and practiced and mastered. And there are four hidden habit skills that most people don’t realize they’re bad at, which I talk about in my new book: Committing to actually starting. If you’re not good at creating habits, you simply need to practice these four hidden skills. But if you get good at this, you can unlock almost unlimited achievements.
The "Flipped" Classroom and Transforming Education Recently, I wrote a post regarding some ideas that I did not believe that would transform school culture. Although most agreed on two of the ideas that I shared, there was a large contingent of educators that argued regarding the “flip” and are very passionate about what it can do for the classroom (one even referred to me as a “nut” for even suggesting this!). Also, Forbes magazine talked about the Khan Academy and the “flipped classroom” being one of the most important stories of 2012. Whether it was inspired by Salman Khan or by educators, it has certainly stirred a movement: Entire school districts are now reworking their curriculum, pedagogy, classroom structure and technology around Khan Academy videos. As I see how passionate educators are regarding this idea, I can definitely see why it has merit. The Year of the Learner Will Richardson wrote a powerful comment on my own blog talking about 2013 being the “year of the learner”, and it has deeply resonated with me:
An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments 27 Simple Ways To Flip The Classroom We chat about flipping classrooms every week on Edudemic and it’s for good reason: this relatively new classroom organization style has been adopted by countless teachers around the world. Typically, the kind of adoption flipped classrooms has seen is reserved for major things like the Common Core or even iPad integration. But flipped classrooms has teachers, administrators, and students all engaged and placing the learning on center stage rather than the teacher. See Also: What’s A Flipped Classroom? If you’re looking to take the first step(s) toward flipping your classroom, online course, or other form of education … this visual by Mia MacMeekin ( check out her awesome blog here and her popular ‘ 27 Ways To Be A 21st Century Teacher ‘ visual we ran here) details some bite-size ideas for anyone looking to flip the classroom.
The Teacher's Guide To Flipped Classrooms Since Jonathan Bergman and Aaron Sams first experimented with the idea in their Colorado classrooms in 2004, flipped learning has exploded onto the larger educational scene. It’s been one of the hottest topics in education for several years running and doesn’t seem to be losing steam. Basically, it all started when Bergman and Sams first came across a technology that makes it easy to record videos. They had a lot of students that regularly missed class and saw an opportunity to make sure that missing class didn’t mean missing out on the lessons. Once students had the option of reviewing the lessons at home, the teachers quickly realized the shift opened up additional time in class for more productive, interactive activities than the lectures they’d been giving. And voila: a movement began. A 2014 survey from the Flipped Learning network found that 78% of teachers said they’d flipped a lesson, and 96% of those that tried it said they’d recommend it. What is a flipped classroom? 1. 2. 3. 1.
MY FLIPPED CLASSROOM by Crystal Kirch on Prezi 6 Resources on Flipping the Classroom There’s lots of discussion and experimentation on the topic of Flipping the Classroom. Here are 6 resources with links to other resources on the topic: Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams are award-winning teachers in Colorado who use the term, Mastery Learning to describe how they have ‘flipped’ their classrooms inside out. Don’t use technology in the classroom, use it before and after, outside of the classtoom. A major roadblock or barrier to the implementation of this model is that many educators do not know what to do within the classroom, what to do with that “whatever they want to do” time. The Flipped Class: Myths Vs. A professional learning community for teachers using Vodcasting in the Classroom. Tagged as: Education, educational technology, Educational Video, flipping the classroom, Video On Demand
UDL and The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture In response to all of the attention given to the flipped classroom, I proposed The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture and The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture for Higher Education in which the viewing of videos (often discussed on the primary focus of the flipped classroom) becomes a part of a larger cycle of learning based on an experiential cycle of learning. Universal Design for Learning has also been in the news lately as a new report Universal Design for Learning (UDL): Initiatives on the Move was released by the National Center on UDL, May, 2012. This post describes the principles of Universal Design for Learning and how they naturally occur when a full cycle of learning, including ideas related to the flipped classroom, are used within the instructional process. Universal Design for Learning The UDL framework: Source: More about UDL can be found at: Some of the key findings of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL): Initiatives on the Move study: