Good for the Soul: Claude Bernard Lectureship #EB2013 | Whizbang P stands for many things in my life. It's my first initial. As a nephrologist, it's liquid gold. It can stand for physician or physiologist, either of which I will admit to. It rarely stands for Physics in my world. Yet Sunday, a packed room experienced Confessions of a Reformed Lecturer, a performance by Eric Mazur, Professor of Physics at Harvard. Last fall I taught my 6 hours of renal pathophysiology using the flipped lecture technique with peer instruction. Several months later the evaluations for my coursework came in. Damn! Turns out a lot of educators, including Eric Mazur, get students who do not appreciate this method. So back to the Bernard presentation or performance (you can view his slides here). Part of this is because we do not engage our brains in lecture. By the end of the hour he had us all convinced that plain old lectures would not do. I swam upstream through the crowd, and Mazur was kind enough to point me to his website, Peer Instruction. Congratulations, Dr.
The 2 most powerful flipped classroom tips I have learned so far Stealth Flipper’s class, Fall 2012 (blur purposeful) Won’t students skip my class if my lectures are available online? This is a question that comes up often in the world of higher education, where class attendance is usually not compulsory. One fine day early Fall of 2012, I took this question with me on my walk from my office in the University of Texas at Austin tower to one of the largest auditoriums on campus. I was visiting Stealth Flipper’s class, a large enrollment (n=400) Humanities course for non majors, called Introduction to Ancient Rome. Within the first few minutes of arriving, as I had to jockey for a seat, the answer to my question seemed pretty clear. Now, as I think back on this, I ask myself – “So what? Stealth had not always taught a flipped class. Stealth emphasizes that she liked teaching a large class and “even enjoyed lecturing.” So, when Stealth learned lecture capture via Echo360 was available in her classroom, she decided to try to flip her class. 1. 2. Fig 1.
Looking for ‘Flippable’ Moments in Your Class March 25, 2013 By: Barbi Honeycutt, PhD in Instructional Design “How do you determine what can be flipped?” With all of this discussion around flipped classrooms, more instructors are asking this question and wondering when and where flipped strategies are best integrated into the learning environment. Certainly, some topics lend themselves more easily to flipped strategies than others, but every lesson plan has the opportunity for at least one “flippable moment.” The Internet, online textbooks, online lectures, MOOCs, and other resources provide access to endless amounts of content, much of it free. So, back to the original question: How do you determine what can be flipped? Flippable Moment #1: Look for confusion. If this is a lesson you’ve taught before, then you probably know where confusion is likely to occur. Flippable Moment #2: Look for the fundamentals. Flippable Moment #3: Look at your extra credit question. Flippable Moment #4: Look for boredom. Dr. Tags: flipped classroom
A tale of two TEDs | the red pincushion I will start with a disclaimer: I fully realize how lucky I am to have had the opportunity to speak at a TEDx event. I feel honored, mostly unworthy, and very rewarded to have spoken at TEDxStanford. Most days, I am just horrified by my presentation, wishing I hadn’t done it, or wishing I had said a million different things. Other days, I have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. AND I will also say that TEDxStanford was a truly lovely event. I struggle with the TED umbrella as a whole. That’s where my TEDx experience becomes a tale of two TEDs. Being involved with TEDxStanford led me to the great sense of gratitude I expressed above and concern that my talk would be used to promote the very things I pushed against in my talk (e.g., solutionism, with only the powerful at the table). So, to keep the better tale alive, here is what I hope comes out of my TED talk: 1. 2. 3. 4. Please share your (gentle) thoughts. As promised, here are my favorite presentations/performances from the day: Like this:
The Post-Lecture Classroom: How Will Students Fare? - Robinson Meyer A new study finds moderate student gains in courses where lectures take place at home and "homework" happens in the classroom. If college professors spent less time lecturing, would their students do better? A three-year study examining student performance in a “flipped classroom” — a class in which students watch short lecture videos at home and work on activities during class time — has found statistically significant gains in student performance in “flipped” settings and significant student preference for “flipped” methods. The study, provided exclusively to The Atlantic, is one of the first to examine a “flipped” classroom in the current state of its technology. The study examined three years of a foundational pharmaceutics course, required for all doctor of pharmacy (Pharm.D.) students attending UNC. Students also came to prefer the flipped model to the lecture model. “As I always like to say, we flipped their preference,” Mumper told me. Not that that’s a bad thing.
Keep the Lecture, Lose the Lectern Blended classes – mixing traditional and digital teaching – are gaining converts. Doug Fisher came to online teaching by happenstance: A temporary leave from Vanderbilt in 2008 had him scrambling to make arrangements for his popular computer science and engineering database class. MOOCs – massive open online courses – were still in their infancy, so Fisher found no help on the Internet; instead, he taught the course via video-conferencing. Fast-forward five years, and Web-based material has become an integral part of Fisher’s courses, prompting his recent appointment as director of the new Institute for Digital Learning at Vanderbilt, charged with developing the university’s digital learning strategy. Classroom hybridization – also called flipping the lecture – is cropping up in engineering curricula throughout the country, from lone instructors experimenting with the approach to department-wide efforts. Changing the Dynamic Nonetheless, flipping the lecture isn’t universally embraced.