By going through many interactions with educators, I’ve come up with a conclusion that Flipping a classroom can be a beneficial approach in any sense.
As we know Flipped Classroom is a new practice that is being adopted by many of the classrooms nowadays. It’s a pedagogical model that enables students to watch lessons at home and homework is done in the classroom in the presence of a teacher who becomes a facilitator by giving them personalized instructions. Flipping a classroom can be done anyway:
1st Step: This occurs when the student is at home.
The teacher provides students with an own recorded video tutorial, a podcast, a tutorial by other teachers or a YouTube link,
A student himself learns at home through Web and apps or parents help him go through a lesson.
2nd Step: This is a classroom activity.
Students work in the presence of a teacher and clarify their doubts by interacting with the teacher as well as other classmates.
The main motto of flipping a classroom is to provide teachers with sufficient time to assess students’ performance and deliver personalized instructions. Let’s see how educators personally feel about this approach.
The following are the exclusive experiences of teachers who have adopted the flipped classroom approach.
Two years ago, Mumper was a Pharmaceutics teacher to 153 first-year UNC Pharm. D. students. He used to teach them twice a week for an hour and a half and then guide them to read introductory textbooks. He had a teaching experience of 10 years in that subject so he could predict that his lectures would help students score nearly 80%. Yet he was unhappy with this time-table as there was so much of content that he was unable to cover it in that insufficient time. Also, he wanted to present the content to his students in a more effective way rather than through slides which were no longer effective in engaging them. Flipped classroom approach became a boon to him. He started giving lecture modules for students to watch at home and then he conducted quizzes to assess their performance, came up with personalized instructions and improved their learning over traditional classroom methods.
Karen Berlin
, an educator who has started the flipped classroom approach a few months ago, found it very useful and also shared on Twitter that 35/44 students scored A-B grades on a unit test.
Jerry Blumengarten, an educator dedicated to helping students and teachers in flipping a classroom, has created his flipped classroom page that endeavors to identify useful or interesting resources. Through this page, he helps parents, students and educators by providing them with useful resources and educational technology tools. Many teachers are implementing flipped classrooms using his website.
Similar to Jerry Blumengarten, Johnson, a Math educator from Kelowna, BC, Canada, who is very passionate about flipped classroom model, started a blog to help Math teachers use his flipping lessons.
Cassandra Hawkins Wilson, an English Professor, Mississippi has flipped her classroom and has found this approach really useful. One of the tools she is using to provide students with flipped lessons is Storify.com. Through Storify, she helps her students by providing them with different resources namely videos, images, articles, links, etc.
Recent surveys say that the flipped classroom approach boosts grades by 5%. Platforms namely Sophia, Knomia, etc., help and motivate teachers to adopt the flipped classroom approach which results in a greater student achievement.
For the teachers who wish to effectively get started for flipping their classroom or those who have already started and want to improve it in a better way and those administrators who like to invest in teachers’ professional development, we provide you with information about an outstanding one-day seminar
that shows you exactly how to “FLIP” your classroom to increase learning, motivation and achievement. It also lets you know about the best tools and techniques to make this happen from completely “flipped” classrooms to “blended” learning.
The above mentioned are the few examples of how flipped classroom has worked for educators. We’d like to have your personal views and your ways of implementing a flipped classroom. Please feel free to share with us in the comment box.
