A critical decision at Havana High School took effect as school began for the 2012-13 academic year: the school has changed regular classrooms into “flipped” classrooms, a new trend in teaching.
“Flipping” a classroom means the teacher and student (or parent, or other members of a learning community or support network) flip their roles: the student studies at home, using the Internet and other sources of information about the subject, and in school, the “teacher” is put in a “responsive” mode, facilitating inquiry that is led by the students. The teacher helps students with homework, which would be completed at home in a traditional classroom, and serves as a go-to resource for answering questions students bring in. However, the teacher doesn’t develop lesson plans as he or she might do if the classroom had not been flipped. And students do have “homework,” but it’s not the kind their parents had.
“The homework as we think about it in terms of, like math, and going home and doing the mass number of problems, no, that bulk of the homework will be done in the classroom with the expertise of the content area expert, which is the teacher,” WMBD/WYZZ TV quoted Superintendent Patrick Twomey as saying.
Of course, some kids at the school don’t have computers at home, so the high school has purchased a few of these, along with DVD players.
Students study the lesson materials at home, either on the Internet or on DVD, some of which may have been prepared by their own teachers or by other people or organizations that know something about a particular subject or topic. When they come to school the next day, the theory goes, they ask the teacher their own questions about the parts of the lesson that interest them. They can even move around and help other students learn the material.
The flip will undoubtedly draw national attention to the school, as flipping classrooms has been promoted by everybody from the Khan Academy to Bill Gates to who knows who! There’s even a website, flippedclassroom.org, set up to cheer about the promise of flipped learning. And a book by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, entitled Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student In Every Class Every Day. They have a post on a blog where they say flipping classrooms is “radically transforming learning.” All this sounds encouraging, and research dating back to about 2000 under the title “inverted classroom” backs up almost every claim:
Enhancing the Teacher-Student Interaction
Proponents of flipping the classroom say teachers interact better, more closely, and more often with students. They develop collaboration and other skills necessary for participation in a changing world, meaning that student-student interaction gets better as well. The teacher’s role changes to more of a coach and he spends his time talking to kids. And kids spend their time talking to other kids. The teacher answers questions, sets up and works with small groups, and guides the learning for each student individually.
For example, teachers might walk around the room and see some students struggling with one subject. They might give a mini-lecture—or have one of the students give a mini-presentation—to a small study group. The benefit here is that the instruction is given to students who are ostensibly inquiring about the subject matter. Their brains may be more open to learning at this time, proponents believe, and that learning might sink in better than if the material were delivered to their brains on the schedule of their teacher during a prepared lesson from a pre-written syllabus.
Enhancing the Teacher-Parent Interaction
Another mission accomplished by flipping a classroom is that it turns questions from parents about their sons’ and daughters’ “behavior” into questions about their “understanding.” Behavior in school “used to” mean something like “paying attention, raising your hand, not bothering the other students during class,” etc.
In a flipped classroom, the whole list of behaviors that are part of the school experience changes, making some questions from parents moot. Good questions instead focus on why students aren’t learning the material and on what interventions might help.
What the promoters don’t tell you
But flipped classrooms have a downside, and I expect the folks at Havana will find out soon enough that high school students have no inherent interest, in general, in learning about traditional high school subjects. The material just isn’t important to them in their world, and all the hype about flipping classrooms isn’t going to make a single kid any more curious about trigonometry, as we hear from this 17-year-old on CNN. And this likely fact would nullify one of the linchpins of flipped classrooms. If students are just pretending to play along and show interest in self-directed inquiry, they won’t retain or synthesize knowledge any better or worse in a flipped classroom than they would in a traditional classroom.
Furthermore, even if you take all the “research” thrust on schools by corporate executives who promote this style of teaching in schools, a preponderance of the evidence from more controlled studies indicates that the learning in flipped classrooms is less effective than it is in traditional classrooms, at least from students’ points of view.
One study (PDF) out of Ohio State University, for example, reached the following conclusion:
The findings of this research show that classroom flip students were less satisfied with how the structure of the classroom oriented them to the learning tasks in the course. The variety of learning activities in the flipped classroom contributed to an unsettledness among students that traditional classroom students did not experience.
Yes, students in flipped classrooms are generally “less satisfied with how the structure of the classroom oriented them to the learning tasks.” That’s because there is no one to orient them to the learning tasks in the course. This can result in problems for students with certain limitations. For example, some students miss the forest because of the trees. In other words, they tend to focus on details and never connect those points of data (facts) into a big picture context. In private study, they can follow a tangent based on the material so far away from the main lesson that when they come to class, their questions might completely miss the boat and confuse the teacher—and any students who went off on a tangent in a different direction.
This leads to the second observation of the Ohio State study: “the variety of learning activities … contributed to an unsettledness (if that’s a word) among students.” The learning activities are so varied in flipped classrooms, of course, because no one’s acting as a central source for coming up with these learning activities. Kids have very active imaginations, and their creativity peaks at about age 22. That means high school and early college courses are filled with kids who can come up with a brand new idea totally out of the blue.
Why don’t we learn what a plot of the cosine function looks like by using a see-saw to explain it? one kid might ask the teacher/facilitator. So, the teacher goes with it (after all, the kids are directing the inquiry in a flipped classroom) and does a mini-lecture about see-saws and the cosine function. That kid gets it, but everyone else can’t see the connection between see-saws and sines. The teacher has just wasted all their time on a dumb idea that would have never made it into a traditional lecture about the cosine function—because it’s a really dumb idea that a kid just came up with on the spur of the moment.
Can you see one of the hurdles to overcome if you’re planning to let classes full of very diverse-thinking kids direct the learning? And what if one take-home lesson they’re supposed to learn requires them to use a mouse on their computer to move some widget-thing around on the screen? Some kids just can’t use a mouse because of a physical disability. What do you do with diverse populations of students? Teachers know how to handle this, but kids generally don’t.
Mitigating the influence of informational trash
Let’s take a quick look at how this might play out in a high school chemistry class. In a traditional classroom, the teacher would have on the syllabus for Sept. 2, something like this: Properties of Group I metals in The Periodic Table of the Elements. So on that day, she might show a video, here, and talk about orbital radii. Kids would raise their hands and ask questions if they didn’t understand, and the teacher would (I hope) answer. Homework problems might deal with why cesium is so much more reactive in water than sodium, for example. The key here, though, is that this particular lesson was taught on a day when the teacher was interested in teaching it.
In a flipped classroom, students might watch the same video at home and come to class wondering why cesium is more reactive than sodium. The teacher assigns the same “homework” question as in a traditional setting, but now students work on it in small study groups right in the classroom, with the teacher facilitating their discussions. One student might tell his group he found a page on good-answers.com that said cesium was more reactive because the atom had more protons than sodium. Another looked it up on wiki-wiki-something and said no, it’s because the atomic mass of cesium is greater than that for sodium. Here, kids are presumed to be curious, of their own accord, about this subject, having been inspired to higher levels of inquiry by this awesome video.
A real chemistry teacher, of course, would steer her students in neither of these directions. But kids in study groups don’t want to look stupid in front of their friends and classmates, and they have creative minds. One might even make up an answer if he hadn’t checked out any information on the Web relative to this question and if the teacher weren’t nearby when his study group friend came up with the inquiry.
The two largest sources of incorrect information (trash) in a flipped classroom are the Internet and friends in these small study groups. Both are difficult for a one-person facilitator to manage in real time. The worst information used to come from textbooks, but the Internet has basically surpassed every measure of inaccuracy textbooks ever invented. Content specialists have even found inaccuracies in some videos offered by the Khan Academy and used as resources in many flipped classrooms and in other blended learning settings.
The reason friends are a big source of informational trash is that kids don’t want to look stupid and they have good imaginations, but the reasons why Internet sites are chock full of bad, useless information go way beyond the scope of this story. What’s important for our purposes is that, while teachers are trained in distinguishing good information from bad, kids haven’t quite mastered that skill. And once the information gets planted in their brains, it can be hard to shake.
Transition period required
For one-on-one instruction, there are really no drawbacks, that I can see, with letting the student direct the inquiry. But there will predictably be a bit of a transition period at Havana before teachers and students learn how to avoid some of the pitfalls of flipping entire classrooms, such as kids’ ideas about learning that could rapidly take lessons off-track for the majority of the students who didn’t come up with those ideas.
The question is, Will flipped or inverted classrooms still be around when teachers and students get the hang of this new way of running a class? Let’s hope.
We have known for some time that effectively implementing a flipped classroom requires teachers to have certain technical skills, conceptual knowledge, and pedagogical expertise. They have to maintain control of the classroom even as students take control of their own learning. If that happens, the flipped model is a good one. We just need to be aware of the techniques necessary to keep the negatives to a minimum.
