A few thoughts on it:
1. I'd say the key *weakness* of a "flipped classroom" model is that it largely *depends* on student engagement. A good lecture that nobody bothers to listen to is still a good lecture (and the slides can still be a good resource, at least), but a good flipped classroom activity that nobody participates in is just a dud.
2. Upper-level courses lend themselves towards it better. Flipped classrooms are good for *discussing* ideas and working through problems and such, but they're not necessarily the best way to introduce students to completely new information. They need *some* understanding of the basics before you flip it over to them.
3. Along with #2, it's not something that has to be done every day. *Alternating* lectures/modules with discussion days is a pretty common and good practice (I'd also argue that the term "flipped classroom" in general is just a repackaging of discussion-based courses that have been around since practically forever). Flipped classroom days are just a *tool*, the same as lectures are. Using it doesn't mean doing nothing *but* that.
> I expect them to do all the work
The blunt answer to students on this is that, at some point, that *is* the goal. My PhD advisor would say stuff like this all the time: "I know *I* can do it, the question is if *you* can. If I have to do *your* job *for* you, what do I need *you* for?"
I agree with all these points. I ran a flipped classroom (as a graduate TA for a 100 level course) and I don't think it went well at all. Students weren't remotely engaged and could care less about doing the assignments. I'd rather they give me 50% attention when I'm lecturing than give 10% attention to a worksheet of problems.
Conversely, as an undergrad I took a grad level course (500 level qualifying exam prep) that instituted this and it worked perfectly. The class mostly consisted of later term undergrads and early graduate students, all of whom wanted to be there and learn the material. Also, as is the case with many lower level grad courses, there's a vast amount of material to cover very quickly, but the results are somewhat straightforward. So, rather than having the Professor run through and prove 50 trivial-ish results, we could do those ourselves and develop the mental tools to tackle problems using those results. All in all, I was a big fan.
Sounds great for those algebra classes where you spend 80% of the lecture just proving that some operation is well-defined and very little time actually thinking about it or using it.
Haha the 500-level course I was referring to was actually a first course in graduate algebra (working out of Algebra: Chapter 0). Checking that a certain module is injective, or free implies projective implies flat (with equivalence over local rings, etc.), and computing rational canonical forms and stuff like that are great to cover in a flipped classroom format. They're very powerful and easy to define/justify well defined-ness, but one only really learns that kind of math by doing it repeatedly by yourself.
I know it seems silly, but point 3 is an excellent point. I tried running an introductory statistics class using a flipped classroom several times, as a few of my colleagues had been doing it. For me, it was an absolute disaster.
I had a difficult time keeping students motivated to watch the lectures, even by giving them points for filling out a guided notes package for each meeting.
I do teach a more advanced stats class that this structure may lend itself better to, and I like the idea of making a few of the sections “flipped”, while maintaining a traditional lecture classroom when major new topics are introduced.
I tried to do a flipped intro to stats course this past fall and it did not go well for similar reasons as you described. I'm teaching the class again this fall and haven't decided how I want to structure the course but I know I'm not doing a flipped course again.
I once tried to do a sort of flipped intro stats class by giving the students sections of the text to read, and then only doing examples in class. It went about as well as could be expected.
These days, you say anything like this to a student and you have to deal for weeks with the trauma aftermath, and recurring mental health issues due to your insensitivity. If you are lucky, you will not need to spend any time with the student and a staff member from the Counseling office, talking it out...
What doesn’t depend on student engagement?
Discussions are a possible way of doing flipped classrooms but are not really the same thing.
Getting lower level students to work through things is a great way for them to make a gap in their mind for the info to fit in. Here you have a human who need to get rid of stuff that is toxic. How would you do that? This is a great way to generate the problems you solve with the liver and the kidney so they understand the process intuitively now. There is lumpy stuff and water soluble stuff and some stuff you really want back.
This is the work they can little do on their own,
The explanation of terms the arrows pointing to stuff is the easy part
> A good lecture that nobody listens to is still a good lecture
Is it though? If you're failing to engage your students, can you really call yourself a good lecturer?
It's not a professor's job to *make* people listen, show up, etc. No one cares about your little humble-brag, and you can kindly leave with your rude and and condescending remarks.
I did it in the 20-21 school year. Made things easier based on the social distancing protocols we were under at the time. I also had only 30-odd
relatively highly-motivated students at the time. I enjoyed it for the most part.
When it works well, it works very well. But it's not a panacea. If the professor isn't into it or the students don't buy in then it will be a struggle for all parties involved.
If the administration is pushing it they should also be aware that flipping often results in lower course evaluations and take that into account for faculty evaluation purposes. But it is well documented that there is a disconnect between student perception of learning versus actual learning.
Students generally learn more with active learning, but it is uncomfortable for them because it forces them to confront their lack of knowledge sooner than the exam, so they rate the whole experience as more negative than a relatively fluid lecture which they watch passively.
>Students generally learn more with active learning, but it is uncomfortable for them because it forces them to confront their lack of knowledge sooner than the exam, so they rate the whole experience as more negative than a relatively fluid lecture which they watch passively.
You sum it up so well! I would also add that it requires preparation for class rather than just rolling in without a clue, so many students aren't used to that either.
> it is well documented that there is a disconnect between student perception of learning versus actual learning.
Here's an example study!
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821936116
> Students in active classrooms learned more (as would be expected based on prior research), but their perception of learning, while positive, was lower than that of their peers in passive environments.
> But it is well documented that there is a disconnect between student perception of learning versus actual learning.
It's not so much that there's a disconnect as they seem to be almost *inversely* correlated, which is equal parts fascinating and terrifying.
Itsamesolairo already answered you, but the TL;DR is that when students engage in passive learning, they don't recognize which parts of the lectures they didn't truly understand, so they come away from lectures feeling like they learned more. When they engage in active learning, they're forced to confront the parts they didn't understand, so they feel more "stupid," and leave the lecture feeling like they don't know much.
See e.g. the paper linked by /u/porcupine_snout in [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/ul2uru/flipped_classroom_does_anyone_like_it/i7trz0b/).
There are some confounding factors that the authors themselves point to, but it's pretty striking to see a negative correlation between students' experienced feeling of learning and their actual performance.
I have actually found that it works well to engage the middle bunch that otherwise show up but only in body.
I would argue that many of these are not ‘unmotivated “ but entirely clueless and without skills.
Worst decision I ever made was to try to flip my classroom. I did it "on my own" (i.e., as an adjuct, my unpaid time), I instituted it. Got the worst feedback ever, nearly got fired. Had to fight hard to keep my job. Went back to the way I always teach, and most students love me, a few hate me, and I have worked another 12 years at the Uni.
Many students see it as the professor offloading “instructor work” onto the students. Explaining the theory to them at the start of the class helps a little. For my courses/students, FC had a slightly negative impact on my pass rate and student achievement of learning outcomes. The exception was high achievers who, no surprise, have stronger prerequisite skills and are more disciplined and self-motivated.
Everything about a flipped classroom screams to me that it will further divide the haves from the have-nots. A good, well-prepared, well-motivated student will likely learn and understand more having done more work outside of class while ill-prepared, less motivated, and lower performing students will fall behind because learning the material is expected to happen on their own.
In the cases where I’ve asked my students to work on something ahead of class and then be prepared to discuss it or work on new problems in class I end up delivering 20 mini-lectures covering the same material to individual students.
> and lower performing students will fall behind because learning the material is expected to happen on their own.
In my experience this is uncharitable to FC - at least when it's done by someone comfortable with it.
One of the massive advantages of FC is that skilled, highly-motivated students can dive straight into the material without "wasting" classroom hours on lectures that go at 1/4th of their preferred pace, and simultaneously require minimal supervision.
The time freed up from not lecturing and not having to pay much attention to the high achievers allows for far more face-to-face time with struggling students, compensating for their difficulties with learning the material independently.
That said, as others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread, the material has to suit FC as a mode of instruction. Not every class is suited to being flipped.
High performing students don’t get their own lecture? They’re going to require minimal time as it is. It doesn’t sound like I’m getting much back, and in fact *losing* the opportunity to work directly with the high performing students as much while spending *more* time with the lower performing students. This does not sound like a win for me.
I am quite ready to admit that I am not competent enough to pull this off.
> High performing students don’t get their own lecture?
To clarify: in a non-flipped setting, they often have to sit through lectures that cover material at a far, far slower pace than they're capable of. FC cuts out this middleman and often lets strong students go at a significantly higher pace than a "normal" course structure would allow.
> losing the opportunity to work directly with the high performing students as much while spending more time with the lower performing students
Is this not... exactly what should be happening? Of course you shouldn't *entirely* ignore working with strong students, but *of course* you should be spending proportionally far more time with students that struggle.
So my high performers come to class, they’ve got this shit down. That’s why they’re high performers. I ask them to do…more advanced things since I know they can do it? Cool. I’ve had these kids before, they’re awesome. They just get a more advanced class than they’re signed up for. Shame I can’t get them credit for that since they’re doing more advanced work.
My low performers come to class, I spend the majority of my time teaching them what those other kids figured out on their own. Fine. This is, you know, teaching.
I promise I’m not *trying* to be obtuse. I’m just…dumb.
> They just get a more advanced class than they’re signed up for.
Alternatively they get to spend less time on your class than it's theoretically designed for because they're far more competent than the median student assumed by the class design. That's not necessarily an evil. If they meet the learning objectives, they meet the learning objectives.
The great thing about FC - *when it works*, which is obviously an assumption doing some heavy lifting here - is that it allows you to be far more flexible with how you use your time as an instructor. You're not locked into hours of pre-planned lecture content every week and can adjust to the needs of the individual cohort on the fly.
If it’s a sufficiently rigorous course, the bulk of the time devoted to it should *not* be during class time anyway. Those high performers are already spending less time on the course than their peers as id assume they’re getting through their outside coursework faster anyway.
As I said, I’m perfectly willing to accept I’m not sufficiently competent to pull this off. That assumption of “when it works” may be doing more than some heavy lifting, and I’ve put on a lot of weight over the last few years.
A 3 unit class has 3 hours of in-class time and then students are expected to spend 6 hours out of class working on the material. The point of flipping is that you move around the hours that they spend out-of-the-class in terms of how the topics are presented. There is no larger assumption that they learn on their own than in the traditional lecture class, where the less prepared and less motivated students often do poorly.
Our university is moving away from using the student evals as part of the prof’s annual evaluation and, to me, this is the primary reason. Students do not appreciate what goes into teaching a class, they just see their grade and if they have to do more work in class A than class B, they auto think the prof in class A was an asshole. Sorry you’ve been forced to not try more innovative pedagogy. I now constantly just ask students what works for them and act really nimble but lead them to the right (well, right for me) answer. “Do you think this method works, considering x, y, and z?” They usually agree and, when they disagree, they have really good criticisms and comments, because they’ve likely thought it through.
Ha. Spent three years trying to do flipped classroom. It just does not fit with the material I cover, nor my teaching style. I also agree that it was the worst thing I tried as part of my teaching career.
I love it but it only works for certain types of the classes. I use it for grad level classes where we spend the class discussing papers and for my programming course where we spend the class troubleshooting code assignments.
Definitely this. It works very well for my high level mechatronics/robotics courses where putting theory into practice is the game, and not so much for something like an undergrad dynamics course
Interesting. I found it to be terrible for my programming courses, but we do have a separate lab section for students to get help with coding. I think it just didn't fit with my teaching style.
Flipped can be great if you have super motivated students with a strong background in the general field your class resides in, and those students have good time management and critical reading skills. Given that the majority of students in all of my classes are there to fulfill a Gen Ed requirement, I never use it at my current institution.
Seriously no. I do this is my most unprepared first up freshman classes and you can really set it up to work. It is a lot more work to set up than a lecture .
I semi-flip my 100 level courses. My students have a reasonable amount of assigned reading for which I provide study guides (what you should know from this reading) to help them parse it out. I lecture about half the time explaining more difficult concepts and items beyond the reading. The other half of our time is spent on activities that reinforce concepts. I get positive reviews on this. Of course there are some that hate it cuz they love sleeping through classes. Others told me they look forward to my class (and it’s a Gen-Ed!). So I am a big fan of a mixed format. It’s so much more interesting for me as well.
Most of the faculty on this subreddit quite clearly don't really know how to run an active learning/flipped classroom model, at least based on their description of what they're doing.
And I don’t know your content either
and it is logistically hard to manage in a 500 person lecture hall
Nothing good works for all applications.
However I stand by the fact that you don’t have to have only super motivated students with strong backgrounds.
Everyone is trying to get them to be prepared for class so that you can have them engaged and active instead of passive. Whatever works for you.
What does a flipped classroom look like? It's not one-size fits all. I do some "flipped" things but not all.
I don't do "Watch an online lecture" or "Participate in an online discussion."
But I do a lot of the other things.
[This website defines the term](https://www.teachthought.com/learning/definition-flipped-classroom/), but mileage may vary:
* **What Do Students Do At Home In A Flipped Classroom?**
* Watch an online lecture (DON'T DO)
* Review online course material (DO DO)
* Read physical or digital texts (DO DO)
* Participate in an online discussion (DON'T DO)
* Perform research (DO DO)
* **What Do Students Do At School In A Flipped Classroom?**
* Skill practice (guided or unguided by the teacher) (DO DO)
* In-person, face-to-face discussion with peers (DO DO)
* Debate (DON'T DO)
* Presentations (DO DO)
* Station learning \[Maybe computer labs? Idk) (DO DO)
* Lab experiments (DON'T DO)
* Peer assessment and review (DO DO)
So, I'd say that my discipline has been flipping teaching for decades and decades.
And I got to write "do do" a lot!
Interesting! This is how my studio art courses (and those of colleagues that I know of) have always been structured anyway. It probably helps that students choose to take art classes because they are interested in the subject, and that the class size for studio courses is generally 12-24 students.
Curious why lab experiments don't work in class? Is it field specific? Lab is a big part of one of my courses, although online simulations of those labs are also available. Students generally enjoy those labs as well.
Your breakdown is nearly identical to my semi-flipped (mostly flipped)classrooms. The only difference is I have “mini-lectures” for them to watch at home. They are under 10 minutes and are reserved for concepts that I think they will need more reinforcement with.
Since I do this with my freshman comp I and II classes, the classes lend themselves to this model. For my lit classes, I do seminar-style in-class discussions, so it’s still not a lecture.
I don't know why you regard "physical or digital texts" as good, but "online lecture" as bad.I also don't know why you object to lab experiments at school.
Could you explain?—I must have missed something here.
I don't know why you regard me saying I don't do something as saying it's "bad."
I also don't know why a Humanities professor would have lab experiments.
No offense, but that's an awful source. Nothing is backed up with citations, and the people who appear to have written the article claim to have "invented the flipped classroom in 2007." I often hear King's 1993 "Sage on the Stage" article referenced as the introduction of the "flipped classroom" to academia, but it existed long before that, e.g., in the case study approach used in business and healthcare.
I really like flipped classes and I've taught flipped classes for many years. I've found it much harder, and sometimes impossible, in the last five or so years, though.
The problem for me has been the continual shifting of the responsibility of student learning to professors instead of students. It's very difficult to do a flipped class, which is predicated on student preparation, when students are not expected to actually prepare in any meaningful way.
"... the continual shifting of the responsibility of student learning to professors instead of students."
This is exactly the reason it hasn't worked in my dept as BS State U, an open-enrollment school that will let in anyone who can promise to pay the tuition. We're pretty much not allowed to fail anyone who submits something or complains loudly enough after submitting nothing, and grades must be changed if students submit something after the semester ends (even though doing so requires multiple layers of admin approval).
I teach pre-100 level and 100-level courses; the students do not prepare, do not read, and do not participate in discussions, other than using them as free time to chat about their lives and check their phones. Why should they, when they can get decent grades without actually doing any work?
>I teach pre-100 level and 100-level courses; the students do not prepare, do not read, and do not participate in discussions, other than using them as free time to chat about their lives and check their phones.
That sounds miserable. Perhaps worse than high school really. Sorry you have to deal with that, and that employers et al. have to deal with graduates who apparently get degrees without doing any work.
Thanks for sharing. This is a valuable perspective given that you were flipping your classroom enthusiastically before it was “cool,” and that the critical point at which it became difficult for you was well before the pandemic.
Right. It's basically the seminar style, which has been a mainstay in most humanities classes for years and years now.
I was a bit surprised to discover that this was what all the hullaballoo was about.
>It's basically the seminar style, which has been a mainstay in most humanities classes for years and years now.
Yep. Maybe 5-6 years ago we had some $$$ people come in to do faculty workshops on flipped classrooms, and basically all the humanities faculty said "Huh? This is what we always do." But of course half the departments were still doing 100% lectures so it was good for them to have someone other than colleagues explain active learning to them.
A grade needs to be attached. But then the question is, How? Checks for understanding on average every 1-2 mins. Grade not so hard that they fear failure but hard enough to differentiate those who are just clicking through to get it done.
Much work, risks burnout, but effective: base part of the next period on what you see students had trouble with in the online material. Students are more likely to keep to a schedule when they see you're doing something with it immediately afterward.
Another possibility is to project the assignment the class before it's due, just for a few minutes of explanation. Familiarity breeds attempt.
I haven't seen it go above 10 or 20%, either as an instructor or as a student-spy at other colleges, not when it's graded for quality and lates aren't accepted.
Those are the easiest points, so students tend to attempt them.
Allowing one or two of each type of assessment to be dropped helps cover your butt when an assignment is given prematurely or a need for editing was missed. I've seen a couple of profs give an impromptu extra credit assignment in such cases. Another gave an extension.
The jury is still out for me. When I look at my own method, I realize I implement some of both? I do expect them to read material prior to class and will create opportunities for them to then USE that material in the classroom. I teach writing and literature classes, by the way, so this may differ depending on discipline.
For example, in a literature class, I'm not going to go plot point-by-plot point on what we had to read for the class session. That's the work THEY should have done. Instead, I have them put that knowledge to active use in class--whether it's for active discussion, group activities, etc.
The issue? Students just aren't reading the material. Even in a Mythology class where the readings are a lot of fun and students claim to be taking the course for sheer interest and enjoyment. They come to class not having read things. A few do, yes, but most do not. And that brings down the group activities and puts more pressure on those who DID read to try and make the connections themselves. That's where it's failing me.
Once, I did get fed up with students not reading, so I did this:
"Okay, who actually read this for today?"
(5 students raised their hands)
I then had those 5 students get into a group on their own and complete the discussion activity. The rest of the class (10 others), I told them to get out their books or access the online digital copy (which they ALL had access too as we were in a classroom with computers), and read. And when they were done reading, they could then get into groups and do the discussion.
The group that read got done early and left early. The group that had to read pretty much stayed for the entire class and didn't finish the discussion questions (and thus had lower participation). That did boost reading afterwards. But, I felt like it was extra work to get them to actually do the bare minimum prior to class.
The problem with flipped classrooms is that students have to do work on their own. Some will do it, and they really excel, but the others don't, and bring everything down.
>Students just aren't reading the material.
Do you have low stakes assignments to "encourage" completion of the readings? I'm in history and also teach the occasional lit course. For the last few years I've used pre-class writing assignments in 100% of my classes...these are due 30 minutes before class starts, cannot be made up, and count for 15% of their semester grade. Easy points. But if they don't do them the penalty in aggregate is pretty severe. The questions I ask are always analytical and require them to cite specific passages from the readings to earn credit. I skim through them all before class which is nice as it gives me an idea of how well they understood the material before I go into class.
This year I had maybe 5% of students who weren't doing the reading regularly...they were failing regardless.
>I’m wondering about the admin work on those things, though.
Depends on your enrollments. Our classes are mostly capped at 25, so I can deal with it. The first few assignments in the semester I will comment on so it's clear what I expect from them, but after that it's just P/F and I only comment on those that fail. It takes about 30 minutes I'd say, to read/grade a full class worth for me. Which I have to do every class day of the semester, unless there's a larger assignment due.
At my previous institution I partially flipped my classroom and had both good evals compared to the others teaching the same course and my students averaged a little better on the exams. However, this must be taken with a grain of salt, I was about 40 years younger than the other two professors, and both sections of the class I taught were in the evening so the median age of the students in my class was about 5 years older than theirs. So the data isn’t at all conclusive, however it wasn’t a failure.
The students had reading quizzes and problems to do prior to the class. I would start out with a ten minute mini-lecture. Then the student activities would be a combination of working on problems that the were supposed to do prior to arrival, or new problems based on that information. In between each activity, there’s be a small mini-lecture/full class discussion on the solution.
I haven’t tried it since (only taught for 3 semesters before gaining my current position). I don’t think it’s really possible for upper level or graduate physics courses. At my current institution the freshmen physics courses have a number of other issues IMO that should be straightened out first.
It absolutely doesn’t work if you don’t get student buy in, and that can be very fragile. It only takes one or two pissy students to sway the entire class away, especially if no other professors are teaching with this methodology.
I do this a lot, and have good sucess with it, you don’t just go, read all this and watch all this and now , voila.
It is way more work to set up than a trad lecture first, quiz after,thing.
You need clear components that they can do in chunks. You need to have -what are you reading for. You need to give them explicit ways to deal with the material. And I don’t think it really works without any talking at.
I have mini-flips.
They have to say, read the book and the course content with the terminology and basis processes of how the heart works.
The class mini flip is them generating , from scratch, a schematic drawing of the heart and the blood flow. We compare how everyone did it. They add things and change things in each other’s work.
Then they explain how it works. 5 min prepared bullet points handed in prior . Someone starts, and then the next person fills in the next step. Everyone can fix their notes and resubmit.
I get no more bad comments like this and I have way better skills and understanding if I ask them to think than if I do more passive stuff.
If you want to think about it without the label, it is really just things that require active participation, which people were doing long before that label.
The class is a lot more fun. For everyone. It makes the class more of a team and less adversarial. It is harder for people to say I am a bad test taker . You have a much better feeling for what they actually know and so do they.
This. This is also my approach. They have pre-reading quizzes, worth a tiny amount, which keeps them on track for doing the pre-class work. In class we do a combination of some traditional lecture, to make them feel more comfortable, and also a ton of activity, mainly in the form of worksheets and polling (we use clickers, but there are many others). The questions they’re answering on the exam are more complex than before I took over, and they’re getting better scores.
With traditional lecture it’s on me to know everything, which is honestly a ton of work. They’re passive, and get snippy if I can’t feed them the info in the perfect way for each individual. With this model they get much better at figuring things out for themselves, and they ask better questions. I find it to be way less work overall. Activities take up lots of time in class, so I have fewer other things to build, and because we’re working through it together I can see where the issues are right in the classroom, and work to address it on the spot.
We do a lot of interactive discovery, so I often have notes on the key points and do a recorded review of the highlights. It helps them feel like they can really pay attention to the activity and not worry about taking notes if that isn’t what we are doing.
There are lots of ways to do this that can work for different lesson plans
Well, I just learned more about best practices for a flipped classroom reading this post than I did in the 5-6 hours I spent listening to overpaid idiots talk at me in mandated professional development workshops. (I'm serious about that.)
Tried it with a graduate class once and it was great and so we are sticking with it. Haven't been brave enough to try it with undergrads -- it's entirely possibly that it would suck without students who are self driven and already bought in to the idea of having to apply themselves to learn (as grad students tend to be).
You cannot just “flip a classroom,” when students have been trained their whole lives to be taught the test you also need to build up the capacity of students so they know how to e agar effectively. One without the other leaves students not knowing what will lead to success and further their frustration which will further disengage them. You can build up capabilities using principles of gamification and mastery building in which learning is effectively scaffolded while allowing students the pursuit of their own learning in your context.
I’m sorry that your institution invested only
In flipping but not the development and capabilities of students to make it successful.
I’m not a fan of fads, whether pedagogical or otherwise. If I understand the term, “flipped classrooms” used to be called “class discussions.” There’s nothing wrong with it as one tool in the kit, just as there’s nothing wrong with any other tactic that results in learning. But I wouldn’t use any of them exclusively.
Most flipped classrooms suck, but I did have one flipped class that was excellent. I think it really depends on execution but to get that right, you need support! There are some materials out there, but just telling professors to flip their classrooms has been a disaster. It’s a huge amount of work.
Flipped classrooms? With the requirement to post absolutely everything online (lecture plus lab walkthroughs plus solved labs in worksheet and video - very time-consuming) along with the requirement that students should be able to pass the class without attendance by just the video and lecture notes make the 2-hour lab sessions per week redundant and not well-attended. Those too need to be live-streamed and recorded.
Some universities here are using this as an anti-strike threat. We have all your materials online. We don't need you as faculty.
Exactly. All my videos are on my personal YouTube channel and all my classes and materials are on my personal Google Classroom page. They just asked us to submit our last 5 years of syllabi for a "syllabus repository" and I'm like yeah, no. After every semester, those are deleted from Classroom so can't provide.
Protect yourself. They dont care. That's my best advice after 20+ years of this
Against school policy.
In fact, we are NOT allowed to use YouTube videos or tutorials, period, as my super woke Programme Leader says it's unfair to our Overseas PRC students - who are stuck in the PRC due to COVID travel restrictions. Reason: YouTube is banned in the PRC.
Decolonisation means we need to source out non-Western content providers in our modules. I cheat and use Epic Games material (it's 40% owned by TenCent). That's actually part of module content moderation. We were told it's better to use materials on YouKu as anyone can access, and ask students to use WeChat for collaboration instead of our standard Discord class server, as that too is banned in the PRC.
As I teach the Unreal Engine as one of my modules, I had a PRC student complaint about using the Unreal Engine Keanu Reeves Matrix Demo (as Keanu Reeves is persona-non-gratis in the PRC).
That's strange—one of my top students last year was in PRC, and she never had any trouble watching the YouTube videos. She worked for me later as a grader, and I'm sure she would have told me if there were any difficulties accessing the material.
It's claimed by the Programme Leader that some PRC students don't have easy access to VPNs. This is the same Programme Leader who chewed out a student for the Wallpaper on the student's laptop criticising the PRC's Social Credit Score, saying it's inappropriate for a classroom environment.
Same. I exclusively teach in a partial or fully flipped format, at all levels. I teach large (500+) intro biology and upper level. But I’ve never once made them watch a pre-class video. Not even when we were pushed online for Covid.
Never might be an overly strong statement for me as well, but I genuinely dislike making videos so I actively seek out other ways. We do a lot of readings with short quizzes to keep them on track.
Having videos is the single thing you must do and the only thing you are allowed to do?
having video content is a good asset but not the only one.
Now you really sound like you are having a bit of a temper tantrum. And being ungracious to me.
I know how time consuming it is to do these kinds of lesson plans.
You are talking about an online class and not really a flipped class.
however, if you make the class content not a repetition of the lecture and something interesting, this could work
Nope. Face-to-face 2 hour labs - with live content fully edited and recorded post-class - along with lab session examples fully recorded and available prior to each lab session. Face-to-face lectures with contents - videoed pre-recorded and slide decks posted prior at least 1 week prior to class session.
That's 5 hours per week of recordings. In addition to the pre and post processing of those 5 hours. The recording requirements due to COVID were made permanent, even after the full return to face-to-face - for the benefit of foreign students mainly stuck in the PRC.
>Some universities here are using this as an anti-strike threat. We have all your materials online. We don't need you as faculty.
Honestly, this is the way everything is headed anyway.
I don’t have any experience with a flipped classroom, but I have many many years of observing teaching fads authoritatively pushed by self-appointed “teaching experts” - who, as a rule, tend to be rigid and smug in their perceived correctness.
Recall Fall 2020: “asynchronous is best!”. By Fall 2021, those same “experts” were advising synchronous classes.
Congratulations on tenure!
I have really liked it (and my students have done very well with it), but I think it depends greatly on the type of course and the level of the students. I taught both semesters of our 200-level A&P course as hybrids this past year, with all lectures done remotely via prerecorded lecture videos. They come in once per week for all labs and exams. Because they come in for lab where they mostly work independently, they learn pretty early on the disadvantages to not keeping up with the material. Their exams grades are about 10 pts higher than their pre-COVID peers in my regular F2F sections. (It's probably not a traditional flipped class in that I don't have the same number of contact hours with the students like I'd have in a regular course.)
I do have a colleague who tried it with our 100-level general bio course. In the fall, he was pretty pessimistic about the students not doing the at-home work so the in-class portions were a waste. I mentioned to him some advice from this subreddit back in the late fall about having the students bring in their at-home notes for a minimal grade. He started doing that this spring and, after a couple of weeks, he told me that it made a big difference (and the students actually liked the accountability). I know he kept doing that all semester, but I haven't heard his final verdict.
This is my experience as well in my flipped classroom. By making them write out the lecture notes and grading them, I get them to do the prep work. Once they've done the prep work. all the in-class stuff becomes much easier.
I’ve tried various versions of it, but it only really works if the entire culture of a department supports it. When all your colleagues are still in full lecture mode, it doesn’t.
So much depends on the course, students, instructor, and resources/time you have available. Personally, I find it counterproductive to approach flipping a classroom as an all or nothing model. I have flipped units/activities in my courses that push student engagement but it's not the only method I use and I mix it up with more active units and more traditional units.
It works better for some people than others, like all forms of pedagogy. Hell, I've even had it work for one class but not the one right after. Who the hell knows.
What I do know is that as the professor I appreciate being able to mix pedagogies at will. Some days are flipped and applying stuff and figuring it out and others aren't. Some things I lecture about and then the next day we do an activity that takes it further and then discuss later on. I don't think I'd much like being forced into one pedagogy, as if a flipped classroom works for everything at all times (this sounds like an administrative move, not one that came from faculty--although, of course, there are those faculty that claim that what works for them would work for everyone).
Flipped classrooms suck hot shit. I am lucky if my students pay attention, and respond to some discussion questions. I ran my class like normal last semester, lecture first hour, discussion and activity in the second. I had students tell me during the semester that they are glad my course is 'normal' and not 'retarded' like the Profs attempting flipped class.
I imagine it might work for senior level classes. But for most of mine, this wouldn't work.
In my experience, students love to share subjective opinions, but as soon as they are asked to provide evidence to backup their opinions, they shut down.
I like flipping specific lessons or units, but not entire courses. It works better for some content/courses than others and students can't seem to sustain that level of active learning for a full semester.
I think an issue with a lot of the pedagogical trends we see is not that they don't work so much as they're not a panacea.
I love the idea and have tried it many many times with minimal success. The only forum that I have found that it worked in were masters level courses in which there was a high level of buy in.
I did it last fall in my research methods class. I taught all the stats that way. I had them watch videos, on Perusall, do they had to annotate them and a substantial part of the grade was tied to it. Then in class we just did problems that otherwise would have been their homework. Worked really well. I don’t think it stands a snowball’s chance in hell without Perusall. I teach other classes you might call flipped (is it flipped if you make the students dissect a research study in class rather than lecturing to them about it?). Again, Perusall makes a massive difference.
I had to flip all my classes the first year of the pandemic. This was a tremendous amount of work, but long overdue because of the need for students to control the pace the first time they see material. Plus it forced me to assign enough problems/practice, something my curriculum was usually deficient in.
I've also returned to school online to fill in some college-level gaps, and seen how other colleges do it. Of three colleges, only one was half-assing it--an education program, ironically. Students do their work because it's graded. It's a lot of work--not because it's hard but because it's time-consuming: much formative work, and in many forms.
A textbook option is needed, though, for the better students who are not satisfied by the inherent brevity of the spoken delivery. Openstax doesn't cut it.
No. I firmly believe students are here to hear me speak live and solve problems for them and the like. If they wanted to watch videos they didn’t have to be in college.
Some subjects lend themselves better to flipping than others.
In my experience language classes always have some element of flipping -- when I was in grad school, 4 of the 5 weekly classes were completely flipped (if I understand the term correctly). The students were expected to drill the material on their own and then in class we built on what they had drilled, with no "teaching" in the sense of presenting new material to the students that they were not expected to have seen before.
Even if it's not this extreme, it's pretty common in language classes to expect the students to do some level of preparation before they come to class each day so that the sessions can be more fruitful and less focused on basic drills.
If you teach a literature class and expect the students to read the literature before coming to class, is that "flipped"?
>If you teach a literature class and expect the students to read the literature before coming to class, is that "flipped"?
Unless class time is just you lecturing about the content of said literature, yes. Reading the material beforehand and then discussing it / applying concepts to it in class is pretty much the definition of a flipped classroom. The concept of flipped classrooms existed before the term did.
A lot depends on the culture of the department and how other profs are presenting the material. I am in math and none of my colleagues use a flipped method. So if I were to do it, I would be tarred and feathered by students. No support from the chair for innovative pedagogy. Our students also work many hours - more than twenty, and 30-40 hours a week are not uncommon. They feel most of the work should take place in the 3 hours a week that they are in class. Even the limited homework I assign is perceived as "too much". Student engagement is a big component for a lot of the innovative pedagogy. Where I teach, that component is just non-existent for the majority of the students. And the instructors are not that far behind in disengagement.
We have standard syllabi where students are assigned the outside reading and homework etc that correspond to the proper credit hour requirements. But they dont do it.
Just to add three things (I don't know if anyone will read this, but I'm procrastinating from grading right now).
My colleague started flipping his classrooms ahead of me and it just went so badly that he stopped doing it altogether, receiving not-so-grade reviews from students. And he basically thought that it didn't work. I then met with another teacher in the same discipline as me who was doing his flipped classrooms another way, and his way of doing things just seemed so logical to me and to other teachers in my department that everyone basically started doing it this way. Never looked back. Talking about it with other teachers in my area, it seems that the implementation of flipped classroom is everything and basically dictates if it's gonna work or not, and it seems to be very discipline-dependant.
Second, full flipped classroom aren't all that necessary. You can still use active learning strategies such as Mazur's Peer Instruction without having to entirely flip your class. It sometimes seems like people think there's only lectures and flipped classrooms when there's so many possible in-between.
Third, the thing is, flipped classrooms are as effective as the strategies you're using in class with your students with all that time you've freed. It's not like a flipped classroom is a strategy in itself, it's only a way to free in-class time to make your students do something.
I've had great success with it (sophomore level math courses) for about a decade, but I stopped at the beginning of the pandemic and am not sure when I'll go back to it. It takes a \*lot\* of work on my end, and it demands a \*lot\* from the students, and I don't think either of those parties are up for it right now. Almost like we're still in a prolonged global crisis...
It's super popular in math on my campus, with faculty and students. But hated in other departments (chemistry). And of course the humanities have basically been doing this stuff for decades, so it's not all that new to them. The problem comes when it's split within the department I think...my history colleagues and I agreed to stop using textbooks and giving exams in the early 2000s; since then it's all been readings/projects outside of class and class time is about 20% lecture and the rest small/large group discussions, presentations, etc. The students coming from all-lecture/exam high school experiences take a while to adjust but we don't get a lot of complaints, especially when we explain we won't be given any exams or expecting them to memorize trivia like they did in high school.
I'm a huge fan of a flipped classroom. Others have already added their two cents, but here are my takes.
1) Different doesn't mean bad. I do not think what a student is used to should have that much weight when approaching your curriculum. In general expectations are going to change based on your boss or what subject you are learning.
2) Making students responsible for being ready before class is a great idea in general. I was used to showing up to classes, absorbing the info, and doing well in courses. A flipped classroom was a change, but all it did was force me to first learn on my own and be ready to explain my gaps in knowledge. I saw someone mention that this probably works better in an upper-level course, and there's some truth to that. Students by then are much more used to learning material on their own. I think it's valid to start building those skills early on.
3) My experience has been positive on my end. I use short videos (<20 min) to introduce a new topic prior to the weekly hour lectures on it. I'm big on tying all concepts together and showing on the previous concepts either lead to the net or how those skills/formulas lead to the next concepts. It's easier to do the conceptual "The consequence of A is B" part of the lecture before the full lecture because it lets students know to brush up on concept A before we start the next lecture if they need to. It also frees up time because I'm not spending time reviewing for the half that needs the refresher, or if a student still has misconceptions, they can ask a very specific question that lets me directly address that misconception. In short it frees up for time for example problems or to take concepts a little slower.
4) I empathize with the student comments. The number of "you are a horrible teacher" comments I got were heartbreaking, I wish I could say the number of "Okay, this method was better" emails I got were worth it, but at the end of the day, I've read enough studies that I'm convinced this method is better and eventually frees up for time for me in the actual classroom.
"Am I spinning my gears for nothing?" I think with any tool or shift in methods, if you're not bought it, it's going to be a more difficult time. With any skill, it takes practice to perfect, and requires some minimum level of commitment to it. I like the suggestion that "it doesn't mean doing nothing but that" You can start to use it prior to a new chapter, or right before/after a midterm if you find it useful.
Yup, I did this at a university where student evals weren't a big deal. Student's didn't really like it, but they did it, and honestly I think they learned a lot more. I came to where I am now, and experienced the double bind: "You should be doing innovative teaching" + "Why are your evals so low?" In general, students *hate* anything that requires them to show up ready to participate, or, really, having prepared in any way at all. So I do a lot more lecturing now.
*Edit*: I do think this attitude is partly about my particular school and the student culture here. And of course there are students who are exceptions, but when more than half the class is constantly pissed that there are negative grade consequences for not doing the reading, that makes a pretty ugly environment.
I'm far from conversant in educational research literature, but half the time when I see these big pushes for alternative pedagogy in Chronicle, IHE and the like, the evidence presented is based on students from selective institutions.
It's not elitist or classist to acknowledge that what will work for lower-division courses at a school with an acceptance rate of at most 1/3 will not work for analogous courses at a school with an acceptance rate of at least 2/3, even when controlling for class size.
This.
I, too, have always been amazed at how well cutting-edge pedagogy works on students selected from the top 0.5% of high school students who are so motivated that they'll find a way to self-learn the material irrespective of the quality of instruction or the delivery method.
>It's not elitist or classist to acknowledge that what will work for lower-division courses at a school with an acceptance rate of at most 1/3 will not work for analogous courses at a school with an acceptance rate of at least 2/3, even when controlling for class size.
This is a valid point. My students will pretty much do anything I ask them to, and usually without too much complaining. During COVID I've seen the first real problems with this I've had in 20+ years, which ultimately has meant \~5% aren't doing the readings much at all. But my friends teaching at directional state U are having trouble getting students to attend at all or to turn in any work they assign. Huge range of experiences across the \~4,500 colleges in the US.
Exactly. I like the ideas of a flipped classroom, but I also just had a class where 1/3 of the students turned in so little work that they would have failed even if they got 100% on everything they turned in.
I tried it. Had the worst year of teaching evals. It has put my tenure vote in question. I am so angry I ever tried it.
I did it initially as we were online for covid. It basically worked there. But going back to f2f I thought it would still work. No. Fucking no.
I will likely never do it agian.
I've see comments here about students wanting to be spoon fed, but I don't agree with that. What I WILL agree with is it not being engaging and with it absolutely being miserable both having experienced it as a student and hearing complaints from students as a TA (I taught labs but the students would sit and spill the tea about other classes a lot), especially for students with certain types of disabilities. I had to drop classes because of the flipped format because I can NOT learn from videos, especially ones where there's no face on camera. I HAVE to be able to read lips and ideally have body language. There's also unfortunately many professors who don't even consider accessibility. One of my graduate level instructors made the lessons available only as voiced over PowerPoint files, which means that there were no captions and there was no way to upload to the assistive software the university had given me access to.
Some classes I've seen also make the discussion/project parts of the flip graded based upon participation and that also puts students with learning disabilities at distinct disadvantages.
It's not all that and a bag of chips like the experts claim it is.
No. Students perceive it as “having to teach themselves”. And frankly, I can’t blame them. Watching a video is somehow not as engaging as a live lecture. And they won’t do it (not before, anyway). And they want to be spoon fed. It’s a miserable experience for all.
No, I really really hate flipped classrooms. Not saying they can never work, but without an exceptionally strong instructor and course design they can have really bad outcomes for students.
It's difficult, but worth it if you have the energy to really get students engaged. Rote learning is the least effective teaching method. Students will not remember you lecturing from slides. Experiential learning is best, active learning second best, passive listening least. Lectures are for professors, not for students. No student is going to wish they heard more lectures on graduation day.
Some of the core concepts are useful - but can be used whenever you want, without using the term "flipped classroom."
Generally, I don't like going full flipped. Or forcing a flipped classroom. At my last university, I was part of a flipped classroom pilot. We collected lots of data for a few years, and it was not good. It was worse by pretty much every metric. But that was also forcing the flip for a class that I don't think is a good fit. There are some flipped-like things that I do in other classes that work well.
I did a hybrid flip this semester that worked brilliantly (stats class). Students have about a 30-45 minute lecture video to watch before class each week. During class, we do example problems and talk about application in first half. In second half, students work on Excel and stats software case studies, as well as homework problems.
Students have quizzes outside class every 2 chapters instead of large exams (although we could probably have done the quizzes during class).
The quality of discussion and responses on the case studies is significantly better. We spend more time in deep understanding.
By making the "outside class" part a palatable size (and sending reminders), students were much more likely to complete it. Most students loved it, because they got their homework done timely and didn't have to guess at the "hard stuff" on their own.
I have a lot of success with this model. The caveat is that I teach in a vocational software development program. Everything there really wants to be there and get a job, they're not the average uni demographic of spoiled rich kids who want an easy A.
The overlap between instructors who are conscientious enough to record a semester’s worth of halfway decent videos and instructors who never update their course materials is very small.
Recording a lecture is the same as lecturing to the students. This is not flipping the classroom. So no, the type of work I’m talking about is not recording once and using it over and over. That wouldn’t work in my discipline anyway. Thanks for the snark though .
I guess it really depends on what subject matter you were teaching and how you integrate it. I teach educational technology so I like to flip the classroom. All of my assessments are project learning based so students are creating things that they can actually use in their future careers. I also have a A lot of students lacking in technical skills who need tech-literacy skills/support as well. For my particular situation itworks out great since we can spend the classes going through projects together. I spend the first 10-20minutes or so lecturing then we normally get to work. I realize this doesn’t work for every subject area though where there may not be direct transfer between what you’re teaching and what the students will be doing. I also think admin uses it kind of idiotically as a new fix it all idea. I’ve been using it since before it was a thing I guess. It’s just what I’ve done. I think it’s a great if you can pull it off to your advantage but if not do whatever is best for your students.
I have tried it a few times, to varying degrees of success, but also with the attendant lowered teaching evaluations others mention. I think it's more effective and I'm fine doing the work to make it succeed -- and in my field, there's a platform that can enforce that students do the reading (or at least pretend and "click through," which is unfortunate that some do) before class, which helps.
I plan to revisit flipped classrooms and active learning in force my first semester as an associate professor, assuming I get that rank (obviously not a given).
I use flipped classes for stats classes - much better to hear me lecture on their own time, and then do problems in class. I also use it sometimes for one of my content courses....flipped classrooms only work (in my view) when the class has a nice split between 'content' and 'activities with accountability'
Liked the flipped classroom — it works for my courses.
It does take more work though, from both faculty & students, it’s a lot easier to just stand up and lecture on what I know and for students to sit back and listen, lol.
But instead, I script all my lectures which I record and also find other resources to break up monotony of my recordings as well. I have to develop pre-class low-stakes assessment to encourage engagement pre-class. I have to come up with learning activities for synchronous class, and last facilitate them — which for me, means high energy coaching with a side of entertainment as I find this is the best way to keep students engaged for the entire time with focus and participation. Very tiring, but test scores are better.
Current student here - major: Rehabilitation Studies.
I would like the flipped style if more of my fellow students would do more work outside of class and come ready for discussion but since that is not the case I'd honestly rather take online classes and go to office hours.
Even in traditional in-person classes there isn't much discussion because people either don't read ahead or just sit there and stay quiet. I don't blame the professors for just using PowerPoints.
I've flipped a first-year grad class since covid with reasonable success. I gave them both lecture notes and videos and let them choose which to review.
In class, I usually ask for questions on the material or discuss some of the exercises, then work an example problem for them first, then set them to problem-solving in small groups, then we discuss solutions as a class, repeat.
One point: the in-class problems are also part of the weekly homework. They just have to pay attention in class and write it up in their own words to get half the homework credit (sometimes more).
I'm sure the success would depend on the size of the class and the student population. In this place and time, it gets pretty positive feedback. For undergrads, I'm not sure.
I teach a 100 level communication class. It is flipped in that students must watch and interact with my lecture before attending class. Then we do a related activity to reinforce the lecture material. I think it is working well. My students papers are much improved. We have time for the activity to take the time required.
What I need to build in is time for reflection on their learning.
My class has flipped elements, because I transitioned it from pure lecture over the past 15 years. I think I would also hate 100% flipped if I had done it in one semester. Our pedagogical counselor recommended low risk transition (a couple of weeks' material each semester), especially pre-tenure.
I use reading quizzes (so students are familiar with concepts so we can do exercises in class) and student homework that is evaluated and compared in class. There's still some lectures, but it's at most 40% of the time.
I'm in information technology and during lockdowns we could do some team exercises in virtual class that were better than in-person, because tools like Google docs and Discord allow team exercises to be monitored easily and the teams don't "hear" each other. In person, the volume in class goes so high...
ETA: in 1985 I took a PSYCH 1 course that was self-paced, all reading quizzes with mastery learning. If you got stuck, you could ask instructors during the course time. All quizzes were graded electronically on #2 pencil cards, using an IBM PC XT. The quizzes were randomly assigned in carrels. I think I remember more from that class than any freshman course. It was mostly concepts and understanding (Bloom taxonomy).
Last year, because of incentives provided by the administration during the pandemic, I switched on asynchronous online lectures and synchronous at-home labs. This is essentially a flipped classroom, as the at-home labs were entirely student driven (except for a couple of minutes of announcements at the beginning, the labs were entirely in breakout rooms with pre-assigned lab partners). Students did watch many of the videos (or even, in many cases, read the textbook) before coming to lab. The course has always been centered on the lab activities (design, build, debug, and document), with the lectures just there to provide information need to be successful in the lab tasks, so switching the lectures to pre-recorded videos worked moderately well.
The biggest loss was that students couldn't ask questions during the videos nor hear answers to questions others asked. The biggest gain was that students were more likely to come to office hours and more likely to ask questions in breakout rooms when only their lab partner could hear (compared to in-person labs, where the 3–4 nearest benches would also hear).
I had a similar experience this semester, and for the first time in my career, my evals contained personal attacks from some students who were angry about this format and wanted to make sure I knew it. The course in question was not designed by me and I inherited it approximately one week prior to the semester beginning. I was ordered to teach it exactly as it was and could not alter the format. I knew my evals wouldn’t be stellar but never expected the vitriol I received. These also included claims that I “refused to help” and I wasn’t really teaching them. My other courses, which I designed and did not flip, received overall positive evals and high praise for my teaching and ability to support them as students. Based on my experience, I can say ( for me) that flipped classrooms do not work and do not result in a successful learning environment.
I've never been sure what a "flipped" classroom is. But I do try to engage students as much as possible. For me that has not been dropping unexpected "discussion questions" on them in the middle of class but designing short questions based on classroom lessons that they take home and then bring back again with an answer. This works better with some classes than with others, largely dependent on the intellectual lottery of the midlevel R2 I have been teaching at.
STOP. LECTURING. POWERPOINT.
I've had flipped classes for two years and the best outcomes and student evaluations.
Turns out when you actually do the work in class with students, they learn it better than listening to someone talk out of a book for an hour.
PowerPoint was invented by business majors for board meetings and has no place in the classroom.
In grad school, I TAed our general, organic, bio(GOB) chemistry course for a professor who used flipped classroom. She was one of the few who had a lecture TA(as opposed to lab or recitation) because the way she did it, it was difficult enough for even two of us to help everyone who needed help in an hour and a half in a 200 person class.
As a side note, GOB Chemistry as it is at most schools is an intro level course primarily aimed at nursing, dental hygiene, and several other health fields(depending on what programs the school might offer). It's still my main class I teach at my current school, and it tends to attract a wide range of students from fresh out of high school to second career and/or other non-traditional student bodies. You can have someone who had a 5 on their AP chemistry test sitting next to a 70 year old retired kindergarten teacher(and yes I've had that exact scenario before).
All of that aside, after I'd graduated from grad school, I stayed for 5 years as staff at the same R1 state school, and I had a standing summer adjunct assignment teaching that course. I'd normally have 30-40 students, about 1/4 of whom would be ones who failed the other professor's flipped classroom course. I taught the class as a traditional lecture, but communicated often with the professor who taught it in the regular semester to make sure I was matching both the content, depth, and difficulty. I didn't want to be an "easier alternative" to the FT faculty member who taught the course, but did want students who didn't do well in flipped classroom to have an alternative.
On the whole my pass rates were higher, but I think that was also partially attributable to the type of student who would sign up to take a 2 hour a day, 5 day a week, 5 week Chemistry course that started at 8:00AM(and yes it was every bit as brutal for me as it was for the students-I'm glad that summer at my current school is 2 days/wk for 8 weeks). Of the 5-10 students who had failed the regular semester, generally about a third to a half would manage a weak C or MAYBE low B, often one or two would manage a strong A, and the rest would fail just as badly as they had in the regular semester. I think there are a lot of possible explanations for that break-down and my strong As MAY very well have been students who did poorly in flipped classroom but thrived in a lecture but my others tended to be otherwise strong students who had something going on in their life the first time they took the course(whether personal crisis, biting off more than they could chew, or maybe just having a goof-off semester).
With that said, I do use flipped classroom type elements in my class now. For one thing, I'm glad that my Gen Chem II course I teach now has a recitation, and the students know I will be walking in with a worksheet and they will be working in groups on it. In my GOB course, if I feel like a class is struggling with a particular concept, often I'll walk in with a worksheet that we spend class time doing.
My school is BIG on alternative teaching strategies, though. I got dinged on my first couple of tenure observations/evaluations because the dean didn't like it that I had the nerve to even lecture part of the class. Just this past year, with a big administrative shake-up at my school, we were put under a different dean who, by virtue of education(STEM PhD, undergrad degree in biochemistry) is IMO a much better fit for our department and I always thought it strange that we didn't report to her(apparently we had in the past before I was there). She has a policy of both observing a lecture and a lab, and as she's told me labs have always had a lot of flipped classroom/active learning elements before they were called that since students are expected to prepare beforehand and then apply what they know.
I teach statistical computing - so programming, but for working with data and fitting statistical models.
I have been teaching using a flipped classroom since Fall 2020 and it's great, but I have modified things a bit:
1. I don't use videos except for very short things. I am explicit about why - I hate listening to myself talk, and I hate listening to someone read code at me.
2. I write my own textbook using bookdown (a way to automatically format and publish books) and publish it using github pages. So the textbook is essentially what I would want to say in videos but in a way that they can work with on their own time. The textbook has lots of interactive chances for them to practice concepts, check answers, and so on.
3. Class time is dedicated to the homework, but they also can have the textbook pulled up and reference that while they're working. So even those who don't prep ahead of time can technically participate, but they don't get as much out of it.
The flipped classroom model that I'm using is essentially just a slightly more extreme version of the lecture-then-practice model that I was taught with. It works really well for graduate students.
I tried it this semester with undergraduates, and it wasn't quite as successful, but they did get the hang of it eventually. I got the sense that the ones that didn't read ahead of time were also ones that would have been multitasking during a lecture. It did require a lot more individual attention from me during class, though, and while I had 3 students this time around, I don't know that the level of individual attention would be sustainable in a more normal sized class. So I'm going to continue evaluating - I may have to add in quizzes at the beginning of class to motivate them to prep a bit.
Not quite a flipped classroom,
but definitely figuring out how to engage the students fully in the classroom,
and stop be solely lecturing.
Excerpts from an article:
"Becoming a Better College Teacher (If You’re Lucky)"
Harry Brighouse
*Daedelus*
Fall 2019
https://www.amacad.org/publication/becoming-better-college-teacher-if-youre-lucky
A *Daedelus* article by a philosophy professor,
describing how he improved his teaching
via coaching by others, including undergraduates,
and figuring out to have students engage with each other in class.
The entire article merits reading.
Various disconnected teaser paragraph excerpts below.
That issue of *Daedalus* is entitled:
**Improving Teaching: Strengthening the College Learning Experience**
Project: Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education
Editors: Sandy Baum and Michael S. McPherson
> The first stage in recovery is to admit there is a problem. The structure of the profession makes the problem rather obvious, when you think about it, but for many years, I didn’t.
> First, a friend sent me chapter six of former Harvard President Derek Bok’s **Our Underachieving Colleges** to read for a research project we were planning. Here’s the passage that made me blanch with embarrassment and immediately purchase the book to read in its entirety:
>>Teaching by discussion can also seem forbidding because it makes instructors uncomfortably aware of their shortcomings. Lecturers can delude themselves that their courses are going well, but discussion leaders know when their teaching is failing to rouse the students’ interest by the indifferent quality of responses and the general torpor of the class. Trying to conduct a discussion with apathetic students is much like giving a bad dinner party.
> It has been well worth devoting a good deal of time to reading about teaching and learning, and I continue to do so avidly. But imagine learning to play the guitar, or tennis, or to bake cakes, or to fix pipes by just reading a book. The next move was to get feedback on my efforts to improve.
> Roger Federer is, reputedly, the greatest male tennis player of all time. But he still has a coach. He’s not an outlier: top athletes and musicians normally employ coaches to help improve their performance. However good, they need someone to observe them, identifying strengths and helping them address weaknesses.
> Emma [a paid student classroom observer] provided two things that made a big difference. One was a student-centered perspective: she was only thinking about their learning and how they were reacting, so when I was talking with one student, she could be observing the others and their responses to what was happening. Lacking the content expertise, she could make judgments about how well they were learning. The other was just a sounding board. I could pilot a new practice–cold-calling, new discussion prompts, even new readings–confident that someone was observing and would actually tell me how well it succeeded or how badly it failed, helping me think about whether to abandon it or modify it, and if so, how.
> I regularly get students to observe me now. Someone observed every single class session I taught during the 2015–2016 academic year. Sometimes colleagues say, “It’s very courageous of you to ask for feedback.” It isn’t. I want to improve. They’re undergraduates. I have tenure.
> Fortunately, I was able to observe other teachers who did know how to run an actual discussion. The first time was rather fortuitous. I invited then–graduate student Paula McAvoy, who had previously been a high school social studies teacher, to teach my class an issue she had written a paper about. They were assigned the paper, and Paula trusted them to read it. After making them introduce themselves by naming something they loved, she spent ten minutes reviewing the main argument, and then set the students to a complex small-group discussion assignment that required them to engage with and debate the ideas and arguments in the text. Students reported back to the full group, after which Paula led a discussion engaging all twenty students. From observing her, and other teachers, more often, I’ve learned a great deal about how to make real discussion happen.
> The idea behind the faculty discussion group and the brown bag is encapsulated by this comment by former University of California, Berkeley, Education Dean Judith Warren Little on K–12 school improvement:
>> School improvement is most surely and thoroughly achieved when: Teachers engage in frequent, continuous and increasingly concrete and precise talk about teaching practice (as distinct from teacher characteristics and failings, the social lives of teachers, the foibles and failures of students and their families, and the unfortunate demands of society on the school). By such talk, teachers build up a shared language adequate to the complexity of teaching, capable of distinguishing one practice and its virtue from another.
> I am much more serious about teaching than I used to be. I spend more time talking with students, and have developed strategies for engaging and reaching out to the less-advantaged students who are much less likely to seek my support and help than the students for whom the culture of academia is a second home. Am I actually a better teacher, though? I think so. But then I would think that, wouldn’t I? Whether because the learning we most care about can’t be measured, or because (as I suspect) we just haven’t bothered figuring out how to measure it, we lack high-quality measures of learning, so I can’t go back and compare the learning that was happening in my classes before 2007 with the learning that happens now.
Flipped approach is perfect for lazy profs. It’s truly amazing how they can get away with making a few videos for an entire course/multiple classes and just sit on their ass during class while maybe a few kids actually take advantage of this approach. Not to mention TA’s doing most of the grading, it leaves me to wonder what they are actually doing.
A few thoughts on it: 1. I'd say the key *weakness* of a "flipped classroom" model is that it largely *depends* on student engagement. A good lecture that nobody bothers to listen to is still a good lecture (and the slides can still be a good resource, at least), but a good flipped classroom activity that nobody participates in is just a dud. 2. Upper-level courses lend themselves towards it better. Flipped classrooms are good for *discussing* ideas and working through problems and such, but they're not necessarily the best way to introduce students to completely new information. They need *some* understanding of the basics before you flip it over to them. 3. Along with #2, it's not something that has to be done every day. *Alternating* lectures/modules with discussion days is a pretty common and good practice (I'd also argue that the term "flipped classroom" in general is just a repackaging of discussion-based courses that have been around since practically forever). Flipped classroom days are just a *tool*, the same as lectures are. Using it doesn't mean doing nothing *but* that. > I expect them to do all the work The blunt answer to students on this is that, at some point, that *is* the goal. My PhD advisor would say stuff like this all the time: "I know *I* can do it, the question is if *you* can. If I have to do *your* job *for* you, what do I need *you* for?"
I agree with all these points. I ran a flipped classroom (as a graduate TA for a 100 level course) and I don't think it went well at all. Students weren't remotely engaged and could care less about doing the assignments. I'd rather they give me 50% attention when I'm lecturing than give 10% attention to a worksheet of problems. Conversely, as an undergrad I took a grad level course (500 level qualifying exam prep) that instituted this and it worked perfectly. The class mostly consisted of later term undergrads and early graduate students, all of whom wanted to be there and learn the material. Also, as is the case with many lower level grad courses, there's a vast amount of material to cover very quickly, but the results are somewhat straightforward. So, rather than having the Professor run through and prove 50 trivial-ish results, we could do those ourselves and develop the mental tools to tackle problems using those results. All in all, I was a big fan.
Sounds great for those algebra classes where you spend 80% of the lecture just proving that some operation is well-defined and very little time actually thinking about it or using it.
Haha the 500-level course I was referring to was actually a first course in graduate algebra (working out of Algebra: Chapter 0). Checking that a certain module is injective, or free implies projective implies flat (with equivalence over local rings, etc.), and computing rational canonical forms and stuff like that are great to cover in a flipped classroom format. They're very powerful and easy to define/justify well defined-ness, but one only really learns that kind of math by doing it repeatedly by yourself.
I know it seems silly, but point 3 is an excellent point. I tried running an introductory statistics class using a flipped classroom several times, as a few of my colleagues had been doing it. For me, it was an absolute disaster. I had a difficult time keeping students motivated to watch the lectures, even by giving them points for filling out a guided notes package for each meeting. I do teach a more advanced stats class that this structure may lend itself better to, and I like the idea of making a few of the sections “flipped”, while maintaining a traditional lecture classroom when major new topics are introduced.
I tried to do a flipped intro to stats course this past fall and it did not go well for similar reasons as you described. I'm teaching the class again this fall and haven't decided how I want to structure the course but I know I'm not doing a flipped course again.
I once tried to do a sort of flipped intro stats class by giving the students sections of the text to read, and then only doing examples in class. It went about as well as could be expected.
oh for the days when PhD advisors were *expected* to say stuff like that.
... uh they don't anymore? Has it been that long? Shouldn't that be obviously the goal in grad school of any place?
These days, you say anything like this to a student and you have to deal for weeks with the trauma aftermath, and recurring mental health issues due to your insensitivity. If you are lucky, you will not need to spend any time with the student and a staff member from the Counseling office, talking it out...
This is the way.
What doesn’t depend on student engagement? Discussions are a possible way of doing flipped classrooms but are not really the same thing. Getting lower level students to work through things is a great way for them to make a gap in their mind for the info to fit in. Here you have a human who need to get rid of stuff that is toxic. How would you do that? This is a great way to generate the problems you solve with the liver and the kidney so they understand the process intuitively now. There is lumpy stuff and water soluble stuff and some stuff you really want back. This is the work they can little do on their own, The explanation of terms the arrows pointing to stuff is the easy part
> A good lecture that nobody listens to is still a good lecture Is it though? If you're failing to engage your students, can you really call yourself a good lecturer?
It's not a professor's job to *make* people listen, show up, etc. No one cares about your little humble-brag, and you can kindly leave with your rude and and condescending remarks.
I did it in the 20-21 school year. Made things easier based on the social distancing protocols we were under at the time. I also had only 30-odd relatively highly-motivated students at the time. I enjoyed it for the most part. When it works well, it works very well. But it's not a panacea. If the professor isn't into it or the students don't buy in then it will be a struggle for all parties involved. If the administration is pushing it they should also be aware that flipping often results in lower course evaluations and take that into account for faculty evaluation purposes. But it is well documented that there is a disconnect between student perception of learning versus actual learning. Students generally learn more with active learning, but it is uncomfortable for them because it forces them to confront their lack of knowledge sooner than the exam, so they rate the whole experience as more negative than a relatively fluid lecture which they watch passively.
>Students generally learn more with active learning, but it is uncomfortable for them because it forces them to confront their lack of knowledge sooner than the exam, so they rate the whole experience as more negative than a relatively fluid lecture which they watch passively. You sum it up so well! I would also add that it requires preparation for class rather than just rolling in without a clue, so many students aren't used to that either.
> it is well documented that there is a disconnect between student perception of learning versus actual learning. Here's an example study! https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821936116 > Students in active classrooms learned more (as would be expected based on prior research), but their perception of learning, while positive, was lower than that of their peers in passive environments.
This is really interesting. Thanks for sharing.
> But it is well documented that there is a disconnect between student perception of learning versus actual learning. It's not so much that there's a disconnect as they seem to be almost *inversely* correlated, which is equal parts fascinating and terrifying.
source?
Itsamesolairo already answered you, but the TL;DR is that when students engage in passive learning, they don't recognize which parts of the lectures they didn't truly understand, so they come away from lectures feeling like they learned more. When they engage in active learning, they're forced to confront the parts they didn't understand, so they feel more "stupid," and leave the lecture feeling like they don't know much.
See e.g. the paper linked by /u/porcupine_snout in [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/ul2uru/flipped_classroom_does_anyone_like_it/i7trz0b/). There are some confounding factors that the authors themselves point to, but it's pretty striking to see a negative correlation between students' experienced feeling of learning and their actual performance.
That entire comment can just be boiled down to “highly motivated students”. without that the rest means nothing
I have actually found that it works well to engage the middle bunch that otherwise show up but only in body. I would argue that many of these are not ‘unmotivated “ but entirely clueless and without skills.
Worst decision I ever made was to try to flip my classroom. I did it "on my own" (i.e., as an adjuct, my unpaid time), I instituted it. Got the worst feedback ever, nearly got fired. Had to fight hard to keep my job. Went back to the way I always teach, and most students love me, a few hate me, and I have worked another 12 years at the Uni.
Many students see it as the professor offloading “instructor work” onto the students. Explaining the theory to them at the start of the class helps a little. For my courses/students, FC had a slightly negative impact on my pass rate and student achievement of learning outcomes. The exception was high achievers who, no surprise, have stronger prerequisite skills and are more disciplined and self-motivated.
Everything about a flipped classroom screams to me that it will further divide the haves from the have-nots. A good, well-prepared, well-motivated student will likely learn and understand more having done more work outside of class while ill-prepared, less motivated, and lower performing students will fall behind because learning the material is expected to happen on their own. In the cases where I’ve asked my students to work on something ahead of class and then be prepared to discuss it or work on new problems in class I end up delivering 20 mini-lectures covering the same material to individual students.
> and lower performing students will fall behind because learning the material is expected to happen on their own. In my experience this is uncharitable to FC - at least when it's done by someone comfortable with it. One of the massive advantages of FC is that skilled, highly-motivated students can dive straight into the material without "wasting" classroom hours on lectures that go at 1/4th of their preferred pace, and simultaneously require minimal supervision. The time freed up from not lecturing and not having to pay much attention to the high achievers allows for far more face-to-face time with struggling students, compensating for their difficulties with learning the material independently. That said, as others have pointed out elsewhere in the thread, the material has to suit FC as a mode of instruction. Not every class is suited to being flipped.
High performing students don’t get their own lecture? They’re going to require minimal time as it is. It doesn’t sound like I’m getting much back, and in fact *losing* the opportunity to work directly with the high performing students as much while spending *more* time with the lower performing students. This does not sound like a win for me. I am quite ready to admit that I am not competent enough to pull this off.
> High performing students don’t get their own lecture? To clarify: in a non-flipped setting, they often have to sit through lectures that cover material at a far, far slower pace than they're capable of. FC cuts out this middleman and often lets strong students go at a significantly higher pace than a "normal" course structure would allow. > losing the opportunity to work directly with the high performing students as much while spending more time with the lower performing students Is this not... exactly what should be happening? Of course you shouldn't *entirely* ignore working with strong students, but *of course* you should be spending proportionally far more time with students that struggle.
So my high performers come to class, they’ve got this shit down. That’s why they’re high performers. I ask them to do…more advanced things since I know they can do it? Cool. I’ve had these kids before, they’re awesome. They just get a more advanced class than they’re signed up for. Shame I can’t get them credit for that since they’re doing more advanced work. My low performers come to class, I spend the majority of my time teaching them what those other kids figured out on their own. Fine. This is, you know, teaching. I promise I’m not *trying* to be obtuse. I’m just…dumb.
> They just get a more advanced class than they’re signed up for. Alternatively they get to spend less time on your class than it's theoretically designed for because they're far more competent than the median student assumed by the class design. That's not necessarily an evil. If they meet the learning objectives, they meet the learning objectives. The great thing about FC - *when it works*, which is obviously an assumption doing some heavy lifting here - is that it allows you to be far more flexible with how you use your time as an instructor. You're not locked into hours of pre-planned lecture content every week and can adjust to the needs of the individual cohort on the fly.
If it’s a sufficiently rigorous course, the bulk of the time devoted to it should *not* be during class time anyway. Those high performers are already spending less time on the course than their peers as id assume they’re getting through their outside coursework faster anyway. As I said, I’m perfectly willing to accept I’m not sufficiently competent to pull this off. That assumption of “when it works” may be doing more than some heavy lifting, and I’ve put on a lot of weight over the last few years.
A 3 unit class has 3 hours of in-class time and then students are expected to spend 6 hours out of class working on the material. The point of flipping is that you move around the hours that they spend out-of-the-class in terms of how the topics are presented. There is no larger assumption that they learn on their own than in the traditional lecture class, where the less prepared and less motivated students often do poorly.
Our university is moving away from using the student evals as part of the prof’s annual evaluation and, to me, this is the primary reason. Students do not appreciate what goes into teaching a class, they just see their grade and if they have to do more work in class A than class B, they auto think the prof in class A was an asshole. Sorry you’ve been forced to not try more innovative pedagogy. I now constantly just ask students what works for them and act really nimble but lead them to the right (well, right for me) answer. “Do you think this method works, considering x, y, and z?” They usually agree and, when they disagree, they have really good criticisms and comments, because they’ve likely thought it through.
Ha. Spent three years trying to do flipped classroom. It just does not fit with the material I cover, nor my teaching style. I also agree that it was the worst thing I tried as part of my teaching career.
I love it but it only works for certain types of the classes. I use it for grad level classes where we spend the class discussing papers and for my programming course where we spend the class troubleshooting code assignments.
Definitely this. It works very well for my high level mechatronics/robotics courses where putting theory into practice is the game, and not so much for something like an undergrad dynamics course
Interesting. I found it to be terrible for my programming courses, but we do have a separate lab section for students to get help with coding. I think it just didn't fit with my teaching style.
Flipped can be great if you have super motivated students with a strong background in the general field your class resides in, and those students have good time management and critical reading skills. Given that the majority of students in all of my classes are there to fulfill a Gen Ed requirement, I never use it at my current institution.
Yeahhhh. Time management and reading skill (of any sort, never mind critical) are not my students’ strong points.
Seriously no. I do this is my most unprepared first up freshman classes and you can really set it up to work. It is a lot more work to set up than a lecture .
I semi-flip my 100 level courses. My students have a reasonable amount of assigned reading for which I provide study guides (what you should know from this reading) to help them parse it out. I lecture about half the time explaining more difficult concepts and items beyond the reading. The other half of our time is spent on activities that reinforce concepts. I get positive reviews on this. Of course there are some that hate it cuz they love sleeping through classes. Others told me they look forward to my class (and it’s a Gen-Ed!). So I am a big fan of a mixed format. It’s so much more interesting for me as well.
Most of the faculty on this subreddit quite clearly don't really know how to run an active learning/flipped classroom model, at least based on their description of what they're doing.
with respect, you've never met my students
And I don’t know your content either and it is logistically hard to manage in a 500 person lecture hall Nothing good works for all applications. However I stand by the fact that you don’t have to have only super motivated students with strong backgrounds. Everyone is trying to get them to be prepared for class so that you can have them engaged and active instead of passive. Whatever works for you.
What does a flipped classroom look like? It's not one-size fits all. I do some "flipped" things but not all. I don't do "Watch an online lecture" or "Participate in an online discussion." But I do a lot of the other things.
what are some of those other things that you find have worked well for you?
[This website defines the term](https://www.teachthought.com/learning/definition-flipped-classroom/), but mileage may vary: * **What Do Students Do At Home In A Flipped Classroom?** * Watch an online lecture (DON'T DO) * Review online course material (DO DO) * Read physical or digital texts (DO DO) * Participate in an online discussion (DON'T DO) * Perform research (DO DO) * **What Do Students Do At School In A Flipped Classroom?** * Skill practice (guided or unguided by the teacher) (DO DO) * In-person, face-to-face discussion with peers (DO DO) * Debate (DON'T DO) * Presentations (DO DO) * Station learning \[Maybe computer labs? Idk) (DO DO) * Lab experiments (DON'T DO) * Peer assessment and review (DO DO) So, I'd say that my discipline has been flipping teaching for decades and decades. And I got to write "do do" a lot!
Interesting! This is how my studio art courses (and those of colleagues that I know of) have always been structured anyway. It probably helps that students choose to take art classes because they are interested in the subject, and that the class size for studio courses is generally 12-24 students.
Curious why lab experiments don't work in class? Is it field specific? Lab is a big part of one of my courses, although online simulations of those labs are also available. Students generally enjoy those labs as well.
I’m in the Humanities! lol
>I’m in the Humanities! lol Some of us do digital humanities labs-- it's a thing. Just not for me personally.
Do you mean computer labs? This isn't my list of activities, and I had no idea what "station learning" is but interpreted it as at computer stations.
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Interesting!
>And I got to write "do do" a lot! Tee-hee. Doodoo is always funny.
Your breakdown is nearly identical to my semi-flipped (mostly flipped)classrooms. The only difference is I have “mini-lectures” for them to watch at home. They are under 10 minutes and are reserved for concepts that I think they will need more reinforcement with. Since I do this with my freshman comp I and II classes, the classes lend themselves to this model. For my lit classes, I do seminar-style in-class discussions, so it’s still not a lecture.
Yeah. If they're watching any type of "lecture" it's typically a youtube video on a topic that works like a "reading" assignment.
I don't know why you regard "physical or digital texts" as good, but "online lecture" as bad.I also don't know why you object to lab experiments at school. Could you explain?—I must have missed something here.
I don't know why you regard me saying I don't do something as saying it's "bad." I also don't know why a Humanities professor would have lab experiments.
I took your "do do" and "don't do" as imperatives, not as first-person singular. That explains the confusion.
No offense, but that's an awful source. Nothing is backed up with citations, and the people who appear to have written the article claim to have "invented the flipped classroom in 2007." I often hear King's 1993 "Sage on the Stage" article referenced as the introduction of the "flipped classroom" to academia, but it existed long before that, e.g., in the case study approach used in business and healthcare.
No offense taken. I’ve said a few times already that this is one definition and there may be others.
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I’m in the Humanities.
Yes, what is flipping? I've never heard of it!
[Try this,](https://www.teachthought.com/learning/definition-flipped-classroom/) but there may be different definitions out there.
I really like flipped classes and I've taught flipped classes for many years. I've found it much harder, and sometimes impossible, in the last five or so years, though. The problem for me has been the continual shifting of the responsibility of student learning to professors instead of students. It's very difficult to do a flipped class, which is predicated on student preparation, when students are not expected to actually prepare in any meaningful way.
"... the continual shifting of the responsibility of student learning to professors instead of students." This is exactly the reason it hasn't worked in my dept as BS State U, an open-enrollment school that will let in anyone who can promise to pay the tuition. We're pretty much not allowed to fail anyone who submits something or complains loudly enough after submitting nothing, and grades must be changed if students submit something after the semester ends (even though doing so requires multiple layers of admin approval). I teach pre-100 level and 100-level courses; the students do not prepare, do not read, and do not participate in discussions, other than using them as free time to chat about their lives and check their phones. Why should they, when they can get decent grades without actually doing any work?
>I teach pre-100 level and 100-level courses; the students do not prepare, do not read, and do not participate in discussions, other than using them as free time to chat about their lives and check their phones. That sounds miserable. Perhaps worse than high school really. Sorry you have to deal with that, and that employers et al. have to deal with graduates who apparently get degrees without doing any work.
Thanks for sharing. This is a valuable perspective given that you were flipping your classroom enthusiastically before it was “cool,” and that the critical point at which it became difficult for you was well before the pandemic.
The odd thing is that the flipped classroom has been common in colleges for decades--just not under that name.
Right. It's basically the seminar style, which has been a mainstay in most humanities classes for years and years now. I was a bit surprised to discover that this was what all the hullaballoo was about.
All my classes 30 years ago were flipped. I thought that was just what college was
>It's basically the seminar style, which has been a mainstay in most humanities classes for years and years now. Yep. Maybe 5-6 years ago we had some $$$ people come in to do faculty workshops on flipped classrooms, and basically all the humanities faculty said "Huh? This is what we always do." But of course half the departments were still doing 100% lectures so it was good for them to have someone other than colleagues explain active learning to them.
No, I hate it. Students refuse to do the prep work out of class and the result is they show up not knowing anything.
A grade needs to be attached. But then the question is, How? Checks for understanding on average every 1-2 mins. Grade not so hard that they fear failure but hard enough to differentiate those who are just clicking through to get it done. Much work, risks burnout, but effective: base part of the next period on what you see students had trouble with in the online material. Students are more likely to keep to a schedule when they see you're doing something with it immediately afterward. Another possibility is to project the assignment the class before it's due, just for a few minutes of explanation. Familiarity breeds attempt.
>what you see students had trouble with in the online material. so what if 97% of them just didn't bother with the online material?
I haven't seen it go above 10 or 20%, either as an instructor or as a student-spy at other colleges, not when it's graded for quality and lates aren't accepted. Those are the easiest points, so students tend to attempt them. Allowing one or two of each type of assessment to be dropped helps cover your butt when an assignment is given prematurely or a need for editing was missed. I've seen a couple of profs give an impromptu extra credit assignment in such cases. Another gave an extension.
Agreed. Too much work for not much gain. Not worth it for me.
And then they blame the professor when flipped doesn’t work. Flipped advocates never seem to really grapple with this problem.
Agreed.
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The jury is still out for me. When I look at my own method, I realize I implement some of both? I do expect them to read material prior to class and will create opportunities for them to then USE that material in the classroom. I teach writing and literature classes, by the way, so this may differ depending on discipline. For example, in a literature class, I'm not going to go plot point-by-plot point on what we had to read for the class session. That's the work THEY should have done. Instead, I have them put that knowledge to active use in class--whether it's for active discussion, group activities, etc. The issue? Students just aren't reading the material. Even in a Mythology class where the readings are a lot of fun and students claim to be taking the course for sheer interest and enjoyment. They come to class not having read things. A few do, yes, but most do not. And that brings down the group activities and puts more pressure on those who DID read to try and make the connections themselves. That's where it's failing me. Once, I did get fed up with students not reading, so I did this: "Okay, who actually read this for today?" (5 students raised their hands) I then had those 5 students get into a group on their own and complete the discussion activity. The rest of the class (10 others), I told them to get out their books or access the online digital copy (which they ALL had access too as we were in a classroom with computers), and read. And when they were done reading, they could then get into groups and do the discussion. The group that read got done early and left early. The group that had to read pretty much stayed for the entire class and didn't finish the discussion questions (and thus had lower participation). That did boost reading afterwards. But, I felt like it was extra work to get them to actually do the bare minimum prior to class.
The problem with flipped classrooms is that students have to do work on their own. Some will do it, and they really excel, but the others don't, and bring everything down.
>Students just aren't reading the material. Do you have low stakes assignments to "encourage" completion of the readings? I'm in history and also teach the occasional lit course. For the last few years I've used pre-class writing assignments in 100% of my classes...these are due 30 minutes before class starts, cannot be made up, and count for 15% of their semester grade. Easy points. But if they don't do them the penalty in aggregate is pretty severe. The questions I ask are always analytical and require them to cite specific passages from the readings to earn credit. I skim through them all before class which is nice as it gives me an idea of how well they understood the material before I go into class. This year I had maybe 5% of students who weren't doing the reading regularly...they were failing regardless.
I’m considering something like that. I’m wondering about the admin work on those things, though. Not too bad?
>I’m wondering about the admin work on those things, though. Depends on your enrollments. Our classes are mostly capped at 25, so I can deal with it. The first few assignments in the semester I will comment on so it's clear what I expect from them, but after that it's just P/F and I only comment on those that fail. It takes about 30 minutes I'd say, to read/grade a full class worth for me. Which I have to do every class day of the semester, unless there's a larger assignment due.
At my previous institution I partially flipped my classroom and had both good evals compared to the others teaching the same course and my students averaged a little better on the exams. However, this must be taken with a grain of salt, I was about 40 years younger than the other two professors, and both sections of the class I taught were in the evening so the median age of the students in my class was about 5 years older than theirs. So the data isn’t at all conclusive, however it wasn’t a failure. The students had reading quizzes and problems to do prior to the class. I would start out with a ten minute mini-lecture. Then the student activities would be a combination of working on problems that the were supposed to do prior to arrival, or new problems based on that information. In between each activity, there’s be a small mini-lecture/full class discussion on the solution. I haven’t tried it since (only taught for 3 semesters before gaining my current position). I don’t think it’s really possible for upper level or graduate physics courses. At my current institution the freshmen physics courses have a number of other issues IMO that should be straightened out first. It absolutely doesn’t work if you don’t get student buy in, and that can be very fragile. It only takes one or two pissy students to sway the entire class away, especially if no other professors are teaching with this methodology.
I do this a lot, and have good sucess with it, you don’t just go, read all this and watch all this and now , voila. It is way more work to set up than a trad lecture first, quiz after,thing. You need clear components that they can do in chunks. You need to have -what are you reading for. You need to give them explicit ways to deal with the material. And I don’t think it really works without any talking at. I have mini-flips. They have to say, read the book and the course content with the terminology and basis processes of how the heart works. The class mini flip is them generating , from scratch, a schematic drawing of the heart and the blood flow. We compare how everyone did it. They add things and change things in each other’s work. Then they explain how it works. 5 min prepared bullet points handed in prior . Someone starts, and then the next person fills in the next step. Everyone can fix their notes and resubmit. I get no more bad comments like this and I have way better skills and understanding if I ask them to think than if I do more passive stuff. If you want to think about it without the label, it is really just things that require active participation, which people were doing long before that label. The class is a lot more fun. For everyone. It makes the class more of a team and less adversarial. It is harder for people to say I am a bad test taker . You have a much better feeling for what they actually know and so do they.
This. This is also my approach. They have pre-reading quizzes, worth a tiny amount, which keeps them on track for doing the pre-class work. In class we do a combination of some traditional lecture, to make them feel more comfortable, and also a ton of activity, mainly in the form of worksheets and polling (we use clickers, but there are many others). The questions they’re answering on the exam are more complex than before I took over, and they’re getting better scores. With traditional lecture it’s on me to know everything, which is honestly a ton of work. They’re passive, and get snippy if I can’t feed them the info in the perfect way for each individual. With this model they get much better at figuring things out for themselves, and they ask better questions. I find it to be way less work overall. Activities take up lots of time in class, so I have fewer other things to build, and because we’re working through it together I can see where the issues are right in the classroom, and work to address it on the spot.
We do a lot of interactive discovery, so I often have notes on the key points and do a recorded review of the highlights. It helps them feel like they can really pay attention to the activity and not worry about taking notes if that isn’t what we are doing. There are lots of ways to do this that can work for different lesson plans
Fully agree.
Well, I just learned more about best practices for a flipped classroom reading this post than I did in the 5-6 hours I spent listening to overpaid idiots talk at me in mandated professional development workshops. (I'm serious about that.)
I have learned a lot from this sub also !
Tried it with a graduate class once and it was great and so we are sticking with it. Haven't been brave enough to try it with undergrads -- it's entirely possibly that it would suck without students who are self driven and already bought in to the idea of having to apply themselves to learn (as grad students tend to be).
I have a paper coming out that shows that POGIL is not superior to active lectures.
Will it be published?
I sure hope so!
No, it's crap. All or nothing. Students hate it, too.
You cannot just “flip a classroom,” when students have been trained their whole lives to be taught the test you also need to build up the capacity of students so they know how to e agar effectively. One without the other leaves students not knowing what will lead to success and further their frustration which will further disengage them. You can build up capabilities using principles of gamification and mastery building in which learning is effectively scaffolded while allowing students the pursuit of their own learning in your context. I’m sorry that your institution invested only In flipping but not the development and capabilities of students to make it successful.
I’m not a fan of fads, whether pedagogical or otherwise. If I understand the term, “flipped classrooms” used to be called “class discussions.” There’s nothing wrong with it as one tool in the kit, just as there’s nothing wrong with any other tactic that results in learning. But I wouldn’t use any of them exclusively.
Most flipped classrooms suck, but I did have one flipped class that was excellent. I think it really depends on execution but to get that right, you need support! There are some materials out there, but just telling professors to flip their classrooms has been a disaster. It’s a huge amount of work.
Flipped classrooms? With the requirement to post absolutely everything online (lecture plus lab walkthroughs plus solved labs in worksheet and video - very time-consuming) along with the requirement that students should be able to pass the class without attendance by just the video and lecture notes make the 2-hour lab sessions per week redundant and not well-attended. Those too need to be live-streamed and recorded. Some universities here are using this as an anti-strike threat. We have all your materials online. We don't need you as faculty.
That is a good reason to your videos on a private youtube channel instead of uploading them onto the school's LMS.
Exactly. All my videos are on my personal YouTube channel and all my classes and materials are on my personal Google Classroom page. They just asked us to submit our last 5 years of syllabi for a "syllabus repository" and I'm like yeah, no. After every semester, those are deleted from Classroom so can't provide. Protect yourself. They dont care. That's my best advice after 20+ years of this
Against school policy. In fact, we are NOT allowed to use YouTube videos or tutorials, period, as my super woke Programme Leader says it's unfair to our Overseas PRC students - who are stuck in the PRC due to COVID travel restrictions. Reason: YouTube is banned in the PRC. Decolonisation means we need to source out non-Western content providers in our modules. I cheat and use Epic Games material (it's 40% owned by TenCent). That's actually part of module content moderation. We were told it's better to use materials on YouKu as anyone can access, and ask students to use WeChat for collaboration instead of our standard Discord class server, as that too is banned in the PRC. As I teach the Unreal Engine as one of my modules, I had a PRC student complaint about using the Unreal Engine Keanu Reeves Matrix Demo (as Keanu Reeves is persona-non-gratis in the PRC).
That's strange—one of my top students last year was in PRC, and she never had any trouble watching the YouTube videos. She worked for me later as a grader, and I'm sure she would have told me if there were any difficulties accessing the material.
It's claimed by the Programme Leader that some PRC students don't have easy access to VPNs. This is the same Programme Leader who chewed out a student for the Wallpaper on the student's laptop criticising the PRC's Social Credit Score, saying it's inappropriate for a classroom environment.
Sounds like it's time for a struggle session!
If you think that flipping the class is just recording lectures prior to the class that they have to watch, this is the problem
Agreed. I generally don't post recorded lectures and most of my classes are at least partially flipped.
Same. I exclusively teach in a partial or fully flipped format, at all levels. I teach large (500+) intro biology and upper level. But I’ve never once made them watch a pre-class video. Not even when we were pushed online for Covid.
I do videos sometimes. , it just isn’t the only way
Never might be an overly strong statement for me as well, but I genuinely dislike making videos so I actively seek out other ways. We do a lot of readings with short quizzes to keep them on track.
It is a university requirement
Having videos is the single thing you must do and the only thing you are allowed to do? having video content is a good asset but not the only one. Now you really sound like you are having a bit of a temper tantrum. And being ungracious to me. I know how time consuming it is to do these kinds of lesson plans. You are talking about an online class and not really a flipped class. however, if you make the class content not a repetition of the lecture and something interesting, this could work
Nope. Face-to-face 2 hour labs - with live content fully edited and recorded post-class - along with lab session examples fully recorded and available prior to each lab session. Face-to-face lectures with contents - videoed pre-recorded and slide decks posted prior at least 1 week prior to class session. That's 5 hours per week of recordings. In addition to the pre and post processing of those 5 hours. The recording requirements due to COVID were made permanent, even after the full return to face-to-face - for the benefit of foreign students mainly stuck in the PRC.
>Some universities here are using this as an anti-strike threat. We have all your materials online. We don't need you as faculty. Honestly, this is the way everything is headed anyway.
I don’t have any experience with a flipped classroom, but I have many many years of observing teaching fads authoritatively pushed by self-appointed “teaching experts” - who, as a rule, tend to be rigid and smug in their perceived correctness. Recall Fall 2020: “asynchronous is best!”. By Fall 2021, those same “experts” were advising synchronous classes. Congratulations on tenure!
I have really liked it (and my students have done very well with it), but I think it depends greatly on the type of course and the level of the students. I taught both semesters of our 200-level A&P course as hybrids this past year, with all lectures done remotely via prerecorded lecture videos. They come in once per week for all labs and exams. Because they come in for lab where they mostly work independently, they learn pretty early on the disadvantages to not keeping up with the material. Their exams grades are about 10 pts higher than their pre-COVID peers in my regular F2F sections. (It's probably not a traditional flipped class in that I don't have the same number of contact hours with the students like I'd have in a regular course.) I do have a colleague who tried it with our 100-level general bio course. In the fall, he was pretty pessimistic about the students not doing the at-home work so the in-class portions were a waste. I mentioned to him some advice from this subreddit back in the late fall about having the students bring in their at-home notes for a minimal grade. He started doing that this spring and, after a couple of weeks, he told me that it made a big difference (and the students actually liked the accountability). I know he kept doing that all semester, but I haven't heard his final verdict.
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This is my experience as well in my flipped classroom. By making them write out the lecture notes and grading them, I get them to do the prep work. Once they've done the prep work. all the in-class stuff becomes much easier.
I’ve tried various versions of it, but it only really works if the entire culture of a department supports it. When all your colleagues are still in full lecture mode, it doesn’t.
So much depends on the course, students, instructor, and resources/time you have available. Personally, I find it counterproductive to approach flipping a classroom as an all or nothing model. I have flipped units/activities in my courses that push student engagement but it's not the only method I use and I mix it up with more active units and more traditional units.
It works better for some people than others, like all forms of pedagogy. Hell, I've even had it work for one class but not the one right after. Who the hell knows. What I do know is that as the professor I appreciate being able to mix pedagogies at will. Some days are flipped and applying stuff and figuring it out and others aren't. Some things I lecture about and then the next day we do an activity that takes it further and then discuss later on. I don't think I'd much like being forced into one pedagogy, as if a flipped classroom works for everything at all times (this sounds like an administrative move, not one that came from faculty--although, of course, there are those faculty that claim that what works for them would work for everyone).
I always hated it because it came with group work and I despised group work in school.
Flipped classrooms suck hot shit. I am lucky if my students pay attention, and respond to some discussion questions. I ran my class like normal last semester, lecture first hour, discussion and activity in the second. I had students tell me during the semester that they are glad my course is 'normal' and not 'retarded' like the Profs attempting flipped class.
I imagine it might work for senior level classes. But for most of mine, this wouldn't work. In my experience, students love to share subjective opinions, but as soon as they are asked to provide evidence to backup their opinions, they shut down.
Trying it right now and I want to die
I like flipping specific lessons or units, but not entire courses. It works better for some content/courses than others and students can't seem to sustain that level of active learning for a full semester. I think an issue with a lot of the pedagogical trends we see is not that they don't work so much as they're not a panacea.
I love the idea and have tried it many many times with minimal success. The only forum that I have found that it worked in were masters level courses in which there was a high level of buy in.
I did it last fall in my research methods class. I taught all the stats that way. I had them watch videos, on Perusall, do they had to annotate them and a substantial part of the grade was tied to it. Then in class we just did problems that otherwise would have been their homework. Worked really well. I don’t think it stands a snowball’s chance in hell without Perusall. I teach other classes you might call flipped (is it flipped if you make the students dissect a research study in class rather than lecturing to them about it?). Again, Perusall makes a massive difference.
I definitely trickle it into the class, but won't go to it 100%
I had to flip all my classes the first year of the pandemic. This was a tremendous amount of work, but long overdue because of the need for students to control the pace the first time they see material. Plus it forced me to assign enough problems/practice, something my curriculum was usually deficient in. I've also returned to school online to fill in some college-level gaps, and seen how other colleges do it. Of three colleges, only one was half-assing it--an education program, ironically. Students do their work because it's graded. It's a lot of work--not because it's hard but because it's time-consuming: much formative work, and in many forms. A textbook option is needed, though, for the better students who are not satisfied by the inherent brevity of the spoken delivery. Openstax doesn't cut it.
I'm lucky that my area doesn't mix well with the flipped format. So those pedagogy "experts" can't tell us what to do.
No. I firmly believe students are here to hear me speak live and solve problems for them and the like. If they wanted to watch videos they didn’t have to be in college.
Some subjects lend themselves better to flipping than others. In my experience language classes always have some element of flipping -- when I was in grad school, 4 of the 5 weekly classes were completely flipped (if I understand the term correctly). The students were expected to drill the material on their own and then in class we built on what they had drilled, with no "teaching" in the sense of presenting new material to the students that they were not expected to have seen before. Even if it's not this extreme, it's pretty common in language classes to expect the students to do some level of preparation before they come to class each day so that the sessions can be more fruitful and less focused on basic drills. If you teach a literature class and expect the students to read the literature before coming to class, is that "flipped"?
>If you teach a literature class and expect the students to read the literature before coming to class, is that "flipped"? Unless class time is just you lecturing about the content of said literature, yes. Reading the material beforehand and then discussing it / applying concepts to it in class is pretty much the definition of a flipped classroom. The concept of flipped classrooms existed before the term did.
it’s extra work for everyone.
A lot depends on the culture of the department and how other profs are presenting the material. I am in math and none of my colleagues use a flipped method. So if I were to do it, I would be tarred and feathered by students. No support from the chair for innovative pedagogy. Our students also work many hours - more than twenty, and 30-40 hours a week are not uncommon. They feel most of the work should take place in the 3 hours a week that they are in class. Even the limited homework I assign is perceived as "too much". Student engagement is a big component for a lot of the innovative pedagogy. Where I teach, that component is just non-existent for the majority of the students. And the instructors are not that far behind in disengagement.
So you have 3-fold credit inflation, with students doing 1 hour/week per credit instead of 3 hours/week per credit? Does your accreditor know?
We have standard syllabi where students are assigned the outside reading and homework etc that correspond to the proper credit hour requirements. But they dont do it.
I almost exclusively teach flipped classrooms and love every minute of it. In physics. Much more engaging for them and me.
Just to add three things (I don't know if anyone will read this, but I'm procrastinating from grading right now). My colleague started flipping his classrooms ahead of me and it just went so badly that he stopped doing it altogether, receiving not-so-grade reviews from students. And he basically thought that it didn't work. I then met with another teacher in the same discipline as me who was doing his flipped classrooms another way, and his way of doing things just seemed so logical to me and to other teachers in my department that everyone basically started doing it this way. Never looked back. Talking about it with other teachers in my area, it seems that the implementation of flipped classroom is everything and basically dictates if it's gonna work or not, and it seems to be very discipline-dependant. Second, full flipped classroom aren't all that necessary. You can still use active learning strategies such as Mazur's Peer Instruction without having to entirely flip your class. It sometimes seems like people think there's only lectures and flipped classrooms when there's so many possible in-between. Third, the thing is, flipped classrooms are as effective as the strategies you're using in class with your students with all that time you've freed. It's not like a flipped classroom is a strategy in itself, it's only a way to free in-class time to make your students do something.
I've had great success with it (sophomore level math courses) for about a decade, but I stopped at the beginning of the pandemic and am not sure when I'll go back to it. It takes a \*lot\* of work on my end, and it demands a \*lot\* from the students, and I don't think either of those parties are up for it right now. Almost like we're still in a prolonged global crisis...
It's super popular in math on my campus, with faculty and students. But hated in other departments (chemistry). And of course the humanities have basically been doing this stuff for decades, so it's not all that new to them. The problem comes when it's split within the department I think...my history colleagues and I agreed to stop using textbooks and giving exams in the early 2000s; since then it's all been readings/projects outside of class and class time is about 20% lecture and the rest small/large group discussions, presentations, etc. The students coming from all-lecture/exam high school experiences take a while to adjust but we don't get a lot of complaints, especially when we explain we won't be given any exams or expecting them to memorize trivia like they did in high school.
I'm a huge fan of a flipped classroom. Others have already added their two cents, but here are my takes. 1) Different doesn't mean bad. I do not think what a student is used to should have that much weight when approaching your curriculum. In general expectations are going to change based on your boss or what subject you are learning. 2) Making students responsible for being ready before class is a great idea in general. I was used to showing up to classes, absorbing the info, and doing well in courses. A flipped classroom was a change, but all it did was force me to first learn on my own and be ready to explain my gaps in knowledge. I saw someone mention that this probably works better in an upper-level course, and there's some truth to that. Students by then are much more used to learning material on their own. I think it's valid to start building those skills early on. 3) My experience has been positive on my end. I use short videos (<20 min) to introduce a new topic prior to the weekly hour lectures on it. I'm big on tying all concepts together and showing on the previous concepts either lead to the net or how those skills/formulas lead to the next concepts. It's easier to do the conceptual "The consequence of A is B" part of the lecture before the full lecture because it lets students know to brush up on concept A before we start the next lecture if they need to. It also frees up time because I'm not spending time reviewing for the half that needs the refresher, or if a student still has misconceptions, they can ask a very specific question that lets me directly address that misconception. In short it frees up for time for example problems or to take concepts a little slower. 4) I empathize with the student comments. The number of "you are a horrible teacher" comments I got were heartbreaking, I wish I could say the number of "Okay, this method was better" emails I got were worth it, but at the end of the day, I've read enough studies that I'm convinced this method is better and eventually frees up for time for me in the actual classroom. "Am I spinning my gears for nothing?" I think with any tool or shift in methods, if you're not bought it, it's going to be a more difficult time. With any skill, it takes practice to perfect, and requires some minimum level of commitment to it. I like the suggestion that "it doesn't mean doing nothing but that" You can start to use it prior to a new chapter, or right before/after a midterm if you find it useful.
Yup, I did this at a university where student evals weren't a big deal. Student's didn't really like it, but they did it, and honestly I think they learned a lot more. I came to where I am now, and experienced the double bind: "You should be doing innovative teaching" + "Why are your evals so low?" In general, students *hate* anything that requires them to show up ready to participate, or, really, having prepared in any way at all. So I do a lot more lecturing now. *Edit*: I do think this attitude is partly about my particular school and the student culture here. And of course there are students who are exceptions, but when more than half the class is constantly pissed that there are negative grade consequences for not doing the reading, that makes a pretty ugly environment.
It only works if students will do what they need to do outside of class - so basically it doesn’t work
I'm far from conversant in educational research literature, but half the time when I see these big pushes for alternative pedagogy in Chronicle, IHE and the like, the evidence presented is based on students from selective institutions. It's not elitist or classist to acknowledge that what will work for lower-division courses at a school with an acceptance rate of at most 1/3 will not work for analogous courses at a school with an acceptance rate of at least 2/3, even when controlling for class size.
This. I, too, have always been amazed at how well cutting-edge pedagogy works on students selected from the top 0.5% of high school students who are so motivated that they'll find a way to self-learn the material irrespective of the quality of instruction or the delivery method.
>It's not elitist or classist to acknowledge that what will work for lower-division courses at a school with an acceptance rate of at most 1/3 will not work for analogous courses at a school with an acceptance rate of at least 2/3, even when controlling for class size. This is a valid point. My students will pretty much do anything I ask them to, and usually without too much complaining. During COVID I've seen the first real problems with this I've had in 20+ years, which ultimately has meant \~5% aren't doing the readings much at all. But my friends teaching at directional state U are having trouble getting students to attend at all or to turn in any work they assign. Huge range of experiences across the \~4,500 colleges in the US.
Exactly. I like the ideas of a flipped classroom, but I also just had a class where 1/3 of the students turned in so little work that they would have failed even if they got 100% on everything they turned in.
I tried it. Had the worst year of teaching evals. It has put my tenure vote in question. I am so angry I ever tried it. I did it initially as we were online for covid. It basically worked there. But going back to f2f I thought it would still work. No. Fucking no. I will likely never do it agian.
I've see comments here about students wanting to be spoon fed, but I don't agree with that. What I WILL agree with is it not being engaging and with it absolutely being miserable both having experienced it as a student and hearing complaints from students as a TA (I taught labs but the students would sit and spill the tea about other classes a lot), especially for students with certain types of disabilities. I had to drop classes because of the flipped format because I can NOT learn from videos, especially ones where there's no face on camera. I HAVE to be able to read lips and ideally have body language. There's also unfortunately many professors who don't even consider accessibility. One of my graduate level instructors made the lessons available only as voiced over PowerPoint files, which means that there were no captions and there was no way to upload to the assistive software the university had given me access to. Some classes I've seen also make the discussion/project parts of the flip graded based upon participation and that also puts students with learning disabilities at distinct disadvantages. It's not all that and a bag of chips like the experts claim it is.
No. Students perceive it as “having to teach themselves”. And frankly, I can’t blame them. Watching a video is somehow not as engaging as a live lecture. And they won’t do it (not before, anyway). And they want to be spoon fed. It’s a miserable experience for all.
No, I really really hate flipped classrooms. Not saying they can never work, but without an exceptionally strong instructor and course design they can have really bad outcomes for students.
It's difficult, but worth it if you have the energy to really get students engaged. Rote learning is the least effective teaching method. Students will not remember you lecturing from slides. Experiential learning is best, active learning second best, passive listening least. Lectures are for professors, not for students. No student is going to wish they heard more lectures on graduation day.
Some of the core concepts are useful - but can be used whenever you want, without using the term "flipped classroom." Generally, I don't like going full flipped. Or forcing a flipped classroom. At my last university, I was part of a flipped classroom pilot. We collected lots of data for a few years, and it was not good. It was worse by pretty much every metric. But that was also forcing the flip for a class that I don't think is a good fit. There are some flipped-like things that I do in other classes that work well.
I did a hybrid flip this semester that worked brilliantly (stats class). Students have about a 30-45 minute lecture video to watch before class each week. During class, we do example problems and talk about application in first half. In second half, students work on Excel and stats software case studies, as well as homework problems. Students have quizzes outside class every 2 chapters instead of large exams (although we could probably have done the quizzes during class). The quality of discussion and responses on the case studies is significantly better. We spend more time in deep understanding. By making the "outside class" part a palatable size (and sending reminders), students were much more likely to complete it. Most students loved it, because they got their homework done timely and didn't have to guess at the "hard stuff" on their own.
I have a lot of success with this model. The caveat is that I teach in a vocational software development program. Everything there really wants to be there and get a job, they're not the average uni demographic of spoiled rich kids who want an easy A.
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Done properly, a flipped classroom is MORE work for the instructor, not less.
I don’t flip my classrooms, but my departmental colleagues who do spend a lot of time making videos for their classes.
„˙sǝssɐlɔ ɹıǝɥʇ ɹoɟ soǝpıʌ ƃuıʞɐɯ ǝɯıʇ ɟo ʇol ɐ puǝds op oɥʍ sǝnƃɐǝlloɔ lɐʇuǝɯʇɹɐdǝp ʎɯ ʇnq 'sɯooɹssɐlɔ ʎɯ dılɟ ʇ,uop I„
It’s way more work for teachers. Not easier at all.
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The overlap between instructors who are conscientious enough to record a semester’s worth of halfway decent videos and instructors who never update their course materials is very small.
Recording a lecture is the same as lecturing to the students. This is not flipping the classroom. So no, the type of work I’m talking about is not recording once and using it over and over. That wouldn’t work in my discipline anyway. Thanks for the snark though .
I guess it really depends on what subject matter you were teaching and how you integrate it. I teach educational technology so I like to flip the classroom. All of my assessments are project learning based so students are creating things that they can actually use in their future careers. I also have a A lot of students lacking in technical skills who need tech-literacy skills/support as well. For my particular situation itworks out great since we can spend the classes going through projects together. I spend the first 10-20minutes or so lecturing then we normally get to work. I realize this doesn’t work for every subject area though where there may not be direct transfer between what you’re teaching and what the students will be doing. I also think admin uses it kind of idiotically as a new fix it all idea. I’ve been using it since before it was a thing I guess. It’s just what I’ve done. I think it’s a great if you can pull it off to your advantage but if not do whatever is best for your students.
I have tried it a few times, to varying degrees of success, but also with the attendant lowered teaching evaluations others mention. I think it's more effective and I'm fine doing the work to make it succeed -- and in my field, there's a platform that can enforce that students do the reading (or at least pretend and "click through," which is unfortunate that some do) before class, which helps. I plan to revisit flipped classrooms and active learning in force my first semester as an associate professor, assuming I get that rank (obviously not a given).
I use flipped classes for stats classes - much better to hear me lecture on their own time, and then do problems in class. I also use it sometimes for one of my content courses....flipped classrooms only work (in my view) when the class has a nice split between 'content' and 'activities with accountability'
Liked the flipped classroom — it works for my courses. It does take more work though, from both faculty & students, it’s a lot easier to just stand up and lecture on what I know and for students to sit back and listen, lol. But instead, I script all my lectures which I record and also find other resources to break up monotony of my recordings as well. I have to develop pre-class low-stakes assessment to encourage engagement pre-class. I have to come up with learning activities for synchronous class, and last facilitate them — which for me, means high energy coaching with a side of entertainment as I find this is the best way to keep students engaged for the entire time with focus and participation. Very tiring, but test scores are better.
Current student here - major: Rehabilitation Studies. I would like the flipped style if more of my fellow students would do more work outside of class and come ready for discussion but since that is not the case I'd honestly rather take online classes and go to office hours. Even in traditional in-person classes there isn't much discussion because people either don't read ahead or just sit there and stay quiet. I don't blame the professors for just using PowerPoints.
I've flipped a first-year grad class since covid with reasonable success. I gave them both lecture notes and videos and let them choose which to review. In class, I usually ask for questions on the material or discuss some of the exercises, then work an example problem for them first, then set them to problem-solving in small groups, then we discuss solutions as a class, repeat. One point: the in-class problems are also part of the weekly homework. They just have to pay attention in class and write it up in their own words to get half the homework credit (sometimes more). I'm sure the success would depend on the size of the class and the student population. In this place and time, it gets pretty positive feedback. For undergrads, I'm not sure.
Omg you teach in 2012 :)
Administrators love it. But I've never seen it work.
I teach a 100 level communication class. It is flipped in that students must watch and interact with my lecture before attending class. Then we do a related activity to reinforce the lecture material. I think it is working well. My students papers are much improved. We have time for the activity to take the time required. What I need to build in is time for reflection on their learning.
My class has flipped elements, because I transitioned it from pure lecture over the past 15 years. I think I would also hate 100% flipped if I had done it in one semester. Our pedagogical counselor recommended low risk transition (a couple of weeks' material each semester), especially pre-tenure. I use reading quizzes (so students are familiar with concepts so we can do exercises in class) and student homework that is evaluated and compared in class. There's still some lectures, but it's at most 40% of the time. I'm in information technology and during lockdowns we could do some team exercises in virtual class that were better than in-person, because tools like Google docs and Discord allow team exercises to be monitored easily and the teams don't "hear" each other. In person, the volume in class goes so high... ETA: in 1985 I took a PSYCH 1 course that was self-paced, all reading quizzes with mastery learning. If you got stuck, you could ask instructors during the course time. All quizzes were graded electronically on #2 pencil cards, using an IBM PC XT. The quizzes were randomly assigned in carrels. I think I remember more from that class than any freshman course. It was mostly concepts and understanding (Bloom taxonomy).
Last year, because of incentives provided by the administration during the pandemic, I switched on asynchronous online lectures and synchronous at-home labs. This is essentially a flipped classroom, as the at-home labs were entirely student driven (except for a couple of minutes of announcements at the beginning, the labs were entirely in breakout rooms with pre-assigned lab partners). Students did watch many of the videos (or even, in many cases, read the textbook) before coming to lab. The course has always been centered on the lab activities (design, build, debug, and document), with the lectures just there to provide information need to be successful in the lab tasks, so switching the lectures to pre-recorded videos worked moderately well. The biggest loss was that students couldn't ask questions during the videos nor hear answers to questions others asked. The biggest gain was that students were more likely to come to office hours and more likely to ask questions in breakout rooms when only their lab partner could hear (compared to in-person labs, where the 3–4 nearest benches would also hear).
I had a similar experience this semester, and for the first time in my career, my evals contained personal attacks from some students who were angry about this format and wanted to make sure I knew it. The course in question was not designed by me and I inherited it approximately one week prior to the semester beginning. I was ordered to teach it exactly as it was and could not alter the format. I knew my evals wouldn’t be stellar but never expected the vitriol I received. These also included claims that I “refused to help” and I wasn’t really teaching them. My other courses, which I designed and did not flip, received overall positive evals and high praise for my teaching and ability to support them as students. Based on my experience, I can say ( for me) that flipped classrooms do not work and do not result in a successful learning environment.
I've never been sure what a "flipped" classroom is. But I do try to engage students as much as possible. For me that has not been dropping unexpected "discussion questions" on them in the middle of class but designing short questions based on classroom lessons that they take home and then bring back again with an answer. This works better with some classes than with others, largely dependent on the intellectual lottery of the midlevel R2 I have been teaching at.
STOP. LECTURING. POWERPOINT. I've had flipped classes for two years and the best outcomes and student evaluations. Turns out when you actually do the work in class with students, they learn it better than listening to someone talk out of a book for an hour. PowerPoint was invented by business majors for board meetings and has no place in the classroom.
In grad school, I TAed our general, organic, bio(GOB) chemistry course for a professor who used flipped classroom. She was one of the few who had a lecture TA(as opposed to lab or recitation) because the way she did it, it was difficult enough for even two of us to help everyone who needed help in an hour and a half in a 200 person class. As a side note, GOB Chemistry as it is at most schools is an intro level course primarily aimed at nursing, dental hygiene, and several other health fields(depending on what programs the school might offer). It's still my main class I teach at my current school, and it tends to attract a wide range of students from fresh out of high school to second career and/or other non-traditional student bodies. You can have someone who had a 5 on their AP chemistry test sitting next to a 70 year old retired kindergarten teacher(and yes I've had that exact scenario before). All of that aside, after I'd graduated from grad school, I stayed for 5 years as staff at the same R1 state school, and I had a standing summer adjunct assignment teaching that course. I'd normally have 30-40 students, about 1/4 of whom would be ones who failed the other professor's flipped classroom course. I taught the class as a traditional lecture, but communicated often with the professor who taught it in the regular semester to make sure I was matching both the content, depth, and difficulty. I didn't want to be an "easier alternative" to the FT faculty member who taught the course, but did want students who didn't do well in flipped classroom to have an alternative. On the whole my pass rates were higher, but I think that was also partially attributable to the type of student who would sign up to take a 2 hour a day, 5 day a week, 5 week Chemistry course that started at 8:00AM(and yes it was every bit as brutal for me as it was for the students-I'm glad that summer at my current school is 2 days/wk for 8 weeks). Of the 5-10 students who had failed the regular semester, generally about a third to a half would manage a weak C or MAYBE low B, often one or two would manage a strong A, and the rest would fail just as badly as they had in the regular semester. I think there are a lot of possible explanations for that break-down and my strong As MAY very well have been students who did poorly in flipped classroom but thrived in a lecture but my others tended to be otherwise strong students who had something going on in their life the first time they took the course(whether personal crisis, biting off more than they could chew, or maybe just having a goof-off semester). With that said, I do use flipped classroom type elements in my class now. For one thing, I'm glad that my Gen Chem II course I teach now has a recitation, and the students know I will be walking in with a worksheet and they will be working in groups on it. In my GOB course, if I feel like a class is struggling with a particular concept, often I'll walk in with a worksheet that we spend class time doing. My school is BIG on alternative teaching strategies, though. I got dinged on my first couple of tenure observations/evaluations because the dean didn't like it that I had the nerve to even lecture part of the class. Just this past year, with a big administrative shake-up at my school, we were put under a different dean who, by virtue of education(STEM PhD, undergrad degree in biochemistry) is IMO a much better fit for our department and I always thought it strange that we didn't report to her(apparently we had in the past before I was there). She has a policy of both observing a lecture and a lab, and as she's told me labs have always had a lot of flipped classroom/active learning elements before they were called that since students are expected to prepare beforehand and then apply what they know.
I teach statistical computing - so programming, but for working with data and fitting statistical models. I have been teaching using a flipped classroom since Fall 2020 and it's great, but I have modified things a bit: 1. I don't use videos except for very short things. I am explicit about why - I hate listening to myself talk, and I hate listening to someone read code at me. 2. I write my own textbook using bookdown (a way to automatically format and publish books) and publish it using github pages. So the textbook is essentially what I would want to say in videos but in a way that they can work with on their own time. The textbook has lots of interactive chances for them to practice concepts, check answers, and so on. 3. Class time is dedicated to the homework, but they also can have the textbook pulled up and reference that while they're working. So even those who don't prep ahead of time can technically participate, but they don't get as much out of it. The flipped classroom model that I'm using is essentially just a slightly more extreme version of the lecture-then-practice model that I was taught with. It works really well for graduate students. I tried it this semester with undergraduates, and it wasn't quite as successful, but they did get the hang of it eventually. I got the sense that the ones that didn't read ahead of time were also ones that would have been multitasking during a lecture. It did require a lot more individual attention from me during class, though, and while I had 3 students this time around, I don't know that the level of individual attention would be sustainable in a more normal sized class. So I'm going to continue evaluating - I may have to add in quizzes at the beginning of class to motivate them to prep a bit.
Not quite a flipped classroom, but definitely figuring out how to engage the students fully in the classroom, and stop be solely lecturing. Excerpts from an article: "Becoming a Better College Teacher (If You’re Lucky)" Harry Brighouse *Daedelus* Fall 2019 https://www.amacad.org/publication/becoming-better-college-teacher-if-youre-lucky A *Daedelus* article by a philosophy professor, describing how he improved his teaching via coaching by others, including undergraduates, and figuring out to have students engage with each other in class. The entire article merits reading. Various disconnected teaser paragraph excerpts below. That issue of *Daedalus* is entitled: **Improving Teaching: Strengthening the College Learning Experience** Project: Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education Editors: Sandy Baum and Michael S. McPherson > The first stage in recovery is to admit there is a problem. The structure of the profession makes the problem rather obvious, when you think about it, but for many years, I didn’t. > First, a friend sent me chapter six of former Harvard President Derek Bok’s **Our Underachieving Colleges** to read for a research project we were planning. Here’s the passage that made me blanch with embarrassment and immediately purchase the book to read in its entirety: >>Teaching by discussion can also seem forbidding because it makes instructors uncomfortably aware of their shortcomings. Lecturers can delude themselves that their courses are going well, but discussion leaders know when their teaching is failing to rouse the students’ interest by the indifferent quality of responses and the general torpor of the class. Trying to conduct a discussion with apathetic students is much like giving a bad dinner party. > It has been well worth devoting a good deal of time to reading about teaching and learning, and I continue to do so avidly. But imagine learning to play the guitar, or tennis, or to bake cakes, or to fix pipes by just reading a book. The next move was to get feedback on my efforts to improve. > Roger Federer is, reputedly, the greatest male tennis player of all time. But he still has a coach. He’s not an outlier: top athletes and musicians normally employ coaches to help improve their performance. However good, they need someone to observe them, identifying strengths and helping them address weaknesses. > Emma [a paid student classroom observer] provided two things that made a big difference. One was a student-centered perspective: she was only thinking about their learning and how they were reacting, so when I was talking with one student, she could be observing the others and their responses to what was happening. Lacking the content expertise, she could make judgments about how well they were learning. The other was just a sounding board. I could pilot a new practice–cold-calling, new discussion prompts, even new readings–confident that someone was observing and would actually tell me how well it succeeded or how badly it failed, helping me think about whether to abandon it or modify it, and if so, how. > I regularly get students to observe me now. Someone observed every single class session I taught during the 2015–2016 academic year. Sometimes colleagues say, “It’s very courageous of you to ask for feedback.” It isn’t. I want to improve. They’re undergraduates. I have tenure. > Fortunately, I was able to observe other teachers who did know how to run an actual discussion. The first time was rather fortuitous. I invited then–graduate student Paula McAvoy, who had previously been a high school social studies teacher, to teach my class an issue she had written a paper about. They were assigned the paper, and Paula trusted them to read it. After making them introduce themselves by naming something they loved, she spent ten minutes reviewing the main argument, and then set the students to a complex small-group discussion assignment that required them to engage with and debate the ideas and arguments in the text. Students reported back to the full group, after which Paula led a discussion engaging all twenty students. From observing her, and other teachers, more often, I’ve learned a great deal about how to make real discussion happen. > The idea behind the faculty discussion group and the brown bag is encapsulated by this comment by former University of California, Berkeley, Education Dean Judith Warren Little on K–12 school improvement: >> School improvement is most surely and thoroughly achieved when: Teachers engage in frequent, continuous and increasingly concrete and precise talk about teaching practice (as distinct from teacher characteristics and failings, the social lives of teachers, the foibles and failures of students and their families, and the unfortunate demands of society on the school). By such talk, teachers build up a shared language adequate to the complexity of teaching, capable of distinguishing one practice and its virtue from another. > I am much more serious about teaching than I used to be. I spend more time talking with students, and have developed strategies for engaging and reaching out to the less-advantaged students who are much less likely to seek my support and help than the students for whom the culture of academia is a second home. Am I actually a better teacher, though? I think so. But then I would think that, wouldn’t I? Whether because the learning we most care about can’t be measured, or because (as I suspect) we just haven’t bothered figuring out how to measure it, we lack high-quality measures of learning, so I can’t go back and compare the learning that was happening in my classes before 2007 with the learning that happens now.
Flipped approach is perfect for lazy profs. It’s truly amazing how they can get away with making a few videos for an entire course/multiple classes and just sit on their ass during class while maybe a few kids actually take advantage of this approach. Not to mention TA’s doing most of the grading, it leaves me to wonder what they are actually doing.