Salman Khan has a great TED talk on what has eventually developed into Khan Academy. He has some interesting insight and thoughts that are fantastic for reflection. He has found strategies to gather data to impact what is being presented back to students. Take some time to watch the video if you haven't.
As I've watched the application of these ideas and concepts to the classroom, some educators have really used this with tremendous benefit to students. Research has shown the benefits for students to be able to pause, rewind, and carefully take notes on a lecture. Some teachers have given students a lecture to view at home and then use the in class time for discussion or to practice solving problems. Aside from increasing the class time available for working with teacher assistance and student to student interaction, sending these lectures home gives students a finite time of homework.
On the other side of the coin, I have seen teachers put a lot of extra time on students because they now put every lecture up on Youtube. It is important for teachers to retain balance in the work they send home. I also think the art of the interactive lecture can be lost in this format. At times, lecture is an appropriate way to deliver instruction (despite what I would call myths that this is never appropriate). However, interactive lectures engage students and flex the content around the responses and reactions of the participants. And I do mean participants. To relinquish a presentation to one way video can leave out the interactive nature of teaching. It's not all bad but something to consider within a flipped classroom context.
We need to be careful that we don't misapply the flipped classroom methodology so it overburdens students and removes an important element of personal interaction from students that is the learning and dialogue we desire in our classrooms. As with so many things in life, we need balance. I have seen some applications that take and mistakenly apply it in ways that just aren't helpful and really don't embody the same type of online education that Khan and others advocate. I've approached this idea with caution because extremism can be dangerous in any trendy fad.
What do you think? What do you see as the pros of the flipped classroom and the pitfalls to avoid?
I think you hit the nail on the head with the word 'balance'. I believe that the flipped classroom model has a lot of value- in some instances. There are some subjects and some curriculum that lend themselves better to this teaching strategy.
ReplyDeleteI think in subjects that have practicable skills, like Math and Science (almost all of the Khan Academy tutorials seem to be related to these two subjects), students can greatly benefit from learning how to do the skill from a five minute video, ready to come to class to practice it. This works because some skill boundaries are finite, and if the teacher did a good job at explaining how to do the skill, then most questions can be answered by just re-watching the lecture. So while this strategy would be an effective tool in teaching how to balance simple chemical equations, it might not be as effective for teaching Othello.
I see the flipped classroom as a teaching strategy. Just like I wouldn't rely only on students acting out parts of Charlotte's Web in order to understand it, I wouldn't only use screencasts as my method of content delivery. Student's in the flipped classroom are becoming more digitally literate, but that is only one one area we are working to grow in them.
Balanced teachers, balanced learners.