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The Flipped Classroom
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The Globe and Mail has an article about the "flipped classroom" in today's paper, the first of a 5 part feature on education. Some of you might be interested to read it (here), especially as Point Grey's #1 goal on our school's growth plan is to "leverage the use of technology."
The flipped classroom is a setup where students watch high-quality lectures at home and then do their work with their teacher's help at school. This is the reverse of the current usual setup, where teachers lecture or teach in the classroom and homework is done at home.
It's an arrangement that is becoming increasingly common and apparently has surprisingly good results sometimes, including for inner city classrooms (eg. Detroit).
For me, the main message is that technology is a tool. You can purchase iPads or laptops but just putting them into the school building won't make a difference: you have to think about how to make the technology work for your school community. Sometimes, this involves some creative thinking about how class time is structured.
It was interesting to me to see that individual teachers are flipping their classes just to see what happens. It's not something that the whole school or district has to decide in advance.
Here's the beginning of the article:
This fall, Graham Johnson gave up lecturing to his students. YouTube, he figured, could handle that.
So he had his math classes at Okanagan Mission Secondary School in Kelowna, B.C., watch prerecorded video lessons from home – freeing up school time for one-on-one work.
Turns out pixelated teaching works well: His students’ grades are up about 5 per cent.[...]
Categories: Currently... (thoughts from the Chairs)
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2 Comments
A few years ago I presented some of my InScide Out programs at Silbury. The idea of these was to incite a want to know attitude in students as opposed to (the joke) asking kids to work ahead from books or even using technology to access resources (aka the internet)
The concept puts the teacher in control and expects the teacher to be an expert in the subject being taught. Here the students prepare questions on items they know nothing or very little about on the subject being taught. The teacher then chooses the most appropriate questions to be the materials for the following classes.
The teacher then 'prepares' to educate the students in these areas by presenting the facts and describing the sources of this knowledge base.
In short - if we have teachers that are not ahead of the curve (and the students) in terms of subject knowledge - then we can only expect mediocre results no matter what technology is used as a learning platform. Hence I also go along with the excellent products you all refer to.
In the early years (elementary) we have to instill a 'want to know' attitude amongst our kids. This is much more important than rote learning in my mind.
Brilliant students all have either the desire to learn by self discipline or are forced into it, which in the latter case I have found leads to the student learning how to pass with high grades rather than to understand the subject material.
Summarizing - I am all for making available every tool in the book accessible for students but its not the tools that make the difference - US astronauts landed on the moon and returned using slide rules and we have not done it since with computers - it is the brilliant teachers and the desire to be educated that makes the difference.
So programs and tools like the ones referred to are great as long as the students have been prepared for lifelong learning.
Thanks for the sharing of these ideas.
Farrell - from Hong Kong!
As studying educational technology and learning design at SFU, the greatest debate is about whether technology is the driven force or the booster tool for learning. My conclusion is that the affordability of certain technology could accelerate learning progress.
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