Flipped Classroom

Flipping the classroom: Hopes that the internet can improve teaching may at last be bearing fruit (http://www.economist.com/node/21529062)

Electronic education Sep 17th 2011 | LOS ALTOS

What is in a flipped classroom? This article introduces some of the pros and cons of flipping the classroom. 

Here are some quotes from the article and my thoughts:


How it works: 

• "This reversal of the traditional teaching methods—with lecturing done outside class time and tutoring (or “homework”) during it—is what Mr Khan calls “the flip”."
• "Children (or adults, for that matter) need no longer feel ashamed when they have to review part or all of a lecture several times. So they can advance at their own pace."

It is fascinating to see how teachers can potentially free up themselves to help individual students.But lectures and whole-class reviews are still important time for teachers to check on students' understanding or misconceptions, allow students to share different ways to problem solve, and help reinforce the knowledge learned for some students. 


Another concern is: how would schools facing severe budget constraints handle the flipped classroom without technologies available for such tech-supported individualized instruction? How can students, without access to right technologies, watch lectures online outside of classroom? 

Interactive aspect of learning 

• "As a tool, KhanAcademy individualises teaching and makes it interactive and fun. Maths “is social now,” says Kami Thordarson, as the 10-year-olds in the 5th-grade class she teaches at Santa Rita Elementary School huddle round their laptops to solve arithmetic problems as though they were trading baseball cards or marbles."

The flipped classroom still needs social element to enable students to interact with and learn from each other. Learning is a social activity. According to Vygotsky, "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals."

I wonder whether the online lectures are designed based on sound pedagogical principles. How can the lectures be evaluated and peer-reviewed? In what ways are they accessible to all learners (students with learning disabilities, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, physical and sensory disabilities, ELL learners, etc.)? 

Subject matters and teach to the test?

• "The system has its detractors. First, it may not be much use beyond “numerate” subjects such as maths and the sciences;...Even in these subjects KhanAcademy implicitly reinforces the “sit-and-get” philosophy of teaching, thinks Frank Noschese, a high-school physics teacher in New York. That is, it still “teaches to the test”, without necessarily engaging pupils more deeply."

I don't totally agree that students cannot access great lectures online in websites other than KhanAcademy. I am not as worried about other subject matters as "teach to the test." The real concern is how students can practice higher-order thinking vs. lower-order functions as illustrated in the flipped classroom example in this article, unless schools and teachers are aware of the potential of teaching to the test and make a great point using KhanAcademy with a lot of discretion. 

Culture of competition

• "KhanAcademy’s deliberate “gamification” of learning—all those cute and addictive “meteorite badges”—may have the “disastrous consequence” of making pupils mechanically repeat lower-level exercises to win awards, rather than formulating questions and applying concepts."

Some doses of competition is not necessarily bad for students, as long as they are always appropriately challenged and given opportunities to be innately motivated to learn for knowledge mastery. 

The Value of Teachers

• The article raised the issue of how teachers can be evaluated fairly on the basis of exam results or classroom observation (given that some pupils are from educated families, others from poor areas, and so on). The unions are doing their best to ensure that evaluations have no consequences in staffing.
• The article proposes that the flipped model has the potential to make it easier for schools to evaluate teachers. "You can follow the progress of each child—where she started, how she progressed, where she got stuck and “unstuck” (as Ms Thordarson likes to put it). You can also view the progress of the entire class. And you could aggregate the information of all the classes taught by one teacher, of an entire school or even district, with data covering a whole year."
• Opponent voice: "Dennis van Roekel, the president of the National Education Association (NEA), the largest labour union in America with 3.2m members, goes ballistic at this suggestion. “Don’t demean the profession” by implying that you can rate teachers with numbers, he says. Besides, this sort of thing would introduce destructive competition into a culture that should be collaborative, he adds (without explaining why data-driven evaluations have not destroyed collaboration in other industries)."
• Proponent: "Mr Khan, the teachers and Mr Gates all insist that the opposite is the case. It can liberate a good teacher to become even better. Of course, it can also make it easy for a bad teacher to cop out."

Knowing where the students are in performance certainly is a big help to teachers. But can all knowledge be evaluated through numbers? Of course not. Therefore, it still behooves on schools to adopt comprehensive teacher evaluation system, flipped classroom or not.