Monday, May 21, 2012

Flip This!

When students don’t show up to office hours (ha, ha, students showing up to office hours!) I often find myself hunkering down to read all about new innovations in edutainment. It seems that the Big Idea making the rounds these days is the so-called “flipped classroom,” which as I understand it basically means posting one or more video lectures to the Interwebz for students to watch before class, giving them an online quiz to self-check their comprehension, and then using class time to build on those basic concepts through various awesomely engaging activities that never in any way whatsoever remind anyone of the dread monster Lecture. (For an exhaustive discussion of the flipped classroom, check out this bell-and-whistle show of a blog post.)

I admit that I panicked a little the first time I realized that the flipped classroom was a thing. Since I’ve transitioned from teaching Gerbil to native squeakers of Hamster – a kind of classroom environment that is pretty interactive by nature – to teaching courses more amenable to the lecture-discussion-exam trifecta, I’ve worried that my new classes lack some hidden, powerful dynamism that I was not trained to unlock.

This notion has endured beyond my initial introduction to the concept, with plenty of coverage from multiple disciplines and angles. But none of the transformative rhetoric casting a saintly halo around the flipped classroom has addressed some very basic questions that have surely occurred to every reader of this blog:


What if students aren’t really interested in learning?

What if they start glancing at their watches (or staring longingly at the door) the instant their instructor begins a sentence with “Instead of a lecture today…”?

What if a clear majority of your students see any kind of required engagement with course material outside of the classroom as an unreasonable imposition on their God-given right to spend their twenties on self-directed and decidedly more hedonistic pursuits?

“Flipping” the classroom can only function if students are willing to put in the time outside of class – “at their own pace,” as the converts proudly trumpet – to prepare for activities set to take place in the classroom. Correct me if I’m wrong, but last I checked, the lecture-discussion-exam model also asks students to bring ideas and questions to class based on something they’ve prepared in advance: THE READING – and reading, by nature, pretty much automatically happens “at their own pace” as long as they give themselves the time for it (skimming frantically before class should never under any circumstances count as “reading”).

But students don’t do the reading. Every time I plan a class activity on the assumption that students will have read enough to do something fun, I am painfully reminded of what happens when you assume*. And I end up transforming the basic concepts into a lecture, on the fly, punctuated by the odd fit of brainstorming or a snippet of discussion thrown in for good measure. The students never complain.

If course material covered at home takes the form of a video / wiki / vlog / stage musical / interpretive dance instead of good old ink on paper, this does not mean that students will suddenly fall all over themselves to prepare for class so they can Do Things during course hours. Nothing will work if the students’ will to learn isn’t in place.

So if the administrators at Across the Seas U ever try to promote (or, God forbid, require) a flipped classroom, I’m fully prepared to flip them the bird instead.

This bird, when flipped, flips itself right back. 
Fuck yeah.
* - Punchline reserved for the comments (if srsly no one has heard this one before...)

18 comments:

  1. Most of the flipped curricula are in primary/secondary ed, where parents can (more or less) enforce homework compliance.

    At the university level, almost all courses are flipped, in that students are expected to do substantial independent work, often prior to topics being introduced in class. The best we can hope for, honestly, is that students trained by flipped teachers might be more inclined to actually prepare....

    But mostly it means that even competent, purposeful lecturers are going to be denigrated by colleagues and snowflakes alike....

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    1. students are expected to do substantial independent work, often prior to topics being introduced in class

      Students are also expected to be alert, intelligent and involved when they're in class. <chortle, snort>

      Delete
  2. We watched a video presentation about this at a faculty meeting. While it seems like a good idea, I have some concerns.

    The presenter recommended that we place a table at the door and check off everyone's assignment as they came, and mark absent those who did not do the assignment and refuse to allow them to enter.

    Oddly enough, while WOLF359 promotes this idea they also believe that it is illegal to mark people absent in this manner. So, they want me to implement this but will not support me!

    How do you deal with the students who don't do the work, if the class-activities depend on the assignment?!!

    Until administration quits talking out of both sides of their mouth, I'm sticking with the lecture.

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    1. To some extent, you can embarrass them for their lack of preparation by asking them repeatedly to answer simple questions from the reading.

      Delete
    2. Yes, this will "humiliate" them! And it's fun.

      Delete
    3. One secondary teacher's answer to "What if they don't watch the video"
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1MKpyVPilI&feature=relmfu

      Delete
    4. Everything she describes would require the support of admin, especially sending them out of the classroom to go work at a computer.

      Untie my hands, and I will gladly implement this. Until then, admin can flip this!

      Delete
  3. Give them 0 for 'participation' if they haven't done the assignment, but let them in anyway; they may pick something up by being around people who have done the work. (I do this routinely in Hamster Grammar And Syntax classes). I want to encourage people to actually do the work, but I also want to encourage them to come even if they haven't, because going over it in class will at least teach them something, and they won't fall hopelessly behind.

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  4. Ah, yes.

    Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, I have seen the light! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX5tfRdkoY0

    But seriously, what ahistoricality said above.

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  5. This is a big fad in the secondary-education world. I have a math-teacher colleague who does this occasionally, because it allows her to be in class with kids as they work though problems. I think it's great that the idea works for her. I get testy when admins try to push these fads on us, though. (Check that; it's late May, so in the words of Fat Tony from the Simpsons, "I don't get mad, I get stabby.")

    It's mostly a stupid idea in the humanities. What the Foxtrot would a flipped classroom look like in history, kids reading quietly during class and having collaborative discussions at home? The "problem" with humanities teachers, in the eyes of administrators, is that reading, thinking, and writing don't look sexy enough for the PR brochures and website bling. So they reward teachers for doing flashy, superficial nonsense while all the while yapping about how much they "value good teaching." This year alone at my college prep secondary school I have witnessed one honest-to god puppet show, an intellectually shallow and grammatically embarrassing presentation of children's stories by an upper-level English class, and the tossing by another English teacher of Salinger and Fitzgerald from the curriculum in favor of several young-adult books, including (I'm throwing up a little as I write this) The Hunger Games.

    You know what? When I need to work with my students in class on certain skills (thesis development, e.g.) I just do it. I don't go around giving the task a mother-foxtrotting name and insisting that everyone else do what I do and if they don't, then they're a bad teacher and they hate children.

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  6. Brava! Amen! Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap!!!!!

    Yes, as far as I can tell, my classroom (and those of most humanities proffies I know) have been flipped for at least my lifetime. But conducting class on the ceiling is getting harder and harder, because the students are doing less and less work outside of class. So now we try to do it all -- give them a bit of time to read, a bit of time to reflect alone (perhaps in writing) or in small groups on the reading, and a bit of time to discuss (the reading time, of course, has to be disguised as open-book writing or group time, because we can't quite come out and admit that we know they aren't actually reading. So we do that, or discuss *very* short passages, reading out loud as we go).

    And if cheap, easily-available, nicely-packaged content were the key, wouldn't the book (or at least the stereotyped book, or the cheap paperback) have revolutionized education? I suspect that, in fact, they did, but only so far; after all, since books are not merely content delivery devices, but require interpretation, proffies may still want to provide some context, or model an approach to interpretation, or something like that, and (brief) lectures work pretty well for that. I'm all in favor of small classes, and of various methods for interjecting as much engagement and interactivity as possible into large classes, but any approach to college classes that relies heavily on the students doing substantial work outside of class -- including such traditional approaches as having them read and then discuss a book -- is neither new nor a solution to our current problems.

    And, although our current students *may* absorb information from them more easily (I'm not really so sure of that), when you come right down to it, a taped lecture/demonstration/circus act is still a content delivery device, not that different from a book (or a filmstrip or a video, both of which have been around for some time). And, while it may not cost anything to access specific content from the Khan Academy and other providers, it does cost something to buy and continuously update the devices on which the content is accessed, and to arrange for an internet connection (and video content requires much more bandwidth than words, and high-speed access is either scarce or unavailable in many places). When you add it all up, yellowed paperbacks look downright cheap, and even some textbooks more reasonable than they might otherwise.

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  7. My students LOVE lectures. There is nothing they would rather do than write down what I say and passively regurgitate it to me. Any flipping I do is paid for by bad student evaluations.

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    1. Likewise. Whenever I implement one of the latest fads - POGIL, for instance -- I get requests for "more lecture" on the evals.

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  8. I'm actually doing one of these classes right now. The trick is to tie the alternate in class activities directly to something they do care about: grades. We're doing something along the lines of a five minute video that will cover the list of attributes of different colored hamsters, then in class we present several questions that requires them to use the list. Some exam questions would be on remembering which attribute belongs to which type of hamster, but more points are given to doing the type of analysis modeled in class with a new set of data. So yeah, when the answer to "will this be on the exam" is yes, they put in the work.

    It also helps when you don't say "instead of lecture" Lecture is not an option.

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    1. Isis, I never say "instead of lecture." And everything I tell them to do carries points (well, not everything -- but if it doesn't carry points itself, they have to do it before they can move on to point-earning).

      They still complain.

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  9. Do the reading outside class? Are you kidding? I have students these days who show up on the first day asking me if we're going to do the reading IN CLASS. Like, together. Out loud. Roud-robin style.

    Which makes me wonder what's going on in the rest of classes at the university.

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  10. Eric Mazur has had good results with using "peer instruction" in college classes.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_instruction

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    1. I'll let Frod comment on this. His command of invective is better than mine.

      Delete

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