A few weeks ago, I was graced with a presentation by Jon Palmer and how he flipped his classroom. Jon now produces physics videos for a living. Overall, I thought he presented his experience with flipping a classroom well. He was able to show us the vast difference between his classroom after he flipped it.
The video of his traditional classroom was an hour of calculus based physics on the board while students sat and took notes. This is what you tend to see in honors or ap physics. His flipped classroom was completely different. In this video, students were standing at different places around the room. I recall a few working on a demonstration/lab in the back of the class while others were asking him questions about practice problems or some other confusion in the front of the class. It looked like a perfect example of what a flipped classroom should look like.
The problem I have is that it is a perfect classroom. It seems that all his students were motivated and actually watched the videos at home. I have high doubts that I will teach a demographic such as that. Friends of mine are in student teaching in a classroom where the mentor teacher is flipping the classroom for the first time. They are struggling with students not coming prepared for the work in class. The mentor teacher happens to allow them to spend class time listening to the lecture that was supposed to be done at home. With little consequence, it seems that they are voluntarily reverting back to the traditional classroom with a virtual teacher. I can't imagine that helping their learning.
Of all the arguments against flipping the classroom, I find this the most challenging. How do you set up your classroom so that students will find the motivation to watch these lectures at home? It seems that all the advocates for flipping a classroom I have met do so because they teach in a demographic that it is motivated, or the class was an elective class where people knew they would get a flipped classroom. Forcing a class to be flipped... Does it work?
Vi, thanks very much for your post on flipping the classroom! Some of your sentiment mirrors mine, that is, about the circumstances under which Jon was implementing a flipped classroom. In fact, I offered a post on this very topic. While I appreciated Griffin's comment on my post because we, he and I, share the same content area, I value your contribution to this discussion because we, you and I, do not share a content area, and you provide a brief and salient anecdote that seems to confirm my ideas thus far about the efficacy of its implementation. I am not yet ready to give up on flipping the classroom. Unfortunately, however, it is my understanding that there is not much research on this topic because the pedagogy appears to be recent (though Griffin and I might differ on its newness, as we have commented in class or in blogging). I am presently seeking examples of how it works, and I believe that scaffolding this pedagogy could be necessary to make it work. But, another issue that seems to be one at my placement school, as well as in my placement district, is the culture of assigning and completing homework that precedes the expectations that are set in my placement classroom.
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