Flip your classroom

Have you heard a bout a new teaching model named ‘flipped classroom’? This new model is totally different from the traditional one, and is gaining momentum in school nowadays. It came into being with the sharply increasing technology. Technology has made our life a lot easier, and it can also make a huge difference in education area.

                                                                                   

What is Flipped Classroom?

In the flipped classroom, students are not limited in a classroom, instead, they can access courses outside of school. This article introduces the three parts of the flipped classroom: work at home, work in class, work after class.

Work at home:

Teacher’s instruction takes place here. Instructor records and shares lectures outside of class, and students can access the courses so that they watch or listen to the lectures before coming to class.

Work in class:

Students go back to school to interact with their peers and instructor. Applied learning activities and more high-order thinking tasks engage students in class. It is also the time when students can seek and receive help from the teacher and peers. Teachers can address students’ problems and tailor the teaching to students’ different needs.

Work after class:

Teacher can leave assignments or activities to expand and deepen students’ understanding.

This article also provides teachers with some sources to create videos for instruction where students can access outside of class, such as Teachtube, TED-ed, etc.

Why flip your classroom?            

Another article can give you three reasons of choosing flipped classroom.

Comprehension:

At school, the pace at which teachers instruct may not appropriate for every student in the class. However, at home, students can learn at their own pace. They can pause and replay the video no matter how many times they want as long as they can comprehend the content better. If students have questions, no worries, instructor can address the problems when they are back to class.

Interaction:

In traditional class, more than half of class time devotes to instruction so that students only have less than half of class time to interact with their peers. In flipped class, since instruction is done before the class so that students can spend abundant time on meaningful communication.

Critical thinking:

Since students can master basic concepts through the instruction outside of the class, more time can be used for high-order thinking activities to increase students’ abilities of applying, analyzing, and creating.

I experienced the flipped class in my Japanese class as a student three years ago, although I didn’t know its name that time. The Japanese course is still impressive to me, because it was very efficient and I mastered the content very well beyond my expectation. The teacher uploaded a video for us to watch before the class, and we practiced and interacted a lot in the class. At the end of semester, I got high score in this course.

Now, as a teacher, I encourage all of instructors to try to flip your classroom!