The flipped classroom, explained for teachers

In a traditional sequence, students hear the new idea in class and practice it at home, alone, where the stuck ones have no help. A flipped classroom reverses that. Students meet the material first on their own, and class time is spent on the practice, problems and discussion where a teacher in the room is most useful.

Where it comes from

The version teachers talk about most traces to two chemistry teachers in Colorado, Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, who around 2007 began recording their lessons so absent students could catch up, then found it was more useful to ask everyone to watch first and use the class period for labs and help. They later wrote the book Flip Your Classroom. The wider idea, that the lecture does not have to happen in the room, is older, and some universities were doing similar things before video was easy.

The part people miss

The video is just the delivery vehicle. The reasoning is that first exposure to a straightforward explanation can be done alone and at your own pace, while application, the harder part, benefits from a teacher nearby. That means a flipped lesson is only as good as the in-class half. If students arrive, and the teacher gives the same lecture anyway, nothing has been flipped. It has been duplicated.

A classroom example

A ninth grade algebra teacher is introducing solving systems by substitution. The night before, students read a short explanation with two worked examples and answer five questions to check themselves. In class the next day, the first fifteen minutes goes to a quick check and the three questions most students got wrong. Then students work in pairs on harder problems while the teacher moves between groups, and the last part of the period is a mixed set. Nobody sat through a lecture, and the class time went to the stage where students most need someone beside them.

How flipped classrooms fail

• No accountability for the pre-work. If nothing happens when a student skips it, a third of the class skips it and the in-class plan falls apart.
• Pre-work that is too long. Ninety minutes of preparation across subjects is not realistic. Short and focused beats thorough.
• Equity at home. Students without a quiet space, a device or reliable internet are penalized. A flipped model needs a plan for them, such as a library period.
• Repeating the content in class. Students quickly learn they do not need to prepare.
• Flipping everything. Some content needs live, interactive first teaching, especially when the ideas are new and counterintuitive.

What the evidence suggests

Reviews of flipped classroom studies tend to find a small average benefit with a great deal of variation, and many comparisons are weak because the flipped class also gets more active learning and a teacher who has rethought the course. That hints at the answer: the best-supported ingredient appears to be active learning during class time, not the location of the first exposure. Flipping is a good way to make room for that, not a guarantee of it.

How this shows up in ClassSense

ClassSense does not deliver video. If your picture of a flipped classroom involves recorded lectures, you would make and host those yourself. The text-based version is possible, though. Each skill pack has a review page for the skill, with a concept overview, key terms and worked examples, before the practice questions, and the read-aloud button reads the text out loud for students who need it. That can serve as the pre-class half, and the Students grid shows you who has worked on a skill and how it went, so you can see before class who is ready for the harder work.

There are no assignments to schedule, so the pre-work expectation is something you tell students yourself. It is worth reading the packs before you send students to them, since you are asking them to learn from the text without you. The in-class half, the discussion, the problems and the help, is entirely yours, which is as it should be. For the review step see classroom review games.

Common questions