So what are all of the other 34 students doing while ONE student is "getting intensive assistance" from the teacher, or getting his/her questions from the lecture answered?
Working on their assignments or viewing additional lectures. It seems very similar to a Montessori approach to me.
The problem with that kind of mental model is that in any class of 35 students, probably three of them-- at a minimum-- will have the same question about the lecture presentation... on any given day, over any given material.
Asking those things in real time rather than going to EACH student to find out what questions they have... means that the teacher has only spent 1/3 as much time on that question.
That's time that then is freed up for OTHER activities.
As you've pointed out earlier, the same answer may not satisfy those 3 children with the same question. A good teacher will tailor their response to their audience, right?
I see problems with the "learn this, then come back" approach that are a bit difficult to get across to anyone without considerable classroom experience. There's a REASON why teachers offer instruction to groups of students all at once, and mostly it is to benefit the students themselves.
As long as there is only one teacher and twenty or more students, one-on-one time just isn't going to be adequate for >80% of them, and it's got little to do with the relative quality of the teaching, though of course awful teaching makes it worse.
I just don't see this the same way you do. In my experience, students rarely interrupted a teacher's lecture to ask questions. The questions came to them when they tried to apply what they were being taught. Since most students aren't interrupting lectures, a video is a decent stand in. Flipping the classroom gives them a greater opportunity to get their questions answered when they realize what they don't know. Until they try to apply it, I think students know that they haven't grasped the subject, but they don't know why. They don't even know what question to ask to get things cleared up until they try to go through things step by step and get stuck.
Personally, I hated wasting my time listening to teachers answer questions which were already clear to me. I knew it was slowing down an already dreadful pace of learning. If 3 or more kids have the same question at any time, what about the kids who DON'T have that question? Forcing them to listen to the answer is a waste of time. I guess the trick is to make sure that time doesn't get wasted anyway, for a different reason. I think that's possible. They certainly accomplish this in Montessori classrooms.
I'm a big believer in experiential learning and cooperative learning within a classroom. It benefits everyone in that classroom, and it's a GOOD reason to have students working on the same material at the same time-- and at roughly the same rate. It's a time-tested model, and the Socratic aspects of it have certainly stood the test of time as well, I'd say.
I think it is a dreadful mistake to throw that particular baby out with the bathwater.
When experiential learning is appropriate, I don't see why you can't group even with flipped classrooms. So your group is less than the size of your class. So what. Most middle schools have more than one class operating at each grade level, too. Grab all the 6th graders from all 5 classrooms that are ready for the experiment or demonstration and get them together. In my experience, experiential learning happens so seldom that it has little bearing on what the default mode of operations should be for a classroom.
