Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Flipped classrooms

I don't see how it will actually be self-paced, though-- because the "work-work" is still happening IN the classroom in this version of things.

So an advanced student can watch all of this instruction at his/her own pace, all right...

but they can't DO anything about it without the cooperation of whoever is holding the keys to assignments and assessments.

I disagree with you on point two, as well-- if the explanation doesn't make sense the FIRST time, sure, maybe rewinding and watching it again once or twice is a good idea, (for fairly complicated ideas, I mean) but beyond that, the problem is likely to be something more than missing some nuance of the presentation. The problem is likely to be that there is an assumed bit of background knowledge which isn't shared by the student.

A good teacher only offers the SAME explanation a couple of times to a student. At that point, one switches gears and starts probing to find out what the student is thinking at each step along the way. This is the only method of finding the underlying problem and correcting it efficiently. It's also WAY more efficient at finding trouble spots and working more intensively over those.

The other thing that my DD has found with this sort of instruction is that invariably, there are 'missing' steps in logic or illustration... and while some of the time those things seem relatively minor, sometimes they make concepts/methods which feel alien to a student totally incomprehensible instead. Because an unnatural method doesn't resonate with a student and they can't just "follow" the logical progression for themselves without seeing each.and.every step. Gifted students will simply shrug and find their own way around it, as often as not, inventing a new way that DOES make sense to themselves... and the teacher is none the wiser (until it matters later on, when the lack of full understanding crops up as a gap in a later concept), but the less capable students just spin.


I do agree with DAD on points 3 and 4. And frequently on 5, which will come as no surprise to anyone.

My prediction is that-- in practice, I mean, and based on our experiences with a variation upon this kind of model-- a PG student can watch (or read) the entire YEAR of pre-algebra before the end of September, but then get to SIT and do nothing meaningful, as his/her classmates limp along without much instructional support for months... and months...


Oh-- I just realized! That won't be a problem. THAT kind of student can "cement his/her knowledge through group work with less able learners." Perfect!

My most pressing questions, having lived with this kind of "instructional" model for some time--

a) how do students ask questions IN REAL TIME? Because if they cannot, then they will wind up developing misconceptions/stalling until they can get it corrected... which certainly is neither efficient nor good for learning.

b) what about students who require redirection during instruction? A video recording doesn't notice when Johnny is tuning out. Or is that now on Johnny's mom and dad? Or is it on Johnny himself? Doesn't this just "empower" students to "own their own self-regulation" to an even greater degree? At what point does someone stand up and note how incredibly developmentally inappropriate that whole notion is for children and most adolescents? I mean, sure-- it works. FOR ADULTS. With solid executive function. That's basically what the research here does show. Until mid-20's, most human beings aren't great at KNOWING what works best for themselves in terms of deep learning.


Seriously, though, the upshot is that this places the whip in parents' hands, the burden for doing the least entertaining part of "learning" squarely on students who aren't mature enough to self-regulate well, and takes the active portions of learning back into classrooms where there cannot possibly be adequate support for it given student-teacher ratios. What this will mean is even LESS attention in classrooms for kids who are high-potential, and even more use of those kids as miniature teacher's aides, while they gnash their teeth at having to sit through MONTHS of material that they went through in the first few days of school.

I also suspect that for kids who work slowly but deeply, this is going to prevent them from ever being identified as gifted in the first place.

DAD22,
I hate to sound so cynical, but the benefits you outline aren't likely to happen frequently in practice. Although some teachers individualize instruction, most will keep students together. Students who have mastered a concept will likely be used to "help" their classmates who don't get it rather than accelerate. If textbooks are any indication, I doubt the videos will include the variety or be of the quality you hope for. I don't think watching the same video over and over will help students to achieve true understanding, so class time will be used by the teacher with the help of students who get it to teach those who didn't learn from the videos.

This can be (and already has been) easily addressed by letting software be the key to additional assignments and lectures. First the students watch a video lecture. Next they apply what they have learned in the form of an electronic assignment. The assignment is automatically graded upon completion, and if mastery has been demonstrated, the child advances automatically.


I addressed this to some degree with point 3: You have access to more than one lecture on the same topic. If one skips a step that you can't follow, try the next one. Chances are every single lecture on the topic wont have the same problem.



That's exactly what in-class time is for in the flipped classroom. Since the teacher isn't giving lectures, they have more time for probing each student's thought process and addressing misunderstandings.



In the pilot study I read about, the students were allowed to learn several years worth of material in a single school year. Some of them advanced so quickly that the teachers started looking for ways to slow them down because they didn't feel comfortable teaching material so many years advanced of their usual curriculum.



I don't see the importance of asking questions in real-time. Then again, I never once asked a question in school. In the flipped classroom, questions are asked the day after lectures are viewed. Students still get to ask questions before they are expected to apply what they have learned, so I don't see the need to develop any misconceptions.


On the flip side (pun fully intended) the whole class doesn't have to be distracted by Johnny's wandering focus. And Susie's. And Billy's... etc. I don't see a great difference in the responsibilities placed on the students due to flipping the classroom. Knowledge has to be acquired through the senses, it can't be downloaded into student brains like in The Matrix. Students need to pay attention or they wont learn. When students fail to learn, progress reports show it, and issues are addressed by the student, teachers, and parents. Students are already expected to supplement what they do in school at home. If they can't focus at home, they wont perform well either way.


Again, you are assuming that students wont be allowed to compact. When I say there is promise in the idea, I say so partly because I expect it to make compacting much more common than it is. I have already addressed how the flipped classroom gives teachers MORE one on one time with students to address their problem areas. If that's not adequate then the traditional classroom is even worse.

That might skew your perspective a bit.

Some learners operate in a very active Socratic approach, they create a web of "unpromoted" hypotheses and rely on key questions to validate their constructs. Being an active process, the structure can become rather diaphonous without input at the time they are ready to promote the material to learned.

Different strokes for different folks. Socratic learners will find themselves strangled, I think.

Of course, now that we have the largest repository of information ever assembled available on demand, a lot of those Socratic learners will take to the internet for immediate satisfaction of their curiosity. Results will vary, because just because it's large, doesn't mean it's good.

I have been holding out hope that the flipped classroom would be a great idea, and I do tend to agree with Dad22 on a lot of points.

There is nothing to say that every student must be doing the same "homework" in class -- of course, it will work out that way in many instances, where teachers don't want to have to help students on different chapters at the same time, and it will probably homogenize down to the lowest common denominator in the same way that everything else does in education.

But to my mind, a student could easily get ahead on the videos and do the "homework" from several chapters ahead in class while other students are working on earlier stuff. It would not have to bottleneck in the classroom the way the lectures do. Teacher can only give one lecture at a time, but can wander around the classroom and help with many different levels. The student who is far ahead will probably not need to be asking questions that would confuse the other kids, anyway.

In practice, of course, I can easily see it sticking right there, when the teacher says, "why don't you just wait until we catch up to there, as you're confusing the rest of the class", and kid ends up twiddling his thumbs for a month. That *should* be a motivation to find the answer somewhere else and get on with it, but for, say, my son, it would probably be a motivation to twiddle his thumbs.

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?

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.

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'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.

YES. And for high-ability students who operate Socratically, you HAVE to keep them fed or they drift away and occupy themselves. Teachers don't do this because the rate-- fundamentally-- makes them uncomfortable, as someone else noted above.

The internet is not a substitute for a live expert-- at least not for most Socratically-operating learners. Because it's all about asking the RIGHT questions to get the information you're seeking-- and as anyone exasperated and shouting incoherently at a search engine knows... the internet is incredibly OBTUSE about details like "noooooo... I wanted to know about WHY _____, not how to build MY OWN from recycled materials..."

Honestly, non-Socratic learners are rarer than Socratic ones. IME as an educator, I mean. My estimate is that the percentage among science and pre-health majors is about 4 or 5 to 1.

Among Gen Ed students, it's still about 3 to 1, and the ratio becomes even higher during the college years. Many students are conditioned to consider understanding to be a black-and-white phenomenon, and Socratic learning is antithetical to that, which makes students-- initially-- very uncomfortable.

Experiential learning is directly related to the Socratic model, incidentally, through the common thread of "inquiry-based learning" and that is the entire theoretical engine behind flipping classrooms in the first place.

Experiential/Socratic/Inquiry-led learning is a good thing. But not having to wait to get basic questions answered is also a VERY good thing.

For anyone that "never asks questions" I offer-- what do you do when you're challenged and do not have apparent access to the answers that you need, then? I understand not asking questions, as I tend to be that kind of individual, as well. But as a teacher, I'd feel that a student was not sufficiently challenged if they didn't EVER have questions that they couldn't answer for themselves without assistance.

That, to me, is part and parcel of keeping students learning within their proximal zone.

But there are so many assumptions here. First, you've assumed that the lecture provides everything the student needs. It almost certainly won't. Our experience with my son's online learning is that an enormous amount of material is missing. Of the 7 online classes my son did last year, only ONE (CTY Forensics) provided enough information in the lectures and textbook for him to really understand the material without assistance from me.

You've also assumed that a video format can provide enough information. There are subjects in which this is simply not the case. Physics and Java programming spring to mind. I've helped DS with physics and my husband and another programmer helped him with Java. There are nuances in both subjects that simply must be taught, live, on the fly. In physics, the big one is how to recognize how you need to set up problems in order to solve them. This is NOT a single idea but a set of ideas and approaches that vary and build upon one another as a student advances. And there are other nuances, like the difference between a horse-cart system and a horse and a cart. Students don't all have the same confusion points, and you need a teacher there to help because the number of confusion points in some subjects is effectively infinite. You can't cover that in a video.

With Java, the issues seemed related to knowing how to do stuff when the teacher's assumption that something would just work, didn't. An example is a security exception that was thrown when my son had to do something with an applet in his final project. The teacher assumed the applet would just work, presumably because it worked x years ago when the course was designed. It took two adults with 40 years experience 3 hours to solve that. For something complex like this, there is no way it can happen via email or even the next day in a class when everyone is confused.

(Please don't argue that outdated courses don't count because they should be up to date. Obviously, they should be up to date. But there is no way this will happen in the real world!)