Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Flipped classrooms

Yes-- and Val's post is a great example of why the sciences still operate with a Lecture-recitation-tutorial-lab model. It works, and it reaches into a variety of learning modalities.

If you really want students to learn, they have to THINK, and they have to get pretty much immediate feedback about their thinking, which is quite a different thing that giving them immediate feedback on either: a) what someone else thinks (e.g. multiple choice or t/f quizzes) or b) their conclusions (again, assessment-based feedback). That only provides yes/no-- not HINTS based upon the nature of incorrect answers and the apparent certainty with which they are offered.

It takes a subject expert who sees years down the road in an educational journey to understand WHY it is not such a great idea for a student to be thinking that slope = rise/run, and to gently correct the semantics there, while simultaneously offering praise for the procedural know-how demonstrated.

Only live instruction/coaching can do both of those things in real time, and with a great deal of efficiency. The assessment-based model only knows that they are able to operate the steps in the procedure correctly. It can't check on the THINKING behind them.

While that isn't necessarily a criticism of flipped classrooms per se, since ideally a flipped classroom has experiential learning happening, it is a criticism of the inherent CLUNKY features of taking all instruction out of classrooms. That feedback loop doesn't just exist during "writing" or "lab exercises," or "practice problems." It should be happening during the delivery, too-- at which point the person DOING the delivery should be able to 'read' the room and respond appropriately.

I can't explain it, but there is a sound that perplexed students make en masse. You just KNOW, and you stop and you probe-- but that response is invisible to students, since they don't see that in OTHER classes when I teach the same material, I don't pause there.

KWIM?

This is why I say that only classroom educators who have experience with delivering the same content to different groups of students really "get" why video recordings cannot replace good teaching in an equivalent fashion. A video recording doesn't slow itself when it sees a student's brow furrow over a choice of words, then continue when it clears spontaneously with a clear moment of realization. Could the student rewind a video? Certainly. But what if hearing me again doesn't resolve the question over-- why THAT word there? If they know what the word means, but not WHY I chose it, I mean.

EVERY class, I would eventually find about 5% of students who I knew were "representative" of different groups of learners within that class, and who attended lectures regularly. They were my touchstones, and I watched them while I lectured. ALWAYS. If one of them looked confused, I paused, and I asked. It was either that or have ten more come to my office later (in addition to the other five who were NEVER going to show up-- but needed the answer, too). Answering the questions as they come up is much, much better pedagogically, because it means no backtracking, and-- if you're willing to go with the analogy that learning material is like building a house-- potentially ripping out drywall to get to a misplaced stud.

The problem with flipped classrooms for highly capable learners is a subtle one-- but related to that last point. The difference is toxic for high-speed learners, though-- how much material can an 'average' student cover in a week? Maybe a stud-wall, right? Now-- what about a PG child? Most of the first floor, drywall and all. Which one of them is going to have more little things to tweak when the teacher finally has time to spare? When is it better to make adjustments to the framing in a load-bearing wall, hmm? Before-- or after-- you've constructed the rest of the framing?

Those highly capable students can absorb VAST amounts of material in a hurry-- which multiples the number of "little tweaks" tremendously. I know this. I know this because I've had to do that with my DD-- and it is painful for a student to run through assessment/review of half a semester's worth of understanding and hear "not quite" and "that's close, but..." dozens and DOZENS of times in a couple of days. It's punitive. The thing is, if they were learning from another human being in real-time, they would never have HAD those misconceptions to start with. Kids who drink from the fire-hose like that shouldn't have to accept second-rate instructional pedagogy in order to get learning at the rate they need.

Good teaching is about communication as much as learning is. A video isn't "communication" any more than a textbook is.

In short-- half of the problem is that students can't ask questions in real time. The other problem is just as large in a pedagogical sense; teachers can't ask students open-ended/flexible questions in real-time, either.

Working on their assignments or viewing additional lectures. It seems very similar to a Montessori approach to me.


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 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.


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.

Dad22, you didn't respond to any of my points. I'd be interested in knowing your thoughts.

I know, and while that is okay, and our opinions may simple differ based on interpretations of facts, I'm trying to explain why your experiences as a STUDENT may not reflect the reality of what is going on between students (as a group) and teacher as subject expert.


Right. Which demonstrates that you weren't in classrooms where students were ASKED TO WORK problems. This is never how I taught, nor how most of my (STEM) colleagues did, at any of four different institutions.


Correct-- but it's far more efficient to bring that part of the process into the instruction rather than shoving the instruction itself aside as worthless.

With all due respect, there is no way to KNOW that listening to a particular explanation is a "waste" of anyone's time. Ever. Including your own. Is it a "waste" of my time to listen to an explanation of something that I know perfectly well? Wellllll-- no, not really. I mean, assuming that I'm a student in a class where I'm actually learning something to begin with, generally such explanations serve as a window into the thinking of others, and actually DO benefit me, albeit in less obvious ways than my personal "Aha" moments with the textbook. They also benefit me in social ways-- by forcing me to consider the variety of needs that my peers have, as well as my own needs. It also happens with some regularity that an explanation to ONE student will answer questions that three or four others didn't (yet) realize that they had. Is it wrong that none of the five of them had to "struggle" with a homework problem later because of that??

Obviously, I'm not suggesting that grouping and pacing based upon ability is a bad thing, here-- NOT AT ALL. I'm suggesting that in light of that kind of grouping, instruction DOES need to be offered in real-time. If there are students in that grouping who are a 'drag' on instruction, then get them extra help or get them into a more appropriate placement.

But even gifted students need to learn that a classroom is a learning community and that others have strengths and weaknesses as learners, too. Even the 'smart' kids ask dumb things sometimes, and that's actually good for everyone who hears those questions (and their answers). It gives students a way of considering other ways of approaching/contemplating the material.

Actually, that point (in previous paragraph) is one that people who have had kids in B&M settings probably underestimate significantly. My DD has not had much opportunity to witness that by virtue of all instruction being "canned" like in a flipped classroom, and the results have been positively TOXIC.

This isn't about Montessori-- this is about taking do/show-one, teach-one OUT of a communal setting and making it a pair of one-way streets. That's bad news, IMO. A good college classroom has a lot more in common with Montessori than most former students realize, I think.

Research does indicate that as a supplement, recorded lectures are good. It also shows that for some (memorization-based) material, they can be an adequate substitute for attending live lectures, when those live lectures are relatively non-interactive an non-dynamic. But it also shows that when students use them as a substitute for attending more meaningful/complex instructional lectures, their understanding definitely suffers.

Most classroom teachers could have told anyone that. Students have been doing this forever-- getting lecture notes rather than coming to class themselves. It is a poor substitute, though better than NOTHING.

I'm just saying that the choice shouldn't be "recorded" or "nothing."

Sorry Val. You're in my Queue. I think it would be disrespectful to give you a short response... so I'm choosing a delayed response instead. I hope you understand.

I seem to recall questions being asked. We did have some lecturers whose English wasn't good enough to rephrase what they had said - they just repeated what they had already said like a rewound recording. It was not helpful and I can't see rewinding a video to be helpful either. Also if I don't understand something at the beginning and therefore can't follow the next step I need to get an answer now not tomorrow.

Finally why go to a class to do busywork slowly with a bunch of people who probably haven't done the prep work and will ask the same questions over and over again or expect you to do their work for you?

DAD22 has convinced me.

Yet Khan's niece Nadia preferred his videos to live tutoring sessions because she could watch them multiple times and go at her own pace. There may certainly be times when most of a video lecture is ineffective during the first viewing because of a question that pops up at the start. On the other hand, there are times when most of a live lecture is ineffective because it goes in real-time and a student didn't even have time to reflect on what they may have misunderstood in the first part, and formulate an appropriate question. Sometimes a single sentence perfectly communicates an idea, but the concept isn't understood until the student has time to reflect on it. Videos give students that time.



As I've seen this implemented, the teachers know if the students played the videos or not. So the teachers can make a judgement call about helping the kids who didn't view them or answering questions for those that did. Unless you're waiting for a question to be answered, there's no reason to proceed slowly. I don't know why you are implying that some students will expect others to do their work for them, or how that would be specific to flipped classrooms.

The teachers have no such discretion, unless they've decided they want a career change. Otherwise, NCLB and testing-based teacher assessments pretty much demand that the teachers waste all their time propping up those who failed to do the required viewing.

Teachers have methods available to them to prevent uncooperative students from impacting the learning of cooperative students. They can write letters to the parents, send the uncooperative students to the principal, set up parent-teacher conferences... Flipping the classroom doesn't change this dynamic.