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    Val #161900 07/10/13 07:22 AM
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    Originally Posted by Val
    But there are so many assumptions here. First, you've assumed that the lecture provides everything the student needs.

    In a flipped classroom, teachers are available during class time to respond to the students' needs that were not fulfilled by the video. However, I am hopeful that often times the video itself will be sufficient.

    Originally Posted by Val
    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.

    I am trying to explain why I am hopeful that the concept of classroom flipping has merit. I am not here to defend early iterations of online learning. Of course the early iterations will be the most problematic. Hopefully with a few iterations, the coursework of the 6 deficient classes can be made sufficient.

    Originally Posted by Val
    You've also assumed that a video format can provide enough information.

    In a flipped classroom, the video lectures don't represent the entirety of all instruction given to the students. Therefore the video format doesn't have to be 100% sufficient for every single concept of every single subject.


    Originally Posted by Val
    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.

    The fact that numerous students have learned both of these subjects exclusively through the books and/or online materials contradicts your statement.

    Originally Posted by Val
    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.

    In the flipped classroom, confusion points can be addressed by the teacher the next day. I don't see why the things you've mentioned can't be covered in a video. Perhaps you can explain.


    Originally Posted by Val
    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.

    Teachers make assumptions about things working in flipped as well as traditional classes. I've had teachers assume that the overhead projector would work, ruining in-class lecture time. I don't see how this is a flipped-classroom issue. Perhaps you can explain.

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    Flipped from what?

    What exactly is an unflipped classroom? It sounds like a strawman. How is this even a serious conversation?

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    Originally Posted by DAD22
    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.

    1) Not all failures to perform after-school work are due to lack of cooperation. There are also problems of environment, of access, and of competing priorities, most of which are outside of the child's control.

    2) Escalating to the parents or principal doesn't solve very many problems with non-cooperative students today.

    Val #161910 07/10/13 09:25 AM
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    Thanks to Val, I spent some time last night pondering Java and Physics specifically as they relate to video learning, and I want to make a point about another reason I am hopeful for video learning.

    Videos can be more than just a lecturer with a writing implement drawing things and commenting. Videos can include visual learning aids. Physics often deals with bodies in motion, which lends itself nicely to animation and video representation. I can't remember any specific physics lecture from high school, but I remember watching this video with Paul Hewitt in class:


    At first I thought Java didn't lend itself well to visualization, but I realized that's not true. It depends what you're doing with Java. For instance here's a video showing how a binary search tree responds to insertions.


    As a visual learner, I could say that 99% of schooling was problematic for me, but I'd be lying. I already mentioned that I picked things up quickly despite the fact that they weren't presented in my preferred approach. So why is that? I think it's because good teachers break things down into their simplest components. When something is simple enough, a student can compensate for concept presentations that are less than ideal for them. Students do this all the time, and shifting which students are doing it to what degree is a trade-off, with costs and benefits to be weighed and balanced.

    Last edited by DAD22; 07/10/13 10:58 AM. Reason: made it clear that my physics teacher chose to show me a video, which ended up being the only specific lecture I remember.
    Val #161911 07/10/13 09:42 AM
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    Originally Posted by DAD22
    In a flipped classroom, the video lectures don't represent the entirety of all instruction given to the students. Therefore the video format doesn't have to be 100% sufficient for every single concept of every single subject.

    Actually, that is what some radical advocates of this kind of pedagogy are suggesting SHOULD be true.

    The reason why Val's experiences and mine are reflective of a practical examination of that approach is that online coursework DOES tend to use this approach, and it's the only current example available outside of a few hybrid programs (mostly in higher ed).

    I'm not saying that "visual" is a problem. Far from it. Just that this is removing the give-and-take that should be happening in classrooms and replacing it with something that research has (repeatedly) shown is NOT 'better' for any students, and IS worse for a good number of them as a substitute for live instruction.

    The best strategy based on evidence is one in which students are attending live presentations that they can watch AGAIN later.

    That hybrid approach has a LOT to recommend it.

    The ideal, from a research/evidence-based perspective is:

    a) live lecture (30% of class meeting time)
    b) available content for student learning OUTSIDE of class time, including assessments (though security and integrity are huge barriers there, as are ways of including highest levels of Bloom's taxonomy in assessment without a human-human interaction),
    c) 'flipped' classroom time-- time to apply concepts learned in a and b; (70% of class meeting time).


    That's roughly how I ran my classrooms as a college professor. It's roughly how the most talented of my DD's teachers ran THEIR classes, though they were frequently hampered significantly by the platform which mandated far less classroom time than was actually necessary for 90%+ of students.

    That is NOT a pure "flipped" classroom, however. It differs in two particulars:

    1. students are given INITIAL instruction by a live instructor who can 'check in' with students in real-time regarding their preparedness and foundation for tackling the material being presented as they observe, and

    2. it relies heavily on a 'back-and-forth' approach, not a purely linear/flowcharted one re: learning. It's more integrated, and relies on a wider variety of learning modes. Textbooks or other print materials are also an integral part of this model.

    As Bostonian once pointed out-- maybe people who don't like to read aren't actually college material. wink While I know plenty of highly intelligent people whose favored mode ISN'T text, I have to agree on some level that just because some 25% of people prefer VIDEO to textbooks, that isn't a reason to deprive the other 75% of the alternative. Plurality is a very good thing.







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    Originally Posted by DAD22
    Originally Posted by puffin
    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.

    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.


    Originally Posted by puffin
    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?

    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.

    I think that I am disagreeing with you based upon my own experiences as an educator-- not that your anecdotes above are incorrect, but that I strongly suspect that you are not accurately perceiving their relative frequency in average classroom settings.

    My own experience leads me to know that what students PREFER is not always good for them educationally, firstly. Secondly, it's also true that students with relatively slow processing speeds may have difficulty with a lecture that proceeds too rapidly for them to follow in "real-time", by FAR the more common problem is the one that you've minimized-- the issue of a small gap, question, or misunderstood point undermining the student's ability to move forward or understand the rest of the whole.

    I've seen that particular face-palm moment again and again and again... and again. It is the ENTIRE reason why dynamic teachers pay such close attention while they 'teach' from the front of the room-- because that presentation is entirely wasted if a student gets hung up, and it's far, far more work to backtrack later (even with just the one student).

    As a student, as a teacher, and again as a parent watching how online classroom interactions happen, I've seen this. It's the single thing that makes "lecture" most ineffective to begin with, but flipping the classroom to a static information source makes it WORSE, not better.

    The problem is not only that STUDENTS can't ask questions of a video. The other part of the problem is that instructors don't know-- even if they can make educated guesses a good deal of the time-- precisely where the trouble spots will be with a particular cohort of students. It's a process of dynamic discovery for both sides, and it's very difficult to predict ahead of time.

    In part, the hybrid/integrated approach works best because, as Dad rightly notes earlier, you sometimes don't know what you don't know until you try to implement it or integrate it with other knowledge. The trouble is that neither does the instructor about 10-20% of the time. You can predict, in my experience, about 60-70% of the places that students will have difficulty, but that additional 30-40% will EAT UP class time and then some in a flipped classroom, and you'll wind up (as the instructor) answering the same question 3, 4, or 5 times in five minutes... just to deal with 2-3% of it. Idealistic views of how static instruction work are great-- but they don't make it any more efficient to iron out those little misunderstandings, and that is (mostly) what teaching is all about to begin with. A group instructional setting is simply more efficient for everyone from a time-management standpoint. Even if it does annoy the top 5% as a 'waste' of time, and confuse the bottom 10% even more than they already were, re: the pace that suits the middle of the distribution.

    So a long session OUGHT to include brief bursts of direct instruction punctuating applied work/exploration with the concepts being introduced.

    My objection to flipped classroom ideals is the sheer-- well, I consider it lunacy-- of thinking that 'instruction' can be a simple "transfer" of information in a static sense. That works for memorization. Nothing else.

    Also, no offense to autodidacts, but it's also been my experience that those who have only learned what THEY have sought and taught themselves tend to almost invariably have two sequelae which are related: a) they seldom have multiple ways of considering/viewing the understanding that they possess, never having been exposed to views other than their own way of understanding it, and b) they have some strange gaps as a result of never having had an instructor explore/probe for those things as they learned the material. The best autodidacts tend to accumulate that understanding from multiple sources and challenge themselves with different approaches using different learning modes through a version of immersion. They are rare. More common is the autodidact that cannot learn from others because of a rigid mental approach to gaining understanding-- and that does tend to result in less than what I'd call actual mastery, though it can superficially seem that way. This is one reason why I am skeptical that an explanation aimed at the middle quartile is a "complete waste of time" for the top 10% who 'understand' the material already. Assuming that the top 10% is learning something new in that material (as I think is often NOT the case in undifferentiated classrooms), then no, it's not a complete waste of time to consider a different perspective and check your OWN understanding by mentally composing an answer yourself and checking it against what the instructor offers.

    As long as a textbook/video can't respond adequately to the following kinds of questions, it will be a poor pedagogical substitute for a live instructor--

    Is this related to {earlier topic}? Through {mechanism/event discussed in a prerequisite course}?

    Do you have to do it that way?

    Is it okay if I looked at it like this instead?

    Why did you do that there?

    I'm not sure that I understand why you chose ______ as a method/reason/etc. Can you explain?

    Is there a reason to label those axes in that manner?

    Is that a standard symbol or will just any variable do?

    Did you consider _______ ?







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    Val #161922 07/10/13 01:15 PM
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    Apparently there is some research into the effectiveness of flipped classrooms:

    http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/teaching-guides/teaching-activities/flipping-the-classroom/

    "Mazur and colleagues have published results suggesting that the PI method results in significant learning gains when compared to traditional instruction (2001). In 1998, Richard Hake gathered data on 2084 students in 14 introductory physics courses taught by traditional methods (defined by the instructor as relying primarily on passive student lectures and algorithmic problem exams), allowing him to define an average gain for students in such courses using pre/post-test data. Hake then compared these results to those seen with interactive engagement methods, defined as “heads-on (always) and hands-on (usually) activities which yield immediate feedback through discussion with peers and/or instructors” (Hake p. 65) for 4458 students in 48 courses. He found that students taught with interactive engagement methods exhibited learning gains almost two standard deviations higher than those observed in the traditional courses (0.48 +/- 0.14 vs. 0.23 +/- 0.04)"


    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcam...-with-videos-increased-test-scores/40470

    "The 85 students in the flipped course at San Jose State watched the edX lecture videos at home and attended class twice a week to practice what they had learned and ask questions. Two other sections of students took a traditional version of the course.

    The midterm-examination scores of students in the flipped section were higher than those in the traditional sections, said Mr. Ghadiri. Although the midterm questions were more difficult for the flipped students, their median score was 10 to 11 points higher."

    http://www.blendmylearning.com/2011/08/31/the-results/

    "Among the students in the study who had valid scores on the pre and post course assessment, the results were similar for the treatment and the control group. Students in the “control” or traditional summer school course, on average, increased their percentage of correct answers by 5.2% over the five-week period. Students in the “treatment” or Khan class, on average, increased their percentage of correct answers 6.4%

    ...


    Prior to seeing the results of the summer experiment, the teacher predicted that her students would do better on a traditional measure of proficiency such as the California Standards Test or CST if she ran her classroom in the Khan manner versus the traditional classroom approach. Given that she was not a convert prior to this pilot and developed these opinions only through teaching the course, we find this an interesting perspective to consider in the dialogue about how teachers will respond to blended learning."

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    Val Offline OP
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    Originally Posted by DAD22
    Apparently there is some research into the effectiveness of flipped classrooms:

    http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/teaching-guides/teaching-activities/flipping-the-classroom/

    "Mazur and colleagues have published results suggesting that the PI method results in significant learning gains when compared to traditional instruction (2001)."

    This isn't a flipped classroom. Mazur teaches interactively, which is entirely different from the flipped model being discussed here. For the sake of precision, "flipped" here as defined in that link I used has means "students watch videos at home and do homework in class."

    What Mazur does is probably a highly effective technique that 22B alluded to back on page 1 of this thread, and which HowlerKarma clearly practices: mixed lecturing and tutorial-type instruction. PM me with an email address if you want a copy of the article.

    Originally Posted by DAD22
    "The 85 students in the flipped course at San Jose State watched the edX lecture videos...

    College students. This discussion is about the perils of using this model in a K-12 environment, which is very different from college students. They're more mature (executive function) and have chosen to be there.


    Quote
    "Among the students in the study who had valid scores on the pre and post course assessment, the results were similar for the treatment and the control group.


    This is a blog post and not a peer-reviewed article. And the author admits the following very serious shortcomings:

    "First, no statistician will take our results particularly seriously, and they shouldn’t. The sample size is too small to attribute any real significance to the findings. Secondly, the pilot was very brief, lasting only five weeks, or twenty-four class sessions of two hours each."

    I'm a scientist. I know that stuff that can look so good in a pilot experiment, yet be proven wrong when you do the real thing. This is just so common.





    Last edited by Val; 07/10/13 01:37 PM.
    Val #161926 07/10/13 01:53 PM
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    Originally Posted by Val
    This isn't a flipped classroom. Mazur teaches interactively, which is entirely different from the flipped model being discussed here. For the sake of precision, "flipped" here as defined in that link I used has means "students watch videos at home and do homework in class."

    That isn't very precise, though. If 99% of the lectures are watched in video format at home, but one day the teacher lectures in class... is that not flipped? I would consider any classroom to be flipped if the majority of lecture-style concept explanations are experienced at home. As you can probably tell, I don't think it matters specifically how that exposure happens. If teachers usually use books, video recordings, audio recordings, or even interactive software to facilitate the initial explanation of a topic at home, and then help students work through their understanding in class later... that's flipped to me.

    Originally Posted by Val
    College students. This discussion is about the perils of using this model in a K-12 environment, which is very different from college students. They're more mature (executive function) and have chosen to be there.

    To be fair, not all college students have a choice about being there, but I appreciate the differences. Also, in the OP it was not clear that this discussion was to be constrained to k-12.


    Originally Posted by Val
    This is a blog post and not a peer-reviewed article. And the author admits the following very serious shortcomings:

    "First, no statistician will take our results particularly seriously, and they shouldn’t. The sample size is too small to attribute any real significance to the findings. Secondly, the pilot was very brief, lasting only five weeks, or twenty-four class sessions of two hours each."

    I'm a scientist. I know that stuff that can look so good in a pilot experiment, yet be proven wrong when you do the real thing. This is just so common.

    I don't know what the point of your post is. I feel it's a bit accusatory toward me, as though I somehow misrepresented the link I posted. I understand the shortcomings of the data, but it does speak to the idea that a flipped classroom is doomed from the start, which seems to be a popular opinion around these parts. Maybe I'm getting the wrong impression.

    Last edited by DAD22; 07/10/13 02:14 PM. Reason: Definition of flipped classroom discussion
    Val #161928 07/10/13 02:09 PM
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    As an aside...
    We mentioned the Socratic Method earlier, and the first article linked (at CFT) dives into Bloom's Taxonomy. Which kinda struck a chord... as the taxonomy sees field knowledge progressing:
    1. Remembering
    2. Understanding
    3. Applying
    4. Analyzing
    5. Evaluating
    6. Creating

    but when you are wired towards Socratic learning (or abstract/system thinking,) it is more like:
    1. Analyzing
    2. Evaluating
    3. Applying
    4. Creating
    5. Understanding
    6. Remembering
    (with some feedback loops thrown in)

    Which can be a bit more tragic with the flipped classroom as in theory the first 5 steps may be completely inaccessible during the "out of class" part.

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