Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Flipped classrooms

The Science article didn't say anything about videos. It's all about interactivity in the lecture hall. I think that part of the Vanderbilt piece wasn't written carefully.


Sorry; I'm not trying to be accusatory. I'm actually treating you like a peer in science, which is a compliment. Scientists criticize each other's ideas all the time. This is how good science is supposed to work. If you aren't used to it, it can be offputting. But once you get used to it, you start to really appreciate the colleagues who aren't shy about finding holes in your logic. I just sent a manuscript out to 3 people an hour ago and asked them to rip it apart. I meant it.

But like I said, preliminary data can be so seductive, and yet so wrong. This is why it's called preliminary and why it's dangerous to draw conclusions from it. IMO, that mini-study was good as a first step toward getting an answer to a question, but was in no way an answer or even a reliable hint.

Hope is nice, but in the world of education, it rarely pans out.

For example, you're assuming there will be multiple iterations. In the majority of cases, there almost certainly won't be. DS's Java class lectures were so old, his final assignment required him to use a technology that isn't really used anymore because of security problems. There was a big mistake in an early physics lab he had to do. The data for a uniform acceleration experiment had serious flaws, as in, the uniformly accelerating object stopped, went backwards, and moved with constant velocity. I tracked down the guy who wrote the course and suggested he might want to fix the data. He answered:

> I wrote course several years ago and I am no longer associated with it.
>
> The data is actual data generated in a lab, not perfect data predicted
> mathematically.

Translation: I could not care less. PFO.


I'm one of them. I'm an autodidact. I've been teaching myself stuff for decades. I've learned that success in self-teaching requires three things:

• Many resources (books, Google, video and/or audio recordings)
• An ability to pose important and relevant questions that can be answered with the tools above.
• Discipline (a lot of it)

Single resources rarely have all the information one needs to learn something. I have the financial resources to have access to many books and other learning materials. Most teenagers don't. As a HG+ adult with a science PhD, I am very good at points 2 and 3. But these two skills didn't exist in me at birth. I had to learn them, and that took a lot of time. In fact, point 2 is an important part of a PhD or a research-based master's. I doubt that even gifted high school kids have these skills (especially the second one) for the most part. I've worked with or supervised a lot of very bright adults who don't have these skills. It's like they flounder around, not realizing that they're not asking the right questions. I don't know, but these skills might only develop in people who are very good at a given pursuit (i.e. a HG+ athlete or artist might see in me the same inabilities in those fields that I've seen in others in my areas of strength).

Plus, there are also the points about Socratic vs. auto-didactic learners.
A major problem of a flipped classroom is that it puts a large part of the burden of teaching onto the students. This is wrong, IMO. The whole point of being a teacher is that you're supposed to know so much more than the students, you can do more than just impart information from a textbook.

You might argue that teachers don't always measure up in this regard, and I would agree with you. But moving to the extreme of video teaching is, I think, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So, yes, I've decided for now that flipped classrooms, as practiced in that link I used, are a bad idea. I do see merit in asking students to watch someone else's videos after they've been exposed to the ideas in class. Right now, I think that interactive live teaching is probably the best way to get your points across.

Point worth making more than once, here--

Val and I are both scientists. We were both trained to interact over ideas in the same semi-confrontational sort of manner.

Apologies if that seems rude or aggressive; it really isn't intended that way.


Oh, and yes, yes, yes to Mazur's interactive approach.

MOST of my successful peers/colleagues who teach STEM at the post-secondary level (and many at the secondary level) wouldn't dream of doing things any other way.

It just flat out WORKS best for the widest swathe of students.

I'm going to quote my own post from a page back, because there is something that I needed to clarify in it.


I'll also note that most students prefer live demonstrations to watching them on YouTube.

The reason? As one helpfully pointed out, there was always the possibility-- but not the guarantee-- that I'd set something on FIRE. It was engaging because of the lack of predictability, in other words.

Given that my DD and other students have made similar statements about live/interactive instruction periodically, I think this may be a real thing that keeps students engaged in LIVE presentations that doesn't exist in recordings.

If they can't have live, then give them MythBusters.

I just wanted to share an alternative perspective from faculty at San Jose State, which covers a lot of my own concerns as a college professor in the social sciences.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Document-Open-Letter-From/138937/

Much of the discussion here has focused on science and math classes so I wanted to add that these are not the only disciplines facing the "flip" dilemma. Dad22, I can appreciate your enthusiasm for the apparent flexibility the approach seems to make possible. However, I am very cynical about what these classrooms would look like in practice. I think the likely result is the further devaluing of the teaching profession (at the college level, flipped classrooms could easily result in online "professors" from afar and TAs in the classroom. Bye-bye faculty.) And yes this is a job preservation issue for faculty, but it is also about quality of education provided to students. It is also a broader social issue. Do we want a society in which the chosen elite get to have real professors and ask their questions in a face-to-face format and everyone else gets canned videos with ever less qualified teaching assistants? There are some deeper questions here that should be considered.

And as a social sciences professor, I must point out that the examples given here, as someone mentioned above, seem to be more about transferring information rather than teaching concepts and ideas. Can someone really learn about democracy, or social justice, or philosophy or racism or political theory from watching a lecture? When there are multiple perspectives on a subject that must be examined, interpreted, and critiqued, I don't see how this approach could result in independent, critical thinkers, which is the number one goal I have for my students. In fact, it seems antithetical to that goal. It leads students to believe that there is ONE right answer to a question and the answer to that question is whatever the authority figure in the video says it is. This teaches students to be followers not independent thinkers. Thesis, evidence, logical argument. Defend your position in a classroom full of students (and a knowledgeable free thinking instructor) who will challenge and question you and perhaps even bring a new idea or perspective to you that you had not thought of before. This classroom experience develops a learning community, as mentioned above, but it also develops students who not only come to the answers themselves, but who can also use evidence and logic effectively and communicate their ideas clearly. Granted, these things are often not happening in live classrooms, but I don't see how it could happen at all in the flipped classroom.

I think Val and Howler Karma have made some valid points on why this approach might be problematic for the sciences. I would like to suggest that there are some serious concerns here for society and civil discourse as well.

A flipped classroom replaces live lectures with videos. Here is an interesting defense of the lecture:

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2007/07/lectures-highly-effective-teaching.html

21 July 2007
Lectures - a highly effective teaching method

Editorial

Lectures are such an effective teaching method because they exploit evolved human psychology to improve learning
Bruce G. Charlton
Medical Hypotheses. 2006; 67: 1261-1265.

Summary
Lectures are probably the best teaching method for many students in many circumstances; especially for communicating conceptual knowledge, and where there is a significant knowledge gap between lecturer and audience. However, the lack of a convincing rationale has been a factor in under-estimating the importance of lectures, and there are many who advocate their replacement with written communications or electronic media. I suggest that lectures are so effective because they exploit the spontaneous human aptitude for learning from spoken (rather than written) information. Literacy is a recent cultural artefact, and for most of their evolutionary history humans communicated by direct speech. By contrast with speech, all communication technologies – whether reading a book or a computer monitor – are artificial and unnatural. Furthermore, learning is easier during formal, quiet, real-time social events. The structure of a lecture artificially manipulates human psychology to increase vigilance, focus attention, and generate authority for the lecturer – all of which make communications more memorable for the student. Instead of trying to phase-out lectures, we should strive to make them better by understanding that lectures are essentially formal, spoken, social events.

Hmmm. I wonder if there is any research to back that one up. It is an interesting hypothesis, but evolutionarily speaking, language is a more recent development than information acquisition via visual methods, when one stops to consider it.

Social, yes; though that means quite different things to different individuals, as any extreme extravert/introvert could explain.

I mean, anecdotally, it matches what I (and other teachers) have observed to be true; that it is hard to pay attention to anything which is non-interactive for very long, and that students-- in general-- have a hard time paying enough attention to more than a few minutes of video instruction. Research has shown that to be true, too, so it's more than just anecdote and instinct operating. (I posted several of those studies earlier in the thread.)

Oral communication is a different medium entirely, even if it is a lecture setting. It's an intriguing idea. I agree that it's social in a way, but I'm not sure that I agree with formal, quiet, and real-time being the "best" learning environment, if only because none of those is exactly nonsubjective terminology.

I think it probably has something to do with intrinsic motivation and how learning style preferences play into that student motivation. More young students are socially motivated than not, but learning shifts gradually away from that primary mode as students mature, too. College faculty in particular are in a position to watch autodidactism develop in real-time-- most students have to learn the supporting skills (executive, discriminating) to leverage it well, even if they have natural inclinations that direction.

One more thought-- I think that those who are wary of all of the buzz over "flipped" classrooms-- as a pedagogical innovation, I mean-- are so not because they don't see the benefits of moving the applications/exploration/innovation part of things into live instructional time, but because...

er, this isn't new. Effective teachers have always done that. Does nobody recall "assigned reading" in classes?? Break-out discussion groups and spokespersons to report to the class as a whole? Working problems IN class and then seeing the expert work the problem and discuss it?

I'm disturbed by the idea that the standard pedagogy is "sage-on-the-stage" in the first place, because I've seldom seen that in practice. I've been around a lot of educational environments from early childhood ed through post-graduate settings, so it perplexes me that I've not seen this supposed problem that flipping "solves."

Maybe this is more common in the fields which produce professional education faculty and researchers?? I'm seriously confused by that point, and I think that most of the skeptics are, too. We're left wondering-- who ARE these people and where they heck have THEY been that they have this skewed idea of what has been happening in my classroom/department/school, anyway??

It begs the question-- what IS new about this?? (Because the proponents keep using words like 'disruptive' and 'innovative' and 'revolutionary.')

Well. What is new, evidently, is that direct instruction is being eliminated because it is viewed as a simple transfusion of information from expert to learners.

That's simply incorrect for most subjects.

Using video lectures or tutorials as a supplement is fine, and probably good. It's fine to use a video tutorial as a means of learning a relatively simple task, or a variation on a skill that one already possesses.

Not so good for a de novo acquisition in a learning population which is mostly naive and immature. If that worked, the vast majority of kindergarteners would enter school KNOWING how to read thanks to public television and computer games. They don't.


ETA: I'm definitely laughing at wanting to use the 1.75X playback option. I've often wanted a "reset" or "skip" feature, myself.

The term "flipped classroom" is relatively recent, but a related idea, "programmed instruction", has been around for a long time (and was invented by BF Skinner). Quoting Wikipedia:

The Wikipedia article lists several programmed instruction textbooks, many teaching computer programming. Khan Academy, with its lectures and accompanying problems, where answering enough questions moves you to the next topic, could be considered programmed instruction, as could EPGY. Stanford professor Patrick Suppes has been working on EPGY-like systems since the 1960s, as documented at http://suppes-corpus.stanford.edu/browse.html?c=comped&d=1960 .

The idea of students working largely on their own, getting canned instruction (either printed or video) and getting automated feedback as they work problems, has been around for a long time. I don't know if it is unpopular because

(1) it does not work well for most students -- they need live instruction or feedback
(2) school administrators don't want some students getting much ahead of others
(3) automating instruction threatens teacher employment

I looked at a programmed algebra textbook. The snippets of exposition between problems, typically just a few lines, could frustrate students who want to see the big picture.

Well, point number 1 is why teachers aren't in favor of the current administrative fervor for it, at any rate.

I agree with Bostonian's post in its entirety. It can be good for autodidacts, assuming that the curriculum is current and high-quality (which I think that Val and I have shown is not always the case, in spite of assurances to the contrary).


It's pretty toxic for Socratic or top-down/big-picture learners, though. Far more so than I would ever have imagined without knowing my own child as a learner.