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I can see some advantage to my kids although I expect it would just mean they spent most of the class reading as they would have finished the work. But my kids are a very small proportion of the class and I don't believe that the possible advantages to my kids outweigh the disadvantages to kids who a) don't have a computer ar home or don't get to use it because big brother/uncle/cousin/dad is playing games on it, 2) live in environments where doing schoolwork is considered as being available to mind the baby/run to the shop/do something useful, 3) the child needs to work in the evenings (this is obviously older kids but the child might be minding kids all evening too.

I am not in favour of further disadvantaging this disadvantaged. If they want to flip some specific classrooms that is fine but it should be optional.

Interesting article on flipped classrooms:

http://www.ascd.org/publications/ed...ipped-Classrooms-Is-Still-Coming-In.aspx

In our district the teachers in the pilot program were pretty unanimous about liking the flipped classrooms (for math) and the kids and parents felt positively overall, as well. If a kid doesn't have access to a computer at home, there are other options.

Thanks for sharing this.

That is precisely what happens.

MOST college STEM laboratories are taught as more-or-less "flipped" and always have been.

It is incredibly inefficient, however-- because you'll answer the same question about four to six times in a four hour lab-- each student requiring a 15 minutes explanation while their classmates wait for you.

My personal experience suggests that ONLY struggling students get teacher-time in that model. Now, the argument can be made that this is appropriate, but I think (as parent to a giftie) that this is morally WRONG. Advanced students who are NOT struggling to master the basics ought to get some love from the expert, too, KWIM?

The other thing that a flipped classroom does is deprive students of the opportunity to learn from the questions of classmates-- or to simply check their own understanding (by comparing their answer with the instructor's).

I'd argue that students who are at a predictable and uniform learning readiness and background knowledge are least in need of an expert live teacher-- that's sort of the point, that canned video makes a series of assumptions about preparation and level of ability to learn at a particular pace and with a particular level of detail offered. Those assumptions are not necessarily true for non-normative students.

If you have a class of 30 students, it may well be that four of them have a single question about the same thing because of a common feature in their background as learners.

OR-- two of them may want to know if {alternative viewpoint} is equally valid, in light of {other information}. Perhaps one wants to know if the current topic is correctly associated with {this other thing} via {mechanism/connection}.

Those are the kinds of things that make class interactions with a subject expert highly worthwhile, and truly-- far richer than a canned video watched at home with the TV on for background noise.

I'm sad that so few people have apparently experienced an open- or soft-lecture format, where pauses for reflection/interaction/application are common. A supportive environment like that is REALLY superior to either a pure lecture or a completely flipped classroom, IMO. It's better for both tails, and WAY better for the center of the distribution, too.

I also think that it does a better job of fostering a positive learning community-- which DRASTICALLY improves teaching efficiency-- where students communicate with one another dynamically about class material.

I think that it is tempting to assume that flipping a classroom results in self-pacing, but that is NOT the case.

Nor is it the case that flipping classrooms makes differentiation or ability-grouping easier or more likely.

But many times in my career as a student I felt like I was one of the few who came to class having read the material that was asked to be read (speaking of undergrad and graduate school college level here). I assume many people read the book but not necessarily on the time schedule requested. If you asked students to read the material AND watch a lecture before class...I can only imagine that I there would be even less who had done the all the prep work.

What online algebra course is this?

At university I very rarely had time to read screeds of material before classes. After all I had 6 to 10 courses at any one time and there was no co-ordination of workload. Usually things got done in order of due date. I did preread labs and prewrite the bits I could - that way I could knock the lab report out in the same day and cross it off the list.

I just occurred to me how much easier some things must be now with computers and the internet (computers did exist but they weren't really used and most people didn't have them.

That's what I think, too.

I occasionally teased my students that if they walked out of the local Borders having just dropped $100 on a book, not a one of them would wait until they even got it HOME to crack it open...

I knew that only about half of them read the text. Or did any other kind of preparation for coming to class, quite frankly.

I'm with puffin on having options. Each option may offer significant benefits for different kids and their families. Not sure how options would work... teacher A is holding regular class, teacher B is holding flipped class... families choose which option they prefer and make a 1-year commitment?

I'm wondering how this may reflect in research? My hunch is that both groups would perform better than a control group (students in the previous year, students who did not make a choice). An improvement in performance may occur simply because these families made a choice and feel something at stake in making it work. An improvement in performance may also occur because they chose a learning system which best suited their needs, learning style, etc.

I agree with you blackcat. I wouldn't read too much into the verbose comments of a few self-declared experts on this forum. For some, the flipped classroom and its success is a point of insecurity. I suppose this comes from the apparent contradiction between the success of the flipped programs and the belief that students can't learn that way.

It seems to me that some people are really over-emphasizing the importance of the possibility for students to interrupt a teacher's lecture with questions. There are so many reasons that this doesn't really happen in practice. When you don't understand a topic, you usually don't know what it is you don't understand about it.