You teach a course where you normally lecture to students during class time.
They work on homework and group assignments during their own time.
What if there were a way to do the lectures outside of class time
so you could use class time to have students work on activities together?
Welcome to Flipping the Classroom Simply Speaking.
It's a pretty common course design.
Students gather in a classroom a few times a week to hear a lecture.
A faculty member may show slides, play a few videos,
demonstrate some concepts, or solve problems.
On their own time, students work on problems and arrange times to meet
to work on group projects.
Some faculty are finding ways to increase student engagement
and improve learning by flipping this design.
In the new model, students watch, listen to, and interact with content
on their own time and then use class time for engaging activities.
Heres how it works.
Say youre teaching a biology course.
One week, you talk about invasive animal species, such as the Asian Carp.
Instead of lecturing, you post a few YouTube videos about Asian Carp.
You also produce a video of your own in which you show some photographs
of other invasive species and talk about their origins.
You want to keep each video interesting,
so you keep them under 10 minutes each.
To help trigger discussion, you also include some questions
that you will be asking students to think and talk about
during your next class session.
Later in the semester, students can go back to these videos
to review key concepts to prepare for an exam
or to guide a project or paper.
Short videos are just one option.
Audio podcasts, VoiceThread, and and many types of interactive media
can be used as well.
The main idea is to capture your presence, thoughts, and guidance
that would normally take place in a classroom setting.
Now that the lecture is done outside the classroom,
what do your students do when they get together?
You can have students bring their laptops to class, work in groups,
and research one of the other invasive species that you discussed
in your video.
Where did they come from?
What impact are they having?
What is being done to control them?
Since they are doing this research during class time,
they can get your assistance in determining good sources of information
and how to interpret what they are seeing.
Also, youll get a better idea of which students are doing their fair share
of work in their groups.
There won't be any more excuses that students dont have time
to get together for group work.
If an interesting idea comes from one group,
you can get the attention of the class and have a spontaneous discussion.
In short, you can create a much more active environment.
There are many other activities you can do in the classroom.
Have students discuss course concepts or take different sides
of an issue and debate their merits.
Students could share drafts of papers that they are writing
and get feedback from you and other students.
Students can work on difficult problem sets, share solutions,
and ask for help when they get stuck.
Organize students into groups and have them answer questions about a case study.
Or they could write and practice a presentation about a topic of your choosing.
There are ways of using class time for activities involving any discipline.
The important thing is to get students to engage with the content of your course.
Flipping your classroom involves some serious thinking
about the way you are teaching and the way students learn,
so you may want to start with a single topic or week and see how it goes.
The results may surprise you.
This has been Flipping the Classroom Simply Speaking.
To get more information about this topic, visit tlt.its.psu.edu/flip
This video was produced by Penn State University
and is available for use under a Creative Commons license.