Somersaults or back flips - The flipped classroom part 2

How do you flip a classroom?

Any classroom involves the educators concerned considering a number of factors; materials, delivery, self-study, assessments plus the usual aims and objectives of a course or module. There is no one way to do this and the same applies to the flipped-classroom. It can be as simple as videoing lectures for students to view before a class and setting 'homework' for students to complete during class time. This may work in some scenarios, calculus perhaps, but is far from ideal for most courses particularly at a higher education level. 

The table above shows how an educator can start to think about the type of information that is being presented followed by when and how that information will be disseminated to the students. Specifically the change from practice exercises to open-ended or group based problem-solving in a class. Thus giving the 'sage' a chance to come down from the stage and interact with the students giving them dynamic feedback as opposed to marking a homework assignment with a red pen. Prober and Heath ask us why, in an era of video and freely available resources such as youtube and TED, we would waste time on a traditional lecture. In some ways there is a simple answer to this “putting dozens, hundreds or even thousands of students in a room with a professor – endures because it makes economic sense.” In other ways the answer is far less simplistic. A lecture is traditional, therefore it is easy, so if we are going to flip our classrooms we need to know how to do it in a way that enhances the student experience. To change the world you have to know you are going to make it better and you have to have a plan. Which takes us back to the question of how do you flip a classroom. There are several options;

1.
Record the lecture that would have been given in person and encourage the students to watch it before class. Then give the students case studies, group based tasks and discussions to do and use the classroom time to enter into face-to-face discussions with. On the positive side it allows students to watch the lecture at their own pace and in their own time. On the negative side it almost doubles the amount of time required from the lecturer and in addition to that one of the reasons for flipping a classroom is student engagement. The table below shows that students brain activity levels in a lecture are similar to when they are watching TV and lower than when they are sleeping. Providing a full lecture to watch through as screen is not necessarily going to improve that.

 2. 
Students are asked to prepare for classes by engaging with material before a class and are discouraged from being passive learners by the expectation that they come to class with a question or engage in an on-line discussion. Professors/teachers are therefore also able to prepare answers to questions that have been received beforehand. This may, in many respects, mean they are coming to class and 'lecturing' however the subject will have been created in response to student questions. In this scenario the information provided to the students can be as limited or as varied as the faculty's imagination. Heath and Prober suggest that based on accepted time frames for student concentration teachers could provide 10-15 minute online presentations that cover the basic concepts with reading material and embedded quizzes which provide instant feedback. Of course in every subject there are is a wealth of resources on the web which, combined with tailor made videos from a 'sage', can provide a bank of knowledge that can then be reused and revisited many times over.

    Despite the differing suggestions for pre-class work all sources suggest that the flipped-classroom should have interactive lessons based around case studies, real life problems and scenarios which students are encouraged to solve using all available resources. This may well include the on-line information as well as the faculty and their peers thus greatly increasing the breadth and depth of knowledge which students can apply to their problems.
References
Medical Education re-imagined; a call to action
Lecture halls without lectures - a proposal for medical education
How flipping the classroom can improve the traditional lecture

Flipping out in the classroom - The flipped class part 1

I have been thinking a lot recently about flipped classroom. What they are, how they work and how one could potentially be implemented in my current location. Here is part 1 of what I have been working on.

“The last substantive reform in medical student education followed the Flexner Report, which was written in 1910. In the ensuing 100 years, the volume of medical knowledge has exploded, the complexity of the health care system has grown, pedagogical methods have evolved, and unprecedented opportunities for technological support of learners have become available. Yet students are being taught roughly the same way they were taught when the Wright brothers were tinkering at Kitty Hawk.” (n engl j med 366;18)

The flipped-classroom is possibly the approach that will change medical education, in fact all education, if it is done in the correct way. However before we get the how and the why we should start with the what.

What is a flipped-classroom?
The flipped-classroom is the inverse of a traditional classroom where students do what is normally considered to be homework in class with their lecturer or teacher and outside of class they consume the information that may traditionally have been give in lecture format.

(The full infographic can be found here) 

As you can see from the illustration above, part of the process is changing the role of the teacher and the way they, as an educator, view their position in the classroom. It may be that the lecturer feels most common being 'the Sage on the Stage' but surely, the knowledge and expertise that made them sage like in the first place could be put to even more use if disseminated to the students through discussion and one-to-one or small group interaction. The sage on the stage is not being lost in the process either, more becoming the sage on TV, laptop, ipad or smartphone on the bus. The flipped-classroom is not an entirely new concept either. It can be seen to an extent in the socratic teaching methods used in Law instruction, where students must prepare for a class by reading and fully expect to be quizzed on their knowledge by a sagely professor. English Literature also works on the premise that you read the book before class, not in it and as Prober and Khan point out in their paper 'Medical education re-imagined. A call to action'1 Gross Anatomy classes are also essentially a form of flipping where by students must know their text book anatomy before they can do dissections in a lab. 

References 
Lecture Halls without Lectures, a proposal for Medical Education
Medical Education re-imagined, a call to action