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