The 'flipped' classroom

Perhaps the biggest buzz word in education in 2012 was 'flipped classroom'. Just as easily as this hype peaked in 2012, it will most likely fizzle into the archives of pedagogical trends in 2013. The reason: The 'flipped classroom' (together with '1:1 classroom') requires a level of responsibility which students rarely poses. And while it claims to allow for more social learning class, it does not give students or teachers much to build on.

First of all, what does it mean to 'flip' your class? Traditionally, students listen to teachers speak in class and do their schoolwork out of class. The flipped model says that this should happen the other way around. Lectures should happen on YouTube, where students can rewind and learn at their own pace. Then they come to class prepared to do group work or have individual time with the teacher. It sounds great in theory, especially now that YouTube and other online technologies can facilitate this process. But just because learning can happen online, there is no reason to suppose it should.

The movement really started in 2006 when a man by the name of Salman Khan wanted to help his nephew with maths by posting tutorials on YouTube. Besides his nephew, thousand of others found these videos useful. Microsoft invested heavily in the Khan Academy and a movement was born. Recently MIT, Harvard and several other major universities took e-learning to a whole new level by launching Coursera, where you can take a college course online for free with 20,000 others who peer assess each other's work. Last December I visited a high school in the Netherlands where students receive credits for taking such courses during school hours, under teacher supervision. I wondered where this movement was going. 

As an experiment, I decided to enroll in a history course on technology from Michigan State University on Coursera. The website was amazing, the tutorials were mediocre and the human contact took the form of a forum. I was not keen on writing an 800-word essay, only for someone I did not know, half-way around the world to unfairly critique it. I wanted to pick the professor's brain in person. I wanted to sit in a semi-circle and have a discussion with competent classmates. I dropped out after 3 weeks, together with 17,329 others. Later I read that roughly 700 students in the world earned their course certificate, for what it was worth.

Naturally, the flipped classroom is not the same as an e-learning environment. In fact, it could be called a component of 'blended learning' where both online and offline experiences are part of the curriculum, which is to be commended. But the flipped classroom also assumes that the input phase of learning should happen outside the classroom as an individual experience. This is concerning. 

From experience, language and literature teachers know what happens when you shift the input phase of learning out of the classroom. When you tell a class to go off and read Chapters 1 to 3 of a novel over the weekend, you find yourself wondering why on Monday morning. If the input experience is not managed, you end up with an even more differentiated class. If students have even read the assigned reading, you wonder what was gained from it. More experienced teachers will know how important it is to go through the first few pages of a literary work together with students in class. Naturally you cannot read every word of an entire work together. There will always be assigned reading. But at least assigned reading can be directed from in-class, social-constructivist activity. In class, students can be taught how to read with purpose out of class. 

This rule of managed social input can be applied to all learning, even to the most basics of mathematics. Before I tell my 7-year old daughter to practice her multiplication tables on her own, I frame a situation in which multiplication is necessary. To do this I recently introduced her to Monopoly. There's no better example of the social constructivist method than board games. The flipped classroom seems to deny the fact that questions can best be framed and theories can be discovered best in social contexts. In a classroom of 20-25 students and 1 teacher, there is an abundance of learning opportunities to be had beyond lectures, which indeed can always be filmed and viewed on online.