A flipped classroom is a classroom where the teacher acts as a guide to student learning. Traditionally, most classrooms were teacher centered where the students listened to the teacher and the teacher gave the lecture while the students took notes.
A flipped classroom turns this paradigm around by focusing more on the students rather than the teacher. In a flipped classroom, students take control of their own learning. Another name for a flipped classroom is a 'student centered' classroom.
I love using the flipped classroom model because it gives students a chance to shine. Students get to show off what they have learned.
Flipped classrooms can be used in a face to face classroom or an online classroom. I started using flipped classrooms at my first job. I let my adolescent students present the day's lessons. For instance, when we were studying The Wizard of Oz, chapter by chapter, I would let different students present the different chapters of the novel. Instead of the teacher presenting each chapter or giving quizzes, I had the students present each chapter. Also, each presenter was also responsible for quizzing the other students on the content of his assigned chapter.
By having students come up with the quiz, students competed with who could come up with the best quiz, the funniest quiz, or the hardest quiz. Sometimes, the student quizzes were much harder than the ones I would have made! The student quizzes got the rest of the class to also read the different chapters of the novel that they were not assigned.
Having students do the presentations of their project increased their confidence and got them interested in literary analysis of each chapter since while presenting the chapter, they could not just give a summary, but had to do a literary analysis of the symbolism of the chapter thus, having students do the literary analysis allowed them to learn the critical thinking skills necessary for literary analysis.
In an online class, I had students become group leaders in the forum discussion and each student would be responsible for their own thread. If we were studying a novel, I gave each student a chapter they had to present in their discussion thread. In the subject title of their thread, they had to put the name of their chapter so students could visually see which chapter was being discussed.
Then I had each chapter presenter present their chapter using symbolism and literary analysis. Each presenter was then responsible for open ended questions he would ask others to make sure others had read the chapter.
Each student who posted to the forum was responsible for creating their own open ended question about that chapter to keep the conversation going.
In both the online and flipped classroom, I let the students take charge and they end up learning more than if I simply gave a literature lecture and had them take notes and memorize their notes for a test, which is what my high school literature teacher did to us. I didn't encounter project based learning until I hit college where we would discuss our theories of literature with the professor.
How many of you have tried the flipped classroom model? What were your results?
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