Flipped Learning - Is It For You?

What Is Flipped Learning?

Flipped Learning is a model for mastery learning.  Videos provide direct instruction targeted at student learning goals and students practice.  Videos can be watched at home or at school.  While in class, with the support of the teacher available, students dive deeper into content and apply their knowledge before being assessed.  If students do not show mastery of the content, the teacher can remediate, provide additional practice, or assign corrective work before students retake an assessment to prove their grasp of the content.

Graphic designed based on Jon Bergmann’s description of Flipped Learning in the  blog titled, “Mastery Simplified: 5 Tips to Make Mastery  Reality.”

The idea of Flipped Learning has been around for a while now.  To me, it always seemed more appropriate for middle or high school students, but I recently began to wonder how it could be used as a mastery learning model to support elementary school students and how it can tie into gamifying the classroom through digital badging.  (I’ll save the topic of digital badging for a later post.)

Benefits of Flipped Learning

• Increases student engagement
• Increases student investment in learning 
• Increases parent interaction 
• Increases test scores
• Increases professional collaboration 
• Develops relationships among the teacher and students and among students 

Challenges of Flipped Learning

• Decreases pacing if self-paced (possibly)
• Heightens anxiety about grading
• Flexible environment 
• Learning culture
• Intentional content
• Professional educator 

The benefits appear to greatly outweigh the challenges.  The challenges can be easily managed with careful planning.  Being completely self-paced may result in some students never learning the required curriculum.  Instead of self-paced, Flipped Learning can be “minimum paced.”  With flexibility involved for students that need it, the teacher can suggest a pace, but also have a suggested minimum pace to keep students on the right path to learn all the content for the course.

According to the Algebros video on Flipped Mastery, grading can sometimes be a sticky point.  If students take longer to complete an assignment, their grade may appear to be a failing grade.  I do not even see this as a challenge at the elementary school level since parents do not have access to student grades online.

Some Assumptions

In order for a Flipped Learning model of mastery learning to be effective the following need to be in place:

• Flexible environment
• Learning culture
• Intentional content
• Professional educator access

Be aware that students will not automatically know how to learn from watching a video.  Teaching students how to watch the video, take notes, stop the video, try something out, maybe re-watch the video - these are all skills that will need to be introduced to students especially if they will be watching videos at home.

Tinkering

This week, I decided to tinker with the idea of flipped learning.  Just to get my feet wet, I created a screencast to introduce students to measuring angles using a protractor.  Watch the video if you promise not to judge.  It is my first attempt, and I’m just testing the waters here.  Constructive suggestions are welcome below in the comments.

I created my screencast using the latest update of Seesaw.  It has new amazing shape tools and easy to use record features.  The goal of my video is to introduce students to the parts of a protractor and how it is used to measure angles.  I also wanted students to be interactive and have a chance to try it on their own.  

Reflection

Realistically, I think the video would have to include a few more examples, but I wanted to keep my video short within 3 minutes) for my intended audience of third graders.  I was thinking, “If students can go back and rewatch the video they might be able to understand from the example given.”  In retrospect, maybe I realize it would be better to create a series of short videos.  One focusing on just the parts of the protractor.  Another video could be measuring to the nearest 5 or 10 degrees.  Then another could be measuring to the nearest degree.

After considering that, I thought the series of videos could be tried to a digital badging system.  Each skill accomplishment could be a step toward earning a measuring angles badge.