What Is a Flipped Classroom?
The term “flipped classroom” was first introduced to the pedagogical lexicon by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, high school chemistry teachers, in their 2012 book Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day. While there are certainly as many variations to the approach as there are teachers using it, the basic concept is that the traditional classroom structure is “flipped” so that students watch lectures and instructional videos at home, and then they use class time to complete the higher-order thinking tasks that would traditionally be assigned as homework. The idea is that students are completing the “easier” task of listening and taking notes independently and then completing the more challenging tasks with a teacher present to provide help and feedback.
Having done quite a bit of talking about the flipped classroom in our podcast episodes, “Why We Stopped Assigning Homework” and “Learning More About the Flipped Classroom,” as well as a YouTube video in which we share “Six Easy Ways to Try Out Flipping Your ELA Classroom,” we thought it might be worth taking some time to explain what, exactly, a flipped classroom is.
The flipped classroom offers many benefits, including the opportunity to truly differentiate for each individual learner and the increased availability of the teacher to offer feedback and coaching, thus leading to deeper learning for students. Much of the criticism of the approach back in 2012 centered on lack of access to the technology needed for students to view the instructional videos, an issue that has been largely diminished by the number of districts providing 1:1 devices for students.
In some senses, English has always been a flipped classroom: students are expected to read an assigned text at home and come to class prepared for discussion. This made up a large part of our initial resistance to the approach back when it was first introduced: weren’t we already doing this? What we came to realize, however, is that in an English class, this task of reading and understanding is often the one with which students struggle most. Our class slowly became less lecture-based as we shifted toward completing assignments together as a class, reading aloud and guiding students through scaffolded activities. This teacher-centered process of guiding students through an activity, however, traps the teacher at the front of the room just as much as a lecture does and makes it nearly impossible to differentiate: the majority of the class is “on pace,” but the questions they do have are more personalized; some students are sitting there bored because they’re ready to move on; and a handful of students are so far behind it would take days of one-on-one assistance to catch them up.
Much of the criticism of the approach back in 2012 centered on lack of access to the technology needed for students to view the instructional videos, an issue that has been largely diminished by the number of districts providing 1:1 devices for students.
During the pandemic, we began recording screencasts in which we walked through activities and lessons in the same way we would in class and had students work through the assignments independently, using the screencasts to guide them, while we made ourselves available to answer specific questions students had that weren’t addressed in the generalized screencast. We quickly realized what the advocates of the flipped classroom had been getting at: we were able to provide far more personalized feedback and support than we ever had before, and the possibilities once we returned to in-person learning were great. While we had already largely moved away from lecturing, we did have a few lectures we were able to give our AP students in this format, freeing up class time for group projects and one-on-one meetings. We used our screencasts in our standard-level classes to guide students through assignments rather than devoting large portions of class time going over directions, but in our AP classes, we also found opportunities to provide feedback on student discussion boards and group essays that students could review at their own pace and refer back to as often as needed.
As we were clarifying our understanding of the flipped classroom model in preparation for this post, two comments really stood out to us. In Mary Beth Hertz’s 2012 article, “The Flipped Classroom: Pro and Con,” she claims we should care about the model because “it is forcing teachers to reflect on their practice and rethink how they reach their kids . . . inspiring teachers to change the way they’ve always done things, and . . . motivating them to bring technology into their classrooms.” We’ve always strived to be teachers who are constantly reflecting on our teaching and our students’ learning, revising our curriculum every year to better meet students’ needs. Hertz’s words resonate because the pandemic was a time in which we were forced to reflect, to change the way we’ve always done things, and to use technology in new ways, and this is where the power of the approach comes from. It’s not about following a set of guidelines or “flipping” your classroom the “right” way but about being willing to throw tradition out the window and try something new if it means finding better ways to support our students.
In his 2022 article, “What Is a Flipped Classroom?,” Erik Ofgang cites a 2021 research study in which researchers reviewed 317 studies of college students comparing the effectiveness of a flipped classroom approach to a traditional lecture approach. Their findings indicated that “Students in hybrid flipped classrooms in which some lessons were flipped and others were taught in a more traditional manner tended to outperform both traditional classrooms and fully flipped classrooms.” We found this interesting because it provides an important reminder to us as teachers. Not everyone learns in the same way, and no one approach is going to be the magic bullet that “fixes” education. The more we experiment as teachers, adding a wide variety of strategies to our toolkits, the more likely we are to be prepared to meet the needs of the diverse learners who come through our doors every day.
Still wanting to hear more about the flipped classroom? Be sure to check out the podcast episodes and YouTube videos we linked at the top of this post. Still have questions or want to talk out how best to make this work in your classroom? Email us at hello@threeheads.works or DM us on Instagram @threeheads.works. Ready to make the leap? Forward this post to your PLC and get a conversation going about trying this approach out at your site. Wherever you’re at, we hope this gave you some food for thought!