The Flipped Classroom

[Matthew]

On Friday, the 28th of September, I am presenting my Flipped Classroom model at the Westminster Teaching Symposium and wanted to post a summary of that presentation both to share it with the broader community as well as to have specific information available to those who attend as a follow up. 

I'll start with WHY?

I chose to flip my Latin 1 (and now currently Latin 2) class because I found two reoccurring issues that I wanted to address. The first was that every time I presented new material to the class, I spent at least 20-30 minutes lecturing, going through examples, and having them ask questions. Repeat this process every new lesson and that's a lot of talking (and who really wants to hear my voice for that long?). Secondly, after presenting new material and only having 15 or so minutes left in class to start practicing it, I would send my students off with homework to reinforce what they had learned in class. Some would complete it well, others would struggle, but either way the next class would start with questions on the new concepts and a review of the work. So I began to think how worth-while it would be if the whole process could be streamlined and the answer I came to was....flip it.

Now on to WHAT I did.

I decided to address my issues by making videos to teach each lesson's new material. Now there are plenty of great resources out there with videos already made so I'm not going so far as saying you should make your own, but I wanted to make sure my videos followed my curriculum exactly. I then proceeded to assign the videos for homework the day before working with the new material. I'd spend the first 5 minutes of class clarifying any of the finer points of Latin grammar and then move directly into group work that dealt with the new concept. The students would be tasked with helping their peers when stuck, while I was able to walk around and give one-on-one or group help to those still struggling. Then at the end of the class I would give an ungraded quiz using the Socrative iPad app in order to survey if my students understood the topic and if not, where they are getting caught up. 

The RESULT

I found that my students and I benefited in several ways from this method. The first being that I was able to devote more time in class to working closely with my students and therefore able to cover more material, more affectively than before. The students were also able to revisit any lesson they wanted at any time in order to review, which they report as being very helpful. The emphasis on group work (inspired by Eric Mazur) has taught my students to collaborate as well as giving them multiple perspectives on how to understand new material.

Helpful Resources

For video making my software of choice is Camtasia on my Mac and Educreations on my iPad. And this year I used my videos made via Camtasia in my new textbook which was created through iBooks Author.

iPad apps for quick quizzes: Socrative, eclicker presenter

 

Pre-made videos: Khan Academy, youtube

[Bill Sistare]

Matt's presentation was well received by attendees at the Westminster Teaching Symposium.  His work in the realm of flipping the classroom is impressive!  Thanks, Matt, for being a part of the day!