January 2013 – Centre for Teaching Excellence Blog

What do you need to know about the Flipped Classroom? – Jane Holbrook

The concept of flipping a classroom has been causing a stir in the world of educators over the last year or so. Seems you can’t open an educational blog or newsletter without finding an article or someone’s thoughts on what a flipped classroom is (and isn’t). The simplest explanation of the term is that active learning is achieved face-to-face in the classroom through discussion, problem solving, and group work or other activities, and what we think of as the lecturing, or “content transfer”, part of a class is done elsewhere (not during classtime) independently.

Discussions of flipped classrooms often include the comment that this isn’t a new concept and that courses in the humanities have been using this learning sequence for eons; in these disciplines instructors are the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage” and are in the role of facilitators, guiding discussion of concepts or texts that students have ingested on their own through traditional textbooks or online sources. Also much of what is written about flipped classrooms implies that online media consumption of some sort is part of the independent work. However putting lectures online or giving students access to videos through a course website doesn’t make for a flipped class, the key is that students are active in the classroom; the out of class activity could be reading the text book. As learning management systems and a plethora of online screen casting and lecture capture tools make online components to courses easier to provide and create, many instructors are using online lectures, websites, online videos, or online documents to prepare students to come in and be active learners during class time. An excellent summary of thoughts around flipping or inverting the classrooms can be found in Derek Bruff’s blog called “Agile Learning” http://derekbruff.org/?p=2108.

[As an aside Derek Bruff’s posting was written as a response to another blog posting by Steve Wheeler about a Wired article and I picked up the whole thread through Twitter. You just have to love social media for the layers and connections – check out @CTELiaisons ***).

My colleague, Mark Morton, and I offered a workshop during the fall 2012 CTE Focus on Teaching week and put together this list of reasons why someone might consider flipping at least some classes:

Allows you to spend class time having your students engage in active learning activities such as debates, discussions, Q and A, demonstrations, peer tutoring and feedback, role playing, and so on. This is the “constructivist” aspect of the learning theory known as Social Constructivism.
Allows you to spend class time having your students learn with and through each other. This is the “social” aspect of the learning theory known as Social Constructivism.
During class time, you don’t “lose” your students: in a lecture, the attention of most students starts to flag after ten or fifteen minutes.
Students have time to process and reflect on content before coming to class to apply and work with that content.
Students can control the time, place and pace of learning of the “lecture”.
Allows you to re-use your video content in multiple courses or across multiple years.
Lets you vary the pace and structure of the classes throughout the term which can impact student engagement.

Also we compiled this list of “things to consider”:

You need to devise strategies to ensure that students actually ingest the content outside of class. For example, start each class with a brief quiz that assesses their knowledge of the content. The quiz could be done via clickers or via LEARN (our LMS), both of which can automatically grade the responses and add them to the grade book in the LMS.
Convey to the students that the videos, or other components, are not supplemental to the course but rather are essential. Remind them that if they don’t watch the videos, they won’t be able to participate in the classroom activities.
Spend some time at the beginning of the course explaining to your students the pedagogy behind the flipped classroom model.
Don’t re-lecture. If students come to class without having ingested the content, move forward with the learning activities anyway. If you resort to lecturing in class to bring them up to speed, you’ll only reinforce their decision to not ingest the content prior to class.
Make sure the video includes some questions or reflective activities that you want the students to think about in preparation for the next class. These can appear at the end of the video or can be inserted at appropriate times throughout the video.
Determine what format will work best for your students (and for you). For example, you might videotape yourself talking in front of a flip chart. Or you might create a screencast that focuses only (or primarily) on the the content that appears on your computer screen. Or, depending on your discipline, you might be able to create an audio podcast rather than a video.
Accept the fact that you might need to decrease the amount of content that you cover in your course as a whole. However, students will experience deeper engagement with the content that they do cover.

Please feel free to add to this list through the comments!

Also see some examples of flipped classes in higher ed, http://www.emergingedtech.com/2013/01/flipped-classroom-successes-in-higher-education/.

***Follow the @CTELiaisons on Twitter – we’re following some interesting folks and retweeting from many sources.

Using “Transit Questions” in place-based pedagogy – Trevor Holmes

I love being in the classroom, whether it’s large or small, whether I’m officially the teacher or the learner. But I also love getting out of the classroom. Some of the most powerful experiences in my own learning and my own teaching have been observing, interacting, and reflecting in spaces other than lecture halls and seminar rooms. Some time ago, I wrote about place-based pedagogy (with some suggested reading) and gave the example of a workshop for the Educational Developers Caucus (EDC) conference at Thompson Rivers University. Since then, I have continued to use what previously I hadn’t a name for in my own cultural studies course — the field observations and intellectual response papers, the spontaneous “field trips” out into parts of campus to apply concepts, the incorporation of people’s experiences into the framework of the course.

Today’s post is about a small piece of the place-based learning experience I had at the EDC conference, a piece that I’m considering using with my own learners when they do their field observations. To date, I’ve supplied them with reflection questions and notetaking guides for the site visits. I’ve used the online quiz tool in the learning management system to ask “prime the pump” journal questions. But I’ve never yet tried the “transit question” approach. Transit questions were thought-triggering questions handed out just before traveling to the field sites in Kamloops. There were, to my recollection, four different cue cards and each pair of people received one or two cue cards. The idea was that the question on the front (and maybe there was one on the back) would ready us for what we were about to see by asking us about related prior experience with X, or what we expect to find when we get to X, or how is X usually structured. The idea was to talk to our partners about the questions and answer them informally as we made our way to the sites (which took 10-20 minutes to get to).

Photograph of two people in Iceland — Photo of two people in Iceland. Source: Karlbark’s Fotothing stream (shared under CC license)

I can imagine transit questions for pairs that would be suitable for my course too. However, we don’t always have pairs (sometimes small groups, sometimes solitary learners going to a space in their hometown, and so on). I can easily adapt the idea for solo use, though clearly I wouldn’t want someone to be taking notes in response to the prompt while, say, driving!

If we do the field trip to Laurel Creek Conservation area again to test ideas found in Jody Baker’s article about Algonquin Park and the Canadian imaginary, I’ll be using transit questions for the bus ride for sure. With other observations I will have to think about how to adapt the idea. Choosing the right question or questions seems to be important, and offering space to jot notes for those who don’t want to start talking immediately. I’d strongly encourage this approach when you know people will be traveling somewhere for the course by bus, or by foot/assistive device. I can imagine that there are lots of opportunities to do this (and it’s likely already done) in disciplines as varied as geography, planning, fine art, architecture, biology, geosciences, accounting, anthropology, and many others. I’m thinking it would be great if they could pull questions from a question bank to their phones or other devices en route as well… the possibilities!

Transit questions on the way to field sites helped to ready me and my partner for what we’d be looking at, to reflect on the implications of our mini-field trip, and to connect our histories to the present task. I recommend them wholeheartedly.

Turning Information into an Invitation – Trevor Holmes

I’ve been teaching undergrads since 1994 I guess, as a TA at first, and by 2001 as a course instructor. Since 2006 I’ve been the instructor of record on a large first-year cultural studies course (and assisted in 2005 on the same one). This post is in the head-scratching, old dog / new tricks category, and is about office hours.

Generally speaking, I hold 1.5 to 2 hours of office time for consultation with students. I’m happy when I see three to six students in a week, which only happens around essay writing time. Some students come for help getting started, others with drafts to go through together, and others afterward to understand feedback. Although I ask students to show up or make an alternate appointment, I probably only see ten percent of my class that way in a good year (I teach 200).

Over the years I’ve read about some ways to use office hours more effectively. Don Woods (McMaster, Chemical Engineering Emeritus and architect of their problem-based learning approach) always talks about using student ombudspeople (1 or 2 per 50 students), with whom the professor meets each week or two to have a dialogue about how the class is going. A former professor at York when I was a graduate student there used to have his undergraduates come in to receive their essays — they’d have to read them aloud to him in order to get them back (this usually led to a deeper understanding on their part of their grades and their own writing). Teaching tips abound — and of course CTE has our own version of advice for the beginning TA or instructor.

This year, though, thinking I was past all such tips — surely these are all for beginners, not for seasoned oldtimers like myself — I once again posted my office hours for the term in the learning management system calendar tool. Week in, week out… can I remove just the one instance over Reading Break this time? Yes! Great. But…

…instead of writing “Trevor’s Office Hour” like I normally would, I wondered what might sound more inviting. I’m so tired of the discourse of “information delivery” as our role in higher education. In lecture, I’m not an information-delivery specialist. My discipline isn’t about transmitting information from me to many. That is a subject for another post, but it’s important to think about the whole endeavour, and how I communicate this belief I have. If I simply post my hours as information, how am I welcoming the discussion and support I feel I can share with my first years? So, I tried instead posting the calendar entry with the words: “Trevor’s Office Time: Come and Visit me in xxxx-xxxx from 4:30 – 5:00” (and the same, but an hour, on the other day).

For the first time in nearly 20 years of teaching, two students showed up for my first office hour before the first lecture day. I told them I was happy to meet them, we talked about their interests, majors, futures, and I asked them what made them come see me before the class had even begun. They said “because you invited us to come and visit you.”

I was pretty much gobsmacked, not having expected anyone to pop by until three weeks hence when the paper is due. I hope this signals an increase in the frequency of visits and the diversity of visitors. Pleasant surprises like this, that by the students’ own account were because of the three small words “come visit me,” are the kinds of things that keep my enthusiasm for teaching so high even after eight iterations of the same course.

Make Tutorials Matter – Mihaela Vlasea, Graduate Instructional Developer

It is often mentioned that with large engineering classes, it is difficult to truly engage students and provide them with the opportunity to get involved in classroom activities. I recently had the opportunity to teach a tutorial review session, for which I prepared extensively. I presented the material in a very organized fashion, while being careful to periodically ask a few questions while I was solving problems on the blackboard. Based on the answers I was receiving, as well as some feedback from the class, I felt that students understood the material very well. However, upon marking a final exam question, one very similar to the one I had solved in class, I was quite surprised to see that the majority were not capable to meet the basic framework of the solution. Upon reflecting on this fact, I realized that there is a major difference between students understanding my approach and them being able to solve questions on their own. This realization was quite important, because it has forced me to somewhat re-think my tutorial teaching strategies in the future.

Gear Wheels - photo by Ian Britton via flickr — Get the Gear Wheels Turning (Gear Wheels photo by Ian Britton via flickr)

Provide more opportunity for students to think about the problem

Instead of dwelling on copying the problem requirements on the board, I could provide students with a copy of the question (wither on a Power Point slide or a handout) and ask them to take two minutes to read it carefully. Then, I would ask students a few clarifying questions to make sure they have understood the problem requirements.

Provide more opportunities for students to solve the problem

After going through the first step, I would allow students to work in pairs or about 2-3 minutes to discuss a few ideas on how to start solving the question. I feel that it is important, as it would make students feel that their suggestions are valuable to the development of the solution. This would increase their level of “ownership” over what is discussed in the class, rather than having a one-way teaching approach.

Facilitate and moderate discussions on alternate solutions

Often times, students only have the opportunity to be exposed to a single solution to a problem. Offering students the opportunity to think and suggest alternate solutions in a supportive environment would be a great opportunity to expose students to more approaches as well as to encourage creativity in engineering classes. This is a critical point that should be endorsed in tutorials. Students may be encouraged to propose an alternate solution in class or they may be to be allowed to post their own solutions on a forum or wiki page, where their peers can discuss or correct their input (this would be a bit harder to moderate, but it would certainly be interesting).

In general, I think that tutorials in engineering should be more student-focused and should promote discussion, rather than being an extension of lecture time. These are just some of my ideas which stemmed from recent experience in teaching tutorials in large engineering classes.