Flipping is back

I am retrieving a nice short video from Penn University to sum up all the benefits of flipping your classroom. You may have tried and decided that flipping was not for you. You may have concluded that students were not engaging with that approach and that therefore it did not work.

The thing is, for flipping to work it is not just enough with asking your students to do things ahead of your next seminar or meeting. What really kicks-start flipping is the way you make your students work when you meet up. 

 

Now that Covid-19 has thrown all of us to the deep end of the pool and we have to produce asynchronous content to support student learning, and now that we know we have a number of tools to make online sessions work in a new way, it could be time to flip again.

One key for flipping to work is to create engaging class synchronous activities, questions, group tasks. We know for sure that our students will be online, so why not count on it to create tasks that may involve searching for content or images or examples? Flipping and all the changes that will come with it are to support and active environment, where content is being used and created in real time, not just received nor just delivered. 

The question is not only what I am going to teach, but how I am going to design the synchronous time so that what I teach can lead to students' interaction and participation. Also by them making use of the learning that they ought to initiate before they turn up in the online classroom. 

To use higher order thinking skills means to apply, analyze, evaluate, and create new material in the synchronous classroom. This also means to let our students know what kind of qualities we need in the classroom. We have to tell them from the start that learners in the flipped classroom are expected to show initiative, be proactive, inquire, collaborate, and contribute new knowledge in observable ways (Estes, Ingram, & Liu, 2014). So let's get our students involved!