Something has to change in my classroom. It is clear that students are growing less interested in lectures and more interested in finding “the answer” for a specific concept that they are being asked to apply though a lab assignment. I’m not convinced that a digital lecture will do the trick either. The lecture itself is done as a teaching method and needs to be replaced with an approach that will be engaging for the students and their learning, inside and outside of the classroom.
In a recent article in University Affairs, Alan Slavin (2012) argues that increased face-to-face instruction is the only way to achieve continued success by our traditional “bricks-and-mortar” colleges and universities. Slavin cites Mazur’s Peer Instruction: A User’s Manual (1996) as his source for a teaching method that when applied to Slavin’s own discipline of physics, shows a dramatic increase in student engagement in the learning. The lecture materials are reviewed by students prior to class, rather than delivered by the instructor as a lecture, with an aim of providing class time for a structured discussion on the lecture topic. This isn’t just simply reading the chapter before the lecture, what he describes is a class where the students come prepared to discuss the material with each other, with the help of guiding questions from the instructor but minimal additional participation by the instructor. The instructor’s role is simply to provide a framework for student-to-student discussion or “peer instruction” and correct any misconceptions along the way. This is not dissimilar to our own learning environment in EDUC 5103, which confirms for me that the concept of face-to-face should not be restricted to only physical environments. Face-to-face, by my experience, should extend to any digital environment that permits real-time, or synchronous, face-to-face interactions. I wonder if François owns a copy of Mazur’s (1996) Peer Instruction that I might be able to borrow sometime.
“Research has shown that the conceptual understanding of students taught interactively improves twice as much as when they are taught with conventional lecturing, even for superb lecturers”, (Slavin, 2012). I can’t think of any reason why this same approach could not work in my own classroom. The key is to make materials available to the students, accessible online, that present the concepts in a way that is engaging to students, not simply recording a lecture. With that lecture time freed up in my class, I can then let the students explore the concepts by simply providing a framework for application and monitor their progress toward success. In short, I’m not simply looking at flipping the lecture out of the class; I’m eliminating the lecture all together. The discussions and group interactions should prove to be just as fruitful for my students’ learning as the discussion and exchange of ideas with my colleagues and classmates has proven to be for me, at work and in the classroom. In fact, I know from years of experience, that there is much that I can learn from my students. Given all the extra time to spend on this new process, my own learning will also benefit greatly. What am I flipping then? This constitutes a flip of the classroom where the student novice becomes the student expert and my role as instructor expert morphs into that of a guiding novice, learning right along with the students.
References:
Mazur, E. (1996). Peer instruction: A user’s manual. San Francisco, CA: Benjamin Cummings.
Slavin, A. (2012, May 30). How will our bricks-and-mortar universities survive? They must capitalize on their strengths in personal interaction. University Affairs. Retrieved from http://www.universityaffairs.ca/how-will-our-bricks-and-mortar-universities-survive.aspx
Flipping the Classroom 
Hi Kevin,
It is rare to find a teacher that is willing to change their whole teaching ideology to create a more engaging classroom. I assume that you are going to be to implementing this in the upcoming academic year and I am only sorry that I won’t be able to hear how it works. The only downside I can see is if you have a student or group of students come to your classroom unprepared. But, given the level in which you teach this will be unlikley. Kuddos to you, Kevin!
Jen Levine
Kevin, I really love your post. You’ve communicated effectively many of the questions and answers that have emerged from the idea of Flipping one’s classroom. I have had opportunity, on occasion, to practice this approach with my students over the past year. I have been surprised by the level of engagement that such as approach elicits. It seems my students haven’t needed me in the ways I had once assumed. This is not to say that my role hasn’t been significant, however, it has become something different than what I had once imagined. It’s funny. I didn’t get into such a rut in my teaching pedagogy when I worked in the Elementary system. I seemed to better recognize and respond to the needs and interests of my students. When I began teaching adults it helped that I didn’t fully appreciate how adults were used to being taught. This meant that I did a variety of activities that I felt would meet end objectives. I had fewer resources and had to creatively engage students in the learning process. As I became more seasoned I was introduced to the expected pedagogy. It was to teach content found in a textbook using PowerPoint as a “summary” tool which was shared with students in class then posted to the LMS for review purposes. The idea was that this was the high-end of “standard”. How did we arrive at a place where we were led to believe that our adult students would somehow enjoy being passive recipients of the information tumbling through our lips? How did we allow ourselves to become the medium through which text became audio? Of course, I am well aware of how rich discussions can become in a class where using slideshows is a guiding framework and the teacher takes the roles of sharing personal wisdom while drawing similar stories from students who are themselves a source of content. Lecture does not have to mean pedagogy to the book. However, often these conversations seem to take on a life of their own and the nervous teacher will shut them down to redirect students back to the canned content that they will be tested on. How did we come to believe that forcing oneself to sit passively is a display of discipline and commitment to a learning process. Where’s the process in that?
I’m not convinced that children’s needs are all that different from the learning needs of adults. I’m also not convinced that andragogy is a pedagogy that should be reserved only for adults. Let the growing interest in the gamification of education be an additional supply of skepticism.
So… back to Kevin’s point. Do we flip lecture out of our classroom? …or do we abandon it all together? I say, identify what the objective is… then determine the pedagogy that might take your students there. A digital lecture doesn’t have to be “pedagogy to the book”. It can be a video that makes use of creative pedagogy in combination to arrive at an end goal. And who is to say that this video can’t be used to stimulate conversation, collaboration, and socially constructed knowledge?
Does it have to happen in a synchronous manner? I’d say no. I question the statement that concludes that the most learning happens in a face-to-face classroom, that less learning happens in an online yet synchronous manner, and that the least effective medium for learning is online and asynchronous. (…to be continued…)