Lingua Design Teaching corner
Flipping the classroom
Aim:
At the end of the session participants will understand advantages of flipping the classroom and analyse ways of flipping the classroom.
Rationale:
A teacher-centered approach to class management is gone and obsolete. We understand that every student creates their own path to knowledge. Constructivism has brought us this knowledge and we are eager to facilitate that.
Let’s imagine a regular student centered approach within a specific setting.
As a teacher, you usually have to deal with time restrictions and different learning styles in a classroom.Too much idle time may result from this traditional classroom setting. They need to be engaged and active at all times.
School aims to develop autonomous students, but it is a fact that a traditional setting brings up dependent students.
Let’s look at ways of flipping the classroom.
You can implement following activity in an online setting, but also offline.
Activity
We asked teachers to brainstorm around:
1) what flipping the classroom means;
2) its advantages and disadvantages.
Firstly, teachers shared their ideas on the board on the following:
1) What is flipping the classroom? (e.g.Some ideas below:)
- Doing what you usually do in class at home and examples of it (reading texts, watching a film,…)
- In class students do what they usually do at home, namely activities related to the studied topic at home
- Students discuss more about a topic with thought-through arguments
2) Advantages of this method:
- Student-centered
- Task-centered
- Research-oriented
- Autonomous learning
- More space for discussion and clearing of doubts
- Time for knowledge to settle in
- Collaboration
- Teacher as a helper
- etc…
Disadvantages of this method:
- Access to technology may not be a given
- Teachers have less control (on the side of the teacher) of the thinking patterns associated with the learning process, and therefore of not understanding where the student has troubles
- In traditional lesson settings the students maybe be too talkative;
- Interaction has to be very controlled, as the creation of a leader is a natural process and some students may feel uneasy managing the exposing of their learning;
- Teachers watch a video to confirm their answers and prepare the discussion.
- Watch how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_p63W_2F_4
Moreover, we’ve asked teachers to discuss the video and check their answers on the board.
Extra Activity:
In pairs /groups teachers imagine a flipped classroom for specific scenarios:
- Teach Present Perfect to the 8th grade.
- Teach English as a Lingua Franca
Discussion:
In addition, teachers discuss their opinions by brainstorming around the topics of the video, and comparing the traditional classroom management style with this method.
Recap
To conclude, flipped classrooms challenge both students and teachers to change in their roles. Most importantly, students become more active students and teachers become more the helpers or of assistance. It provides self-confidence and with that comes better results in terms of learning management.