2014-01 Ong Wei Sheng Wilson

Instructions

Your personal page serves at least three purposes. It is a place for you to:

1. take notes

2. enable your flipped presentation

3. submit your individual assignment

Use the rough scaffold below as a guide. You may add headers and content, but not remove any.

Part A: Imagine that you are submitting a Wikipedia article on the flipped classroom. Draft your article here. Bear in mind that your writing will be public and subject to scrutiny and critique. What would you write to educate others like your school principal and colleagues about the flipped classroom.

Part B and C: You are a manager of other teachers, Suggest a plan for a group of teachers to flip their classrooms. Prepare a flipped presentation in Part C to get formative feedback on your plans.

Refrain from uploading presentation or other files to this space. Instead, host your files in the cloud and embed them in your page. For help on how to do this, refer to the iTunes U courses provided by CeL in the Resources section or search Google or YouTube.

Name: Ong Wei Sheng Wilson

School: Serangoon JC

Role: HOD/CCE, Subject Tutor / History

Part A: Article on Flipped Classrooms

1. Definition and origins of the "flipped classroom"

Learning is flipped when direct instruction is moved from the group learning experience to the individual learning environment. The direct instruction usually comes in the form of text, video content resembling or representing didactic, frontal, teacher talk. This takes the place of homework in the individual learning space. The group learning experience in turn revolves around collaborative learning, answering questions, working on assignments, application and transfer of learning, and further exploration.

Two high school teachers in Colorado, USA, Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, were the first to “flip” their classroom. It started with video recordings to help students who missed lessons to catch up at home. In this sense, the original flipped classroom is already current practice in many schools that have Learning Management Systems, e-learning components in their learning experiences, or ICT-enabled lessons that can be accessed remotely in times of contingency. Students have customarily used such tools to review lessons they had already experienced in the physical classroom, or to revise work in advance of tests and exams. What was innovative about the “flipped” classroom was how classroom time was dedicated discussion, collaborative problem solving work and hands-on practical during lesson.

There are three possible dimensions of “flipping”

Location: Direct Instruction and Didactic elements of learning, e.g. of key concepts, takes place at home; Interactive, collaborative, application and assignments undergone by learner in the classroom.

Teacher:

Traditionally, teacher monopolises sharing while learner downloads content passively

Flipped, learner might also have a role in influencing the content and concepts that are taught, and the perspectives from which they are taught

Content Creator:

Traditionally, teacher creates the entire learning experience, and creates / curates the content required

Flipped, learner has a role (and even responsibility) to choose content for learning

2. Flipped learning is:

• Something that has always been done in some way, and had been expected of our learning environments in some way, especially at post-secondary level.

• Where learning that is one-on-one, monologic, didactic, and that does not require interaction, can be done in a time and space of the learner’ choosing

• Where collaborative, rich and emergent learning can be made to happen by design, in the physical classroom.

• Where the learning that is challenging, at the edge of students’ capability, where a teacher can make an impact with feedback and guidance, can happen in the classroom, because the didactic has been taken out of the classroom

Flipped learning is not:

• Merely getting students to view recorded lectures at home

• Merely doing written work in the class

• Merely creating more curriculum time by shifting curriculum to home time

3. How to design, develop, evaluate and manage flipped learning

Design – i.e. how to start

• • Crystallise Learning Outcomes and critical understandings

  • Delineate which outcomes or aspects of outcomes lend themselves to interactive and collaborative learning (e.g. joint construction) vs. didactic, frontal teaching

  • This should be based on learner styles, and therefore individual teachers may adapt this based on the student profile

  • Based on above, determine the value proposition of flipped learning

  • Then, design learning experiences for home and classroom based on those objectives

  • Identify the teaching resources and tools for the home component

  • Design the learning experience for the home component, esp. the instructions and deliverables, i.e. accountability structure

  • Design the appropriate classroom activities, e.g. facilitation guides, questioning plans, collaborative tasks, performance and product outcomes

  • Determine the contingencies in the classroom for those who missed out on the home activity

  • Determine assessment for learning, feedback, accountability and responsibility division

Develop – i.e. how to improve

• • Home Component

    • Vary tools – screencasts, powtoons

    • Differentiate instructional media

    • Curate content and guide learners to explore more

    • Encourage learners to create content for classroom components

  • Classroom Component

    • Scrutinise the quality of questioning and facilitation

    • Station-based learning to enable senses to associate physical activity and location with a certain learning experience

    • Encourage peer learning, coaching, and eventually co-construction of learning experiences in the classroom

Evaluate

• Quality of Teaching Survey and quality of teacher-student relationships

• Student Engagement and interest in the subject

• Assessment results (but see purpose of flipping, below)

Building Flipped Culture

• Enable a set of pioneers, trailblazers to act

  • Conduct lesson studies of the flipped instruction - this would be quite different from the once-off lesson observations

• Professional Development plan, incl the formation of PLTs to attach the not-so-ready to the ready

  • ICT Enabler sessions

  • Professional learning about deep questioning, dialogic thinking, facilitating collaborative learning, problem-based learning

  • Flipping other forms of engagement, e.g. staff meetings, PD workshops, parent-teacher meetings

4. Issues with Flipped Learning and Possible Strategies to Address

Teacher Readiness

• Pedagogy – capability to create the authentic, facilitative learning experiences that engender collaborative learning

• Technological knowhow - to deliver home experiences that are crisp and meaningful

• Time and Energy

Some ways to address teacher readiness:

• Work in departments in ways that pool varied talents, and mix teams of the ready+able with the not-so-ready teachers

• Professional Learning Teams (PLTs)

• See the possibilities of inviting students to co-construct learning materials and direction

Student Readiness

• (Surprisingly), students are traditional learners – they have succeeded through the traditional, conventional route, and prefer not to rock the boat

• Not all find mobile or online learning convenient - some do not even take well to Learning Management Systems!

Some ways to address student readiness:

• School might develop mobile apps to improve access – i.e. multiple platforms

• Open library with learning portals dedicated to flipped home component

• Train students in information processing skills – need to have a baseline training on processing information, sieving out what is key

• Self-directed learning: Do students prepare on their own, anyway? Perhaps the autonomy of crafting their own learning to some degree, the relatedness that they improve with collaborative learning, might increase their drive

Purpose of Flipping

• Results vs. Rich Learning?

• All involved need to start off with the objectives of 21CC and self-directed learning

5. References

Should You Flip Your Classroom? <http://www.edutopia.org/blog/flipped-classroom-ramsey-musallam>

The Flipped Classroom: Online instruction at home frees class time for learning <http://educationnext.org/files/ednext_20121_BTucker.pdf>

The Flipped Learning Network <flippedlearning.org>

Part B: Flipped Classrooms in My Context

Outline a plan for mobilizing a group teachers who will flip their classrooms.

Context:

JC Curriculum

• • Heavy demands on critical thinking and writing

  • Content is heavy

JC Students' Lives

• • Relatively independent and self-directed

  • Have internet connectivity through home or mobile devices

  • Little time at home - spend a lot of time in school due to long timetables and CCAs

  • Have a lot of written work to catch upon

  • Engaged well whether through traditional or flipped pedagogy

History Unit

• • Relatively young, though not necessarily tech savvy

  • Open to experimentation and at forefront of pedagogical innovation in school

  • Relatively interesting lecturers, though there are hits and misses

Impetus to Flip

• • Every Student an Engaged Learner

  • Better support them in creating and articulating their thinking onto paper

  • Reduce the need for consultations after school (so that everyone gets shorter days)

  • Convenient way to introduce some source work and encourage collaborative learning

Plans:

Topic is Cold War

• • First topic in JC

  • Not a SBQ topic, but good to introduce sources in that it is a rich, contested issue, and next topic is SBQ topic

3-sided flip: Lecture, Home, Tutorial

• • Traditional Model: Lecture (4 X 1h), Homework (Tutorial Prep), Tutorial (4 X 1h)

  • Proposed Flip: "Lecture" at Home, Sourcework in Lecture time, Essay Construction in Tutorial

  • Major Curriculum time changes

    • Lectures to have group work

    • Tutorials to be extended to 2h, with 2 classes combined, such that 2 teachers can coach

Develop online lessons

• • Existing repository of videos, existing pbwiki space

  • ICT enabling and sharing - platforms such as wiki spaces, video creation e.g. SOM, Powtoon

  • Existing platforms such as Blue Orange

  • Right-size the content to engage - although video recordings show that start-stop, rewind-forward behaviour common among students who replay lectures at home

Develop Source Lectures

• • Setting appropriate discussion questions

  • Finding right sources to match discussion questions

  • Prepare source analyses

  • Planning the socratic questioning sequence to draw student responses

  • Preparing the bite-sized writing tasks for students

Timeline:

Part C: Flipped Presentation

Embed your presentation for Part B here. You may include notes in a shared Google Doc if you wish.

Your peers will view this presentation before the last session and provide formative feedback.