The ability to pause your teacher, repeat steps over and over again, and do work at your own pace. These are a few of the advantages to flipped classrooms. Flipped classrooms are the process of making a videotaped lesson for students to watch at home, and then book work is assigned in class.
“In class it takes 45 minutes to an hour to get through a lesson, the videos take 10 minutes for the same concept,” Pre-AP Pre Calculus and Pre-AP Geometry teacher Joel Vandiver said. “It allows students to have class time to explore concepts in groups while I facilitate.”
After seeing videos of teachers in Colorado using a similar system during February Conference, Vandiver decided to bring the system to his advanced classes. It was shortly picked up by other teachers including Pre-AP Geometry teacher Kymberlen Portillo.
“It gives students the opportunity to help each other when they come across a difficult problem,” Portillo said. “Also, when I’m lecturing in class they don’t have the ability to rewind me, but in the videos they can make me repeat myself and work at their own pace.”
Flipped classrooms are effective because they allows students to target what they are struggling with at home and spend their class time working out the problems they are having. The system puts the responsibility for learning the material on the student.
“I like it a lot because it makes less work to do at home and it gets us the help and practice we really need while were in class,” sophomore Pre-AP Geometry student Dakota Unruh said. “I think it’s a good system to be considered in all math classes because then the students can get the help that they really need.”
This teaching style doesn’t always work though, as Vandiver found out. His students weren’t watching the videos and thus not mastering the objectives forcing him to revert back to traditional teaching methods.
“The biggest pitfall of the program is students waiting until last minute to watch the videos,” Vandiver said. “Life would be much easier for myself and students if they would watch the videos on time. That’s why I still answer questions and teach in class.”
Although there are shortfalls that prevent the system from being effective in some classes or with certain subjects and groups of students, Portillo believes if used right the system works.
“I think it is successful,” Portillo said. “I think that the students have grown in their learning. It has taught them responsibility as far as what they need to study on their own. The conversations in class about the math have risen to another level.”
Portillo is still going strong and suggests that any teacher who is thinking about switching to flipped classrooms should talk to a teacher who has already tried it, then alter the system according to the needs of their students.
“I’d like to continue having flipped classrooms, but with adjustments,” Portillo said. “I’ve gotten feedback from the students and with their feedback I can make adjustments to make it even better. One thing that could’ve made an adjustment is if I had known about this at the beginning of the year. It was a huge adjustment for my students, but they have stuck with me and I am proud of every one of them.”
