Blended, Flipped, or Both?

This past school year, I tried a lot of new things.  Going paperless was just one of them.  l also experimented with a Blended and Flipped classroom.  Before I say how that experience went, let's first go over what each means.

Blended and Flipped are two of the new buzz words in education.  The meanings basically boil down to this:

A Blended classroom uses a combination of traditional learning with an integration of online resources to supplement and enhance the learning.  This is more than just putting worksheets online.  This is using a plethora of resources available online to make the learning experience more meaningful.

A Flipped classroom takes the traditional role of the teacher as instigator of instruction and flips the role to facilitator.  Traditional instruction is delivered at home usually via video lessons and what was normally considered "homework" has been moved into the classroom with the teacher as a guide to help the students use what they have learned at home and apply it to class activities.

In a math classroom, I absolutely loved this idea.  During normal instruction, I typically only have the attention of about 20% of my students.  Some students already know the material, or pick up on it quickly, then become bored and tune out of the lecture.  Some students are missing background knowledge or are a little slower to pick up on key concepts.  These students quickly become overwhelmed and tune out because they feel like they have no hope of keeping up.  The students whose attention I have then become distracted by those students who are not paying attention.  The result is that I inevitably have to reteach key concepts to students who did not hear it the first time; or the second.

A flipped classroom model takes care of this.  Students watch video lessons of the instruction at home.  This allows them to progress at their own speed.  They can go faster through the video if they want, or back it up and rewatch it if necessary.  They also have time to process what they have watched and learned before they are asked to apply the material.  The next day in class, they already come in knowing what is going to be discussed and with a good idea of how to apply the material.  This is a real confidence booster for some students.  The class time is then spent with direct application of the concept learned.

Here is an infographic that explains the concept of a flipped classroom and has some data to back up the concept:



Created by Knewton

More on how this worked in my classroom in the next post.  Stay tuned ......