‘Flipped’ classrooms take advantage of technology
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
POTOMAC, Md.—Step into Stacey Roshan’s Advanced Placement calculus class some morning and two things become apparent: The students don’t seem stressed-out, as AP students often do. And the teacher is barely teaching.
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
POTOMAC, Md.—Step into Stacey Roshan’s Advanced Placement calculus class some morning and two things become apparent: The students don’t seem stressed-out, as AP students often do. And the teacher is barely teaching.
Sitting in pairs, students poke at their iPads waiting for class to
begin. But in place of a long-winded lecture there’s Roshan, a petite brunette
with a broad smile, moving through the room, urging students to take out their
homework.
In a word, Roshan has “flipped” her class.
Pressed for time and struggling to reach a generation raised on YouTube,
Roshan, like a growing number of teachers, digitally records her lessons with a
tablet computer as a virtual blackboard, then uploads them to iTunes and
assigns them as homework. In class the following day, she helps students work
out exercises and answer knotty questions.
It’s the latest way technology is changing teachers’ jobs—in this case
it’s literally turning their workday upside-down. But teachers say flipped, or
upside-down, classes offer greater control of material and more face time with
students.
In many cases, software allows students to chat online while watching
the videos. Tegrity, a Silicon Valley firm that specializes in flipped
instruction, allows students to time-stamp lecture notes. It boasts more than 1
million student users, many of them in higher education.
Flipped classrooms have even attracted the attention of funders such as
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has become a major backer of
Khan Academy, a non-profit repository of nearly 2,400 free instructional videos
that teachers use to teach everything from pre-algebra to Augusto Pinochet’s
Chile.
“It’s about changing the dynamic of how you deliver the instruction,”
says Roshan, who teaches at the private Bullis School near Washington, D.C. She
began flipping her AP calculus classes last fall after finding she couldn’t
cover all the required material. Even topics she covered “didn’t really all
sink in.”
Roshan now finishes the course a month in advance and uses the extra
time for review. The number of students scoring a perfect “5” on the AP exam
has risen, she says. Students watch lessons at home, sometimes two or three
times, and replay confusing sections. If they’re still confused, they query a
friend. If that doesn’t work, they ask Roshan the following day.
“I always tell them, ‘(The) first, best option is to solve the problem
on your own. But if you can’t, ask your partner. And then you should ask me
third, because by asking your partner, at least you’re going to have to work
through the problem because neither of you is an expert in it yet. Neither of
you is going to know the answer right off the bat.’”
On a recent morning, she weaved between desks, chatting quietly with
students, then strode to the whiteboard, popped the top off a black marker and
wrote the capital letters “IVT.”
“I have a request to go over the intermediate value theorem,” Roshan
said. “It’s a really complicated name for something really simple. You guys
want to go over it right now?” No one protested, so she launched into the
lesson: She talked, she drew, she took students’ questions. She drew some more.
Start to finish, the lesson lasted three minutes and 25 seconds. Back to
homework.
Flipping the classroom, Roshan says, has made her students more
independent, less-stressed learners, because for many students, the hardest
part is applying the lesson to problem sets.
“In an English class, you send the kids home to read a passage, and then
in class you discuss that passage,” she says. “Why in math class am I more or
less having them read the passage in class?”
