A new successful way of teaching: Flipped classrooms

Turning Education Upside Down

By Tina Rosenberg, NY Times

Three years ago, Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit, became a “flipped school”—one where students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates.

China: Fake It Till You Make It

Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman, Foreign Affairs

No one knows for sure why some societies are more innovative than others. The United States is a highly inventive society, the source of a host of technologies—the airplane, the atomic bomb, the Internet—that have transformed the world. Modern China, by contrast, is frequently criticized for its widespread copying of foreign inventions and creative works. Once the home of gunpowder, printing, and other transformational inventions, China is today better known for its knockoffs of almost every imaginable product: cars, clothes, computers, fast food, movies, pharmaceuticals, even entire European villages. The United States gave the world the iPhone; China gave it the HiPhone—a cheap facsimile of a groundbreaking American gadget.