Inverted "flipped" Learning at
Schenectady City Schools
by Diane Allegro, Instructional
Technology Specialist
There is much buzz about inverted or
flipped learning which enables students to practice what
they learn under the guidance of their classroom teacher.
Inverted learning is simply assigning your instruction to
students as homework and having them do the practice in the
classroom. This practice in theory turns the traditional process
of assigning homework as extra practice upside down.
This new teaching and learning style
makes the students the focus of the class, not the teacher, by
having students watch a lecture at home and then apply the
lesson with the teacher in the classroom. The main idea behind
the ‘flipped’ classroom is for teachers to be available when
students need them most. Typically a teacher lectures for 20 to
30 minutes leaving the remainder of the class time to do a
related activity, assign homework, and give students an
opportunity to get started on their homework.
At home students are often left to their
own devices to finish their homework and come back the next day
for something new. What teachers often find is that many either
chose not to do the homework or give up as soon as they run into
something that doesn’t make sense. Then a teacher spends the
next day going over questions instead of moving on to the next
lesson.
Now class time is for doing what used to
be homework or answering questions and doing labs,
demonstrations, or more active learning practices. This enables
students to work through the curriculum at their own pace.
Students can access the lecture whenever they need clarification
and the teacher can now spend that ‘extra’ time helping students
one-on-one.
So does this new flipped learning work?
I found one of our more innovative teachers (Brian Rhodes an
Earth Science teacher at the Steinmetz Career and Leadership
Academy) and asked him to participate in learning about a new
way of teaching.
For our inverted learning experiment
this is what we did.
