Flipped learning: Changes to teacher practice

Sara Lambert: The flipped learning process, within the classroom, is a very inclusive model. I think for me the biggest changes that it’s had are it’s more individually centred and it’s changed my position within the classroom. So I’m able to tailor my learning a lot more specifically to individual needs. They’re still grouped but instead of having really fixed group scenarios where we might have traditionally had, the groups change often. If we take, say writing for example, five kids might have this writing goal because that’s applicable to their learning this week, and then next week they might be grouped with other people because of something they’ve demonstrated a gap in or an interest in that they want to pursue a little bit further.

Emma Jensen: The impact on my teaching is that I get to spend more time building relationships with the students in my classroom. I spend less time lecturing students, we don’t do so much giving them knowledge, we’re working more on the higher order thinking with students so I’m helping them to apply new skills of knowledge. Also my teaching that I create through the videos is more succinct, less teacher talk and jargon, we try and keep them down to two or three minutes, the videos. Spend more time working on the higher order thinking with the kids.

Sara Lambert: I think that I think that the biggest thing for me as an educator is that it’s put me in the position where I’ve had to question what my role is within the classroom. I’ve started to think less of my role as being one that exists within a physical classroom and started to think of my role more as something that exists for learners within the learning process. It really enables you to be, not even just two places at once you know, if you’ve got a variety of flipped lessons running on videos, it can enable you to be 20 places at once for 20 different kids which is very powerful.

Using flipped video tools in the classroom first allowed me to move away from the initial stages of learning and immerse myself more in the stages where the kids are traditionally sent away to go and apply new learning concepts and focuses and we know that that’s cognitively more challenging for them, but often that’s the time where you don’t engage with them. So if they’re stuck or if they forget what happened in the initial stages, it gets really hard for them, they don’t have you often to come and talk to because you’re with your next group now so they kind of have to figure out things on their own and that was really tricky. So initially it impacted on my teaching because the kind of teaching that I was doing was very different. I wasn’t in charge of giving the initial material anymore, now it was actually how does my role change to make sure that I can best work alongside kids and tailor my teaching as specifically to the gaps that they have in their understanding of the learning concept.

I now work the majority of the time alongside students and I’ve started to think yeah less of myself as being the source of the initial knowledge, the only source of support for people who are struggling and now more as something exists beside them within the learning process. I think that’s changed the way that I teach and it’s actually changed the way that the kids move throughout the learning process as well. It’s challenging us to think about traditionally what our teaching methods have been and actually a lot of the time it didn’t work.