Best Practices for Flipping the College Classroom

Julee B. Waldrop, Melody A. Bowdon, Julee B. Waldrop, Melody A. Bowdon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317693789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Best Practices for Flipping the College Classroom provides a comprehensive overview and systematic assessment of the flipped classroom methodology in higher education. The book:

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• Reviews various pedagogical theories that inform flipped classroom practice and provides a brief history from its inception in K–12 to its implementation in higher education.

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• Offers well-developed and instructive case studies chronicling the implementation of flipped strategies across a broad spectrum of academic disciplines, physical environments, and student populations.

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• Provides insights and suggestions to instructors in higher education for the implementation of flipped strategies in their own courses by offering reflections on learning outcomes and student success in flipped classrooms compared with those employing more traditional models and by describing relevant technologies.

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• Discusses observations and analyses of student perceptions of flipping the classroom as well as student practices and behaviors particular to flipped classroom models.

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• Illuminates several research models and approaches for use and modification by teacher-scholars interested in building on this research on their own campuses.

The evidence presented on the flipped classroom methodology by its supporters and detractors at all levels has thus far been almost entirely anecdotal or otherwise unreliable. Best Practices for Flipping the College Classroom is the first book to provide faculty members nuanced qualitative and quantitative evidence that both supports and challenges the value of flipping the college classroom.

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Introduction

Joining the Flipped Classroom Conversation

Erin Saitta, Brett Morrison, Julee B. Waldrop, and Melody A. Bowdon

The “flipped” or “inverted” class model has been a staple of K–12 education over the past decade and, in recent years, has become increasingly popular in higher education as well. This method of teaching involves assigning students to work through the basic content of a course on their own time, often by watching a recorded lecture or completing a guided reading instead of listening to a traditional in-person lecture. The approach frees up class time for group problem-solving assignments, demonstrations, experiments, questions and answers, and other engaging experiences.

Conversations about the flipped classroom occur among a variety of constituencies, including K–12 and higher education faculty members and administrators, instructional designers, education researchers, and even policy makers and public officeholders. Much of the public dialogue on the subject occurs in the blogosphere; flipping stories figure prominently in popular and academic media articles, teaching and learning forums, LISTSERVs, and educational webinars. In fact, the expression “classroom flip” emerged out of teaching conversations, professional development events, and conference presentations (Baker, 2000; Toto & Nguyen, 2009; Zappe, Leicht, Messner, Litzinger, & Lee, 2009), with the terms “flipped teaching” and “the flipped classroom” emerging in print shortly after. In 2010, for example, Pink described how a high school math teacher had begun to upload instructional videos to YouTube so that students could spend time working problems in class. Instead of focusing on educational applications, Pink’s article describes how a “flipping” approach could apply to other fields, such as publishing, marketing, film, and human resources. Since that time, flipping the classroom, flipped teaching, and many other variations of the term have been widely used in journals, newspapers and periodicals, and books (Moravec, Williams, Aguilar-Roca, & O’Dowd, 2012; Nielsen, 2012; Sams, 2011; Strauss, 2012; University of Adelaide, 2013).

Despite the significant buzz about flipping that permeates current conversations among educators, most of the discussion on the topic of flipping draws on classroom anecdotes, informal observations of outcomes, and reflections on faculty experiences. Practitioners and scholars who wish to investigate the potential value of the practice in their own classrooms find gaps in our collective understanding of how the method impacts student learning. This introductory chapter provides an overview of prominent scholarship on flipping the classroom in higher education, as well as a few K–12 examples that are particularly relevant. We explore the excitement and skepticism that surround the idea of flipping the classroom while underscoring the limited scholarly evaluation of the method as a reason for caution. The chapter concludes with an overview of the subsequent chapters, which include case studies of flipped classes in eight disciplines of higher education, a chapter on student perspectives on the flipping experience, and a conclusion that incorporates insights from all of our case study authors into a practical conversation about implementing this method.

Theoretical Underpinnings of Flipping the Classroom

The flipping model is an outgrowth of various pedagogical movements in recent years that seek to minimize the amount of time that students spend passively listening to lectures presented by their teachers and to maximize the amount of class time that they spend actively learning material through activities designed to accommodate a broad range of learning styles and to promote deep learning.

Advocates of flipping note its synergies with Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Bloom, 1956), a model that has shaped instructors’ thoughts about teaching and learning in both K–12 and higher education for several decades (Anderson & Sosniak, 1994; Krathwohl, 2002). The model developed by Bloom and his colleagues argues that levels of learning can be mapped in a continuum from simple to complex and from concrete to abstract, suggesting that each level of the taxonomy is foundational to the next. While the model is not meant to suggest a rigid sequential process for learning, the taxonomy is most frequently represented visually as a pyramid (Coffey, n.d.; Overbaugh & Schultz, n.d.). Learning objectives, then, build from knowledge, which emphasizes factual recall, to comprehension, which expands to include basic understanding of material, to application, which includes purposeful use of concepts learned in concrete circumstances, to analysis, which requires the ability to break an idea down and to understand the relationships among its elements, to synthesis, which requires the learner to understand and articulate how the pieces of a concept can be reconstituted into a whole, and finally culminates in what Bloom et al. considered the highest level of learning, evaluation, which requires the learner to make complex judgments about the material. This taxonomy can be used to support flipping the classroom because it involves moving the most basic and, arguably, simple elements of learning outside of class, making use of class time to support students as they move into the higher levels of learning. Thus, it encourages students to engage course material in richer and more complex ways and increases the likelihood that they will ultimately be able to demonstrate sophisticated evaluation of ideas and information, which may be equated with the term critical thinking.

Flipped methodologies also often rely on the concept of experiential learning, which is most notably attributed to Dewey (1915). More recently, Kolb (1984) promoted a learning cycle model that theorizes that the most effective learning occurs when knowledge is created via experience. Flipped methods often seek to provide students with the opportunity to put what they are learning into action in the classroom and beyond through lived interactive experiences. Learners in flipped classrooms may be exposed to the first stage of Kolb’s cycle, concrete experience, together in the classroom with the instructor close at hand. This sets them up to move to the subsequent stages of reflective observation and abstract conceptualization in class together or on their own, and creates a course environment that encourages their ongoing active experimentation as the term progresses. This kind of approach frames learning as something students do, not something that is done to them. It can outfit them with tools and attitudes that allow them to own their growing body of knowledge.

What distinguishes flipping, then, is what happens in the classroom, which frequently involves active learning, a term used extensively in a variety of educational contexts beginning in the late 1980s (Bonwell & Eison, 1991; Cross, 1987; Study Group, 1984). Active learning essentially places responsibility for learning on the student and requires that learners do much more than simply listen to an instructor lecture and then regurgitate knowledge on exams or write formulaic essays in response. The most recent and rigorous evidence to support active learning comes from a meta-analysis that compared 225 studies of learning using traditional lecture methods to 158 studies using active-learning techniques in the STEM disciplines. Results demonstrated that students in the courses taught with active learning had increased exam scores and concept inventories and were 1.5 times less likely to fail than those in the traditionally taught courses. The results were significant no matter what the class size but were best in smaller classes (N ≤ 50) (Freeman et al., 2014). Additional evidence that active learning as a method of instruction increases student engagement and promotes academic achievement and positive student attitudes is abundant and comes from many disciplines (Butler, Phillmann, & Smart, 2001; Hamlin & Janssen, 1984; Michael, 2006; Prince, 2004). In the flipped course, students engage in these kinds of activities during class time and learn more static content on their own.

Asking students to learn content on their own in order to prepare for class is not new. There is a long tradition of teachers assigning students to complete preparatory work, such as reading articles or textbook chapters before participating in discussions, debates, or other in-class activities. Key elements of flipping, including its emphasis on student accountability, use of technology, and a modified role for the instructor, are critical to a number of teaching methodologies.

An example of a well-known method of using class time to increase student learning and engagement is peer instruction, which asks that students discuss concepts in small groups before participating in a whole-class discussion. Popularized in the work of Mazur, a Harvard physics professor, peer instruction relies on pre-class readings from a textbook, video lectures, lecture notes, or some combination of these and other resources that are designed to prepare students to interact with each other during class (Mazur, 1997). Mazur’s motivation for designing and implementing this method sprang from his realization that his students were able to pass exams without truly understanding basic concepts (Mazur, 2009). Therefore, his method focuses on conceptual understanding and correcting misconceptions (Schell, 2012).

Lage, Platt, and Treglia (2000) used the term “inverted classroom” to describe their approach of taking traditional classroom events outside the class and bringing outside events in. Their goal was to offer a variety of teaching styles to better address the needs of all students. In addition to being expected to read the required texts, students could access video-recorded lectures and narrated slide presentations to help them prepare for class. The instructors spent class time answering student-generated questions, presenting mini lectures, guiding problem-solving work sheets for practice, and leading class discussions.

Similarly, just-in-time teaching (JiTT) is a technique that uses pre-class assignments to engage, prepare, and motivate students while providing valuable feedback to faculty. The information acquired before class, usually through the use of web-based technologies, assists faculty in preparing the activities and lectures based on the students’ current level of understanding. This directly impacts what occurs during the face-to-face time. The JiTT method, developed in physics and implemented in a wide range of disciplines, is designed to give students opportunities to construct and integrate new and existing knowledge, and therefore relies on students’ awareness of their initial understandings of concepts and information (Novak, n.d.; Novak & Patterson, 2000).

Building on the concept of JiTT, Moravec, Williams, Aguilar-Roca, and O’Dowd (2010) created learn before lecture (LBL) assignments in an introductory biology course to move lower-level material to pre-class assignment work sheets or narrated slide presentations while using the class time otherwise spent on such basic material for higher-level active-learning exercises. The pre-class assignments themselves were intended to encourage more student participation than other possible pre-class activities like reading or quizzes.

Bowen’s (2012) Teaching Naked provides another example of moving technology—specifically, podcasts—outside the classroom to deliver content between class meetings and to free up class time for active learning. This method promotes more significant student-teacher interactions in addition to increased student engagement, with the goal of improving student learning and maximizing the value of face-to-face meetings. Bowen’s response was motivated in part by a desire to emphasize the value of in-person classroom engagement in this era when fully online courses taught by for-profit institutions and free classes like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have tended to dominate the academic landscape (Bowen, 2012).

The Teaching Naked approach took shape before the popularization of the term “flipped,” but Bowen himself has since associated his work with this method. While a 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education article on Teaching Naked (Young, 2009) did not reference the term “flipped,” Bowen’s 2012 book on methodology features the flipped method as a primary topic.

Bergmann and Sams, two high school chemistry teachers from Colorado, wrote one of the first notable publications describing the flipped classroom approach (Bergmann & Sams, 2012). Their easy-to-read book guides readers through the process of flipping their own courses. The book describes the authors’ reasoning about flipping as well as logistics for navigating technology, which is the springboard for implementation of this method in their classes.

But teachers who have actually used this method in their own courses are not the only ones talking about flipping the classroom; many others in higher education have strong opinions on the topic. Most of the articles, books, websites, and blog posts about the flipped classroom are intended to explain the ideology and methodology as well as the reasoning behind flipping, often with caveats about participating educators’ classrooms (Alvarez, 2012; Berrett, 2012; FitzGerald, 2013; Fulton, 2012). Other web articles describe logistics or offer suggestions for implementation (Honeycutt, 2013; Talbert, 2011), but few attempt to offer definitive answers about the method’s impact on student learning. Despite the dissemination of information about “how to” flip a course or classroom, there remains a gap in our understanding of the impact on learning when this model is implemented, especially in the college or university setting.

Scholarly Evaluation and Gaps in the Research

While systematic evaluation of the flipped classroom model has not been extensively present in educational research, it is beginning to emerge in the literature. Authors who wish to evaluate the impact of flipping and to defend its implementation typically provide two types of evidence: (1) quantitative data about student performance on content assessments, and (2) anecdotal descriptions of student engagement and motivation. In both cases, little information is provided regarding the specific teaching, research, and analytical methods that are implemented, which makes it difficult for readers to evaluate the evidence. For example, non-peer-reviewed academic publications such as the Chronicle of Higher Education have published examples of teachers using flipped classroom methods. One such piece reported that introductory calculus students in a flipped course at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor showed twice the gains on a concept inventory than students at other institutions who participated in lectures (Berrett, 2012). A similar publication, Learning & Leading with Technology, described an increase in performance on calculus unit assessments, test scores, and standardized exams in a variety of classes including calculus, precalculus, and accelerated algebra when teachers used the flipped method at Byron High School in Minnesota. In addition to reporting an increase in performance, the authors included a handful of quotations from students and parents about the perceived benefits and positive reactions to the method (Fulton, 2012). In both of these examples, the data was used to support the flipped method, but, because of the type of article in which the information was presented, descriptions of how the research was set up or analyzed were omitted. Though the information is compelling and was presumably carried out in a scholarly manner, these publication venues better suit the needs of practitioners looking for insights rather than those of researchers looking for evidence of impact. Well-designed studies that identify the population, describe the conse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Joining the Flipped Classroom Conversation
• 2 Flipping a Large First-Year Chemistry Class: Same-Semester Comparison with a Traditionally Taught Large-Lecture Class
• 3 Flipped Calculus: A Gateway to Lifelong Learning in Mathematics
• 4 Flipping the Graduate Course in Nursing: Application to Solve Patients’ Health Problems
• 5 Taking Ownership of the Past: Flipping the History Course as a Means of Increasing Student Engagement
• 6 Best Practices for Flipping the College Classroom: Elements of Psychology, an Introductory Psychology Course at the University of Oklahoma
• 7 Flip Don’t Flop: Best Practices for Flipping Marketing Courses
• 8 Don’t Flip Out: Inverting the Intermediate Microeconomics Classroom
• 9 Flipping the Creativity Class: Creating Active-Learning Environments for Student Innovations
• 10 Student Practices and Perceptions in Flipped Courses
• 11 Conclusion: Reflecting on the Flipping Experience
• Contributors
• Index