Flip your Classroom Without Flipping Out

Flip your Classroom Without Flipping Out

You may be intrigued by the concept but haven’t yet made the flip. You may have flipped already and are looking to improve your classroom experience. You may just be learning about flipped classrooms right now. No matter how far you’ve flipped your classroom, nClass can help make the process easier.

What Is a Flipped Classroom

It’s a new model for classroom instruction–one that promotes collaboration and personal engagement during class by moving lectures after class in the form of short videos. Simply put, students do homework during class while you teach them as homework. This frees up more class time for active learning, which allows students to interact with the material on a higher level during class. It’s a chance to gamify your class, promote and guide group work, and monitor the learning process.

Why Flip your classroom?

Flipped classrooms are just plain more effective at teaching students. In fact, a University of Washington meta-analysis of STEM classes found that students in classes centered on active learning received 6% higher average scores than those in traditional lectures. Additionally, adopting flipped classroom in a pharmacy course at UNC resulted in 5.1 percent higher final grades. They also work with more than just science and technology classrooms–they’ve been applied successfully in foreign language, history, economics, and more. At their best, flipped classrooms improve scores, and at least, students find them more enjoyable and less stressful.

How do you Flip?

At its core, the flipped classroom is a set of models that focus on student engagement, collaboration, self-paced learning and more meaningful homework. As a result, your flipped classroom can and should be molded and adapted to your particular students’ needs. For a list of flipped classroom mistakes to avoid, check out our blog post. Otherwise, check out a few of these flipped classroom ideas:

1. Get your students on board – A flipped classroom can only work if the students understand what they are getting out of this arrangement. Spend the first class session showing students what they have to gain.
2. Use class time for fun learning – Create game-like goals and targets to keep students engaged when the going gets dull. This teacher’s technique helped students succeed in precalculus and calculus classes.
3. Augment class discussion with technology – A smartphone will do nicely.An app like nClass will allow students to send comprehension alerts, give introverted students a voice through text comments in real time, and allow you to keep track more effectively
4. Focus class work on higher level learning – The flipped classroom is set up to allow students to analyze, synthesize and evaluate on their own, so make sure the classwork truly promotes this thinking

How do you flip your classroom? Let us know in the comments.