Robert Talbert has this nice article in the Chronicle, describing how his thinking on flipped learning has changed over time:
Three evolving thoughts about flipped learning
His three points, (in his own words, my rearranging:)
- Pre-class activity is for generating questions, rather than mastering content-oriented instructional objectives.
- Accountability doesn’t have to look like a quiz.
- In-class instruction should focus on two things: Answering questions, and engaging students in high-level tasks – and lecture can play an important role in both.
Number two, in which he introduced me to the idea of androgogy (as opposed to pedagogy) looks a lot like internal motivation. “treating students as responsible adults rather than as children who need constant supervision and rule-setting.” They’ve got to come out of their shells sometime. A colleague pointed out that accountability doesn’t look like a quiz in the world outside the ivory tower.
I like that faculty trying this, are adapting, reflecting on what they did, how it worked, and tweaking it for the next iteration. Then their teaching gets better, their students are more engaged, and everyone learns more.