There’s a lot of people already on the “flipped classroom” bandwagon. For the uninitiated, the idea behind the flip teaching approach is that students do their course work—watching the professor deliver a lecture via video, doing research, writing, etc.—away from school, then come to the classroom for in-person discussion with teachers and classmates.
But there’s a new movement in higher education hold off from a complete flip — where no lectures are done in person — to a model where professors still use in-person lectures, but keep them short. Pamela E. Barnett, associate vice provost and director of the Teaching & Learning Center at Temple University, writes in Inside Higher Ed this approach is more of a “scramble.”
“What is good for our students is a scramble or mix of direct instruction and practice and feedback,” she writes. “The beauty is that technology affords us opportunities to provide for both needs in both online and face-to-face contexts. We need to use these two teaching approaches - direct instruction versus facilitated practice - intentionally to help students meet our learning goals.”
Read the full story on Inside Higher Ed for more on this discussion.
Do you think there’s any merit to sticking with lectures in the flipped classroom model? Or should they be banished completely from the classroom? Share your thoughts.
If your question is: Should long, didactic, slide deck-based, drone fest lectures be banned? Then the answer is yes.
I am an unabashed advocate of the flipped model for my classes but do use extemporaneous lectures to help students “access” knowledge that they may be having difficulty adding to their knowledge spaces. What is most important is not a slavish adherence to any one educational “tool,” but to be mindful in using the correct tool for the given circumstance (something that advocates of straight lecture-based classes sometimes miss I think - as I did when I first began teaching).
I would also add that posting a voiced-over slide deck and calling it a ‘flipped class’ is simply moving a teaching method that may not be appropriate (or useful to students) into virtual space. For the flip to really be useful, an instructor must be mindful of all of the learning modalities offered to students and to curate them to advance the learning goals of the class in a way that doesn’t overwhelm students.