If you haven't heard of the Flipped Classroom - you need to watch this video before you read any further (then come back and read...)
Teachers are being asked to teach more and more with less and less time. This may be a help. Let me walk you through a typical class period.
9:00 am -- Warmups (an intro to today's activities, review of old activities, etc) 10 minutes
9:10 am -- Go over last times homework - 10 minutes
9:20 am -- Intro new topic (possibly through lecture or some other direct instruction model) 15 min
9:35 am -- Guided Practice (students work on problems with some guidance from teacher) 10 min
9:45 am -- Teacher assigns Independent Practice (some call this Homework) 3 minutes (what is left in class)
Here is the Flipped Classroom
The previous day's Homework was to watch a video of the "Direct Instruction" - they watch the video at their pace - they can pause (look up terms, ideas, etc), rewind (and listen to parts over again) and replay (the entire 'lecture' as needed). If they have questions or comments they can post on the teachers blog so that the teacher can anticipate questions and issues. Finally - the student will have taken notes.
Today's plan
9:00 am -- Warmups (the purpose of this will change in the flipped classroom) 10 minutes
9:10 am -- Go over the lecture and deal with questions from the blog- 10 minutes
9:20 am -- Students work on Independent Practice (application of the concepts - this is advantageous because now the teacher is present as a guide. ) 25 min
9:45 am -- Teacher assigns next step (some call this Homework) 3 minutes (what is left in class)
Students are working on the work at a deeper level and then have the teacher as a guide. The teacher can also differentiate based on where students are in their learning process. Teacher will have a better feel for how class is doing because they are spending very little time direct teaching (lecturing, modeling, etc) and more time working with students individually and/or in small groups.
I am working with some of our CTE teachers in our building to see how we can apply this. The one thing that is an interesting challenge is that we are already very application based (project oriented). Also we assign very little homework (most work is done in class). But we might still be able to assign some of the demonstration information as homework and be able to take students deeper or cover more material. One example ( I will be posted more about this later) - is a first aid lesson. The teacher could assign the students to watch the videos the night before. Then discuss and work on the application of the first aid and CPR in class.
Feel free to post comments and ideas on this. I know my explanation might not be great - but there are a lot of good resources on this - take some time and google "flipped classroom".
I'm still learning.....
