– Staff Writer –
On October 8, 2017, a story broke about Prof. Narayan, a university professor in India with a hot new innovation to make classrooms less teacher-centered and more student-centric. Narayan humbly professed his belief that the method would “inevitably find its way to school classrooms.” The Union Ministry of Human Resource Development agreed, honoring Narayan with its “Teaching Innovator award.” The professor’s innovation needed a catchy name and he found one. According to the newspaper, he’s calling his method a “ flipped classroom.” Like Christopher Columbus discovering America or the day my daughter first discovered Sugar Pops, there was no hint in the story that the professor or the newspaper were aware of the preexistence of the flipped classroom model or name.
Two months later, another story surfaced in the Columbia Daily Tribune here in the U.S, about researchers receiving a $450,000 grant to study flipped classrooms. Among the big questions, the grantees hoped to solve were concerns about the “possible downside if a student doesn’t watch the lecture video because the student would have nothing to do during class. Also, some students may not have internet at home, especially in rural areas.”
These are not isolated stories. In a recent review of Flipped Learning research papers published in March of this year, FLGI Chief Academic Officer Jon Bergmann found that roughly two-thirds of the studies and news stories about Flipped Learning involved questions that have already been answered. Further, these answers are broadly known to researchers, administrators, and teachers on the leading edge of Flipped Learning. Therein lies the gap between what we call Flipped Learning 1.0 and Flipped Learning 3.0. This gap in research, practice, and understanding of Flipped Learning is driven by two factors: practicing in silos and lack of some historical framework for understanding the history and evolution of Flipped Learning. In this inaugural issue of Flipped Learning Review, Terra Graves provides an insanely simple guide for those who are new to Flipped Learning, along with some helpful links for further “discovery.”
The Three Ages
by Terra Graves
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