Flipping Without Video: Is It Possible?

Out of The Box May / May 11, 2018

– by Vincenza Leone –

 

When you ask a teacher who is not specialized in Flipped Learning what it is, the first answer is probably: a way to teach with video. This is the most spread idea about FL. It is not exactly what it is. According to Flipped Learning 3.0. The Operating System for the Future of Talent Development, by Jon Bergmann and Errol St. Clair Smith (2017), “Flipped Learning is NOT primarily about the videos.” In Chapter eight, they assert:

One misconception about Flipped Learning is that it is a technological solution to training. The perception is that you must first start with the technology and then follow up with something to do in class. Contrary to this view, Flipped Learning is a fundamentally good educational practice that happens to have a technological component (p. 139).

The question is how much and how often we need to have the technological component in the individual space? Even if I am a supporter of technology at school and in teaching/learning activities, I am also sure that we cannot define every situation the same, so that sometimes we need to give a different shape to the individual space. Just to give a couple of examples from my personal experience, I would tell what I developed along the time:

  1. One example is when you teach foreign literature to students of a different mother tongue. In that case, the request of reading at home can help to focus more on the aim of learning the language and the content at the same time. It is a technique I usually link to the Drama in Education (DiE) technique I use in my English Literature Courses. Of course you can choose to offer students a video stimulus as individual space, but, in my opinion, it can be more rewarding to ask them to concentrate on the reading and using their learning to start the group space.
  2. One more example is offered by historical events where you can ask students to listen to the original speeches of some well-known people and then you prepare the students for the group space enriching the school activities with reference to the individual space work, where the home learning has to find a shared shape. All this, of course, is from the point of view of an ESL teacher, who has a dual focus on learning: language and content.

How about you?  Have you flipped any lessons without video? If so, please share below.






Editorial Leam
Editorial Team
This article was written by a collaboration of editors and columnists on the FLR editorial team or guest contributors.




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2 Comments

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on May 19, 2018

Flipped learning is about moving to study time learning that is fundamental and can be learned during study time. At least for the learning to solve what cognitive experts term “well-structured questions” (such as those taught in math and science-major science, carefully designed written tutorial can be more effective than a video. Any video with a talking head introduces noise that distracts from learning — see research by Richard Clark at USC.

Flipping is about moving what can be learned during homework to homework, so that class time can be used to do what texts cannot: Conduct discussions, demonstrations, and guide complex problem solving.

For an example of flipping without video, go to this link:
http://books.wwnorton.com/books/webad.aspx?id=4294992841
download the DEMO chapter, and see if you can learn from reading it.

For flipped learning to make sense, one needs to know how science says the brain learns.

Avatar
on May 24, 2018

I’m and Italian High School teacher of Literature in classes of ESL – I’ve read you’re Italian too even though much younger than me! – and I believe that teaching foreign literature to students of a different mother tongue, in a context of Flipped Learning, requires different and adapted strategies that include assigning materials in the form of texts, not only videos and those videos may be by Native Speakers and not only by the students’ teacher. Moreover, at least here in Europe, the teachers of ESF have adopted for a very long time Active Learning so that a lot of the activities that may sound new to teachers of other subjects, have always been implemented in foreign language classes and it’s not hard to shift them to a Flipped Learning context.
Well, it’s all I wanted to say. I find this online review very interesting.



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