Supercharge Your Flipped Class with These Five Strategies

-by Jon Bergmann-

The school year is about to start and you are looking for something new to engage your students. You realize that Flipped Learning continues to evolve and you want to find better research-based ways to supercharge your classroom.  Here are five tips to get you off on the right track

1. Add Graphic Organizers

One recent study showed that students learn better if they have a graphic organizer to help them learn from a flipped video. This is a simple outline of the notes so that students can follow along in an organized fashion. Below is a sample page from one class.

2. Add Pre-Video Questions

A study from Iowa State University showed that adding pre-video questions to your flipped videos will enhance student learning. Steve Griffiths, a science teacher from Brisbane, Australia, has adopted this in his class with great success. I encourage you to listen to my interview with him where he describes how to implement this quickly and effectively.  

3. Trust but Verify

Too many first-time flipped teachers simply assign a video and hope students will do the pre-work. I’m not sure if your students are like mine were, but many of them lacked the self-motivation to do work that didn’t have some sort of accountability built in. One study demonstrates that simply using a video interaction/accountability tool like EdPuzzle or PlayPosit to track student progress, and formative assessments, will increase student engagement and achievement.

4. Use Gamification

I was caught up in a study by  Biyun Huang and Khe Foon Hew and their work around gamification. They demonstrated that a flipped gamified class is superior to a non-gamified flipped class. But what really got my attention is the framework they developed out of their research. They shared five elements for effective gamification:  Goal, Access, Feedback, Challenge, and Collaboration (GAFCC). They further showed how they added these into their test course using a very simple and powerful graphic (below).

5. Make the Individual Space Social

Instead of simply assigning flipped videos in the individual space, make the individual space experience social. Eric Mazur, a professor at Harvard University, found that when his students used Perusall, a text-based pre-class interaction tool, they scored significantly higher on exams.

We would love to hear from you. What tips do you have about how you can supercharge your flipped class?