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American
educators are inundated with more new programs and strategies than ever before,
each claiming to be the magical remedy for the most difficult problems facing
educators and learners today. Classroom
differentiation is not one of these buzz words that teachers can ignore,
believing that time will diminish the hype behind it. In most public school classrooms across the
United States, educators face teaching 25 students at a time, on average
(“Education Week,” 2011). Of course, no
two students are exactly alike, and every one enters each teacher’s class with
a different combination of varying learning styles, preferences and readiness
levels. In order to meet the learning
needs of all students effectively, teachers must differentiate their instruction,
tailoring their methods to serve each learner.
Differentiation
is meeting students where they are and ensuring that each student competes
against himself or herself as he or she grows and develops. A teacher who effectively differentiates
begins where a student is, not at the beginning of a curriculum guide. According to Carol A. Tomlinson (1999), an
expert in classroom differentiation, teachers must be ready to, “engage
students in instruction through different learning modalities by appealing to
different interests, and by using varied rates of instruction along with varied
degrees of complexity” (p. 62). Ideally,
teachers must not use only differentiated instruction for every student, but
they must also differentiate in each of these three ways. Many teachers find
this difficult, and not all differentiate their instruction well; how can one
individual appeal to the constant, dynamic needs of twenty-five or more
students on a daily basis?
Tips
and resources for teachers to differentiate their instruction effectively
abound; one new strategy is inverting or “flipping” classrooms in order to
appeal to the readiness and pacing differentiation modality. In a flipped classroom, that which is
traditionally done in class is done at home, and that which is traditionally
done as homework is completed in class.
It allows for more personalized instruction because teachers are no
longer the presenters of new information; instead, the classroom becomes
student-centered, and instead of lecturing for an entire class period, which
may only speak to the learning needs of a few students, teachers can spend
their precious class minutes working with students through activities,
assignments, and problems. According to
Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, two chemistry teachers who helped coin the
concept, conducting inverted class sessions can help all teachers reach all
students every day:
The present
model of education reflects the age in which it was designed: the industrial
revolution. Students are educated in an
assembly line to make their standardized education efficient. The weakness for the traditional approach is
that not all students come to class prepared to learn. Some lack adequate backgrounds for the
material, are uninterested in the subject, or have simply been disenchanted
with the present educational model. When
we began flipping our classrooms, we quickly realized that we had stumbled upon
a framework that enables teachers to effectively personalize the education of
each student-the goal of educators since the concept of individualized learning
first appeared (Bergmann & Sams, 2012).
In their research, Bergmann and
Sams also distinguish between two different forms of the flipped classroom
teaching style: traditional “flipped” teaching in which the entire class learns
the course material at generally the same pace, and instructional
differentiation occurs at home as students complete the “homework” on their own
schedules at their own paces. The second
type is called “flipped mastery” which is geared toward students mastering the
entire content of a course individually.
Through this second inverted classroom method, individual students move
through the course content at their own pace; teachers make the content
available in advance. Every student completes a pre-assessment to determine his
or her readiness level and then begins mastering the content appropriately
based on how much they know about the content at the beginning of the academic
year or semester. The students move
through it at their own paces for the entire length of the course and can
advance only to subsequent units once they have mastered earlier units. The instructor checks for mastery through
formative and summative assessments. If
the students do not master a level or unit, the teacher re-mediates and
reteaches that particular student until complete mastery is achieved. While this method appeals subscribing to
differentiated instruction, Bergmann and Sams
recommend only moving to this format once a teacher is comfortable with
“traditional” flipping (Bergmann and Sams, 2012).
These teachers also maintain that
inverting a classroom does not require the use of technology; flipping a
classroom simply entails making instruction student-centered, as the teacher
goes from being “the sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side” (Bergmann &
Sams, 2012). However, technology can
make the process easier and more engaging for students, and it can help the
teacher virtually be in more than one place at a time. Many who teach through flipped classrooms
record their lessons as video files and then upload the videos in an online
format that students can access to learn the material at their own individual
paces. After the students access the
lecture videos on their own schedules and as many times as they need to, the
students come into class to clarify questions, practice their skills, and work
on activities.
Educational research in
differentiated instruction has shown that, for this type of blended learning to
be successful, it is important to structure the face-to-face and the online
portions of the learning experience so that they coherently support one another
to help students achieve the learning goals for the course in question
(Strayer, 2012). Dean Shimamoto (2012) from
the Department of Educational Technology at the University of Hawaii Manoa recently
conducted a study on developing an instructional model for successfully
flipping a public school classroom, and his results also determined that while
using technology to support this strategy was effective in conveying
information to students, face-to-face interactions between teachers and
students was also necessary for information retainment. He concluded his study by stating that even
though this strategy is becoming wildly popular and information on its advantages
and disadvantages is plentiful, educators have a difficult time finding
information on specifically how to get started because this information is
less-widely researched and published.
Shimamoto suggests that this may be because inverting a classroom can
take on an infinite variety of forms; to engage in this strategy, teachers
should work together to engage in active research to determine resources and
strategies for differentiation through inverting instruction which will best
fit their unique teaching and student learning needs. As with all changes in education, ample time
and patience should be used in order to really determine its effectiveness
(Shimamoto, 2012).
Although teachers will not be
able to find all of the answers for their specific questions on how to flip
their unique classrooms, a multitude of online resources exist for teachers as
they research and begin inverting.
Presently, the most widely referenced online resource for flipping
classrooms is The Khan Academy, which was featured on CBS’s show, 60 Minutes, in the summer of 2012. This not-for-profit organization was started
by Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. He began making instructional math videos to
tutor his long-distance, younger relative; he posted them online, and they were
an instant success, but not in the way he intended. Students all over the world began using the
videos to help them understand math concepts they were learning in school. Teachers began showing his videos in class
and assigning them to be viewed as homework.
Khan acknowledged the popularity and saw a need for education in America
and began Khan Academy, an online library with thousands of instructional
videos. Now, millions of users visit
every day to view and listen to lectures on math, computer science, art
history, science, and social studies.
The website is free, which speaks to Khan’s belief of global, equal
access to information (Khan, 2012).
Another favored resource of
currently flipping teachers is TED-Ed, a free, online library of educational videos
created and posted by professional educators.
Like Khan Academy, TED-Ed offers instructional videos on a wide variety
of topics, including literature and language, mathematics, philosophy and
religion, design, engineering, and much more.
These resources can help make flipping classrooms much easier for
teachers because instead of having to create all of their own video lectures,
which can be time consuming as one begins the inverting process, educators can
assign these videos for students to view and learn from (“TED-Ed”).
Proponents
of more traditional classroom methods have clearly and publicly stated the
disadvantages to instructing through inverted classrooms since the
developmental stages of the strategy.
Some disadvantages that they cite include that just as with each new
teaching strategy, flipped classrooms will not meet the needs of every
individual student. Also, students from
rural and low-income areas may not have the access to computers and the Internet
that high-tech, flipped classrooms require.
Some teachers dodge this equity issue by creating DVDs of their lessons
and letting students take those home to view, but this does require extra
efforts from the teacher outside of the classroom. Another commonly cited disadvantage is that with
the inverted class model, students will spend all of their “homework” time in
front of a computer screen, and not all students learn well this way. Supporters counter argue, however, that
American children use technology for entertainment anyway, and teaching them
through the use of technology outlets can help peak their interests in
education (Jenkins, 2012).
References
Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2012). Flip your
classroom: Reach every student in every class every day. (1 ed., Vol. 1).
New York: International Society for Technology in Education
Education week. (2011,
July). Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/class-size/
Jenkins, C. (2012, Aug. 29). Lecture Tools. Retrieved from
http://info.lecturetools.com/blog/bid/59158/The-Advantages-and-Disadvantages-of-the-Flipped-Classroom
Khan, S. (2012). Khan academy. Retrieved from http://www.khanacademy.org/
Shimamoto, Dean. (2012). Implementing
a Flipped Classroom: An Instructional Module. TCC Conference.
Strayer, J. F. (2012). How
learning in an inverted classroom influences cooperation, innovation and task
orientation. Learning Environments Research, 15, 2,
171-193.
Ted-ed. (n.d.). Retrieved
from http://ed.ted.com/
Tomlinson, C. A. (1999). The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to
the Needs of All Learners. Association
for Supervision and Curriculum Development
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