Not Quite Flipped

The ‘flipped’ classroom has become a huge topic in a reasonably short amount of time. There has been some great discusion and there have been some good points made on both sides of the discusion. Personally, I’m not convinced that there is one right way to do this. In fact, I think if we get caught up trying to follow the rules of ‘flipping’ the classroom we can do more damage than good.

For the last year or so, we have been experimenting with our own version of a flexible classroom. I say ‘we’ because the changes that have been made are based on discussions with students. Our students have fed back to us about what works for them at school, and what doesn’t. This has been a big learning experience for me and at times a very confronting one.

We have avoided calling our classroom ‘flipped’ because I don’t believe we conform to that mould. We have set up flexible learning spaces to allow student to work both collaboratively and individually as they need. We have worked hard to give the students a large amount of control over their learning and the teacher has absolutely stopped being the focus of the room.

The part of the flipped model I disagree with is the emphasis on students watching ‘lectures’ or ‘classes’ at home. I believe we still need to offer students a chance to access this base information at school. For many of our students, accessing technology is not possible and neither is accessing appropriate support for their learning. If we value the information we are sharing, we need to make time for it in our day. Students should be provided with opportunities to access learning at home in different ways.

By taking the best bits of a lot of different ideas, I hope we are on track to creating a flexible learning environment that works. It’s an ever evolving process with the goal of worrying less about how we teach and more about how kids learn.