I’ve finally had it. I can’t stand it any more. I just saw another serious academic article touting the benefits of the “flipped classroom.”
This last one was one too many. I flipped out.
The idea of the flipped classroom is that students read in advance and then you discuss in class. The alternative is that the instructor presents the material in class and then you discuss (or maybe you don’t because there isn’t time).
The flipped idea is truly staggering.
Not because it’s new and exciting but because it’s been around and been widely practiced…forever.
I’ll concede, from my own personal experience as both a student and a colleague, that there have been quite a few teachers and faculty who have taught their classes the “unflipped” (“flipless?”) way.
But anyone who’s been around colleges and universities knows that there always have been many who saw class as primarily an opportunity for discussion, not for delivering information. It’s not uncommon in high school, either. And the momentum toward flipping started long before someone coined the term.
Put simply, approaching instruction in a flipped way wasn’t unusual or controversial in the last half century; it was very common.
Really, you should have been there.
And I guess that’s the point. So many of our experts were never really there. Sure, they went to school and college, and may remember something about how the classes they took worked. But the experience of any individual is not a scientific sample of a giant system.
With few exceptions, our experts have never spent time in the trenches of instruction, have never sat in a lunchroom talking to colleagues about what works, have never gone to faculty or teacher meetings, have never talked to a student or to parents who didn’t think education was important or really didn’t think people like them could learn. Or, haven’t…
Well, you get the idea.
America is home to the ignorant education expert. People who’ve never taught or been in an instructional setting but know absolutely for sure how it should be done. You see them at conferences, smiling condescendingly as they unleash their latest pet strategy on a battered profession.
I’ve seen some real expert-launched howlers in the last decade or so. One was from a consulting group which opined that a major problem with introductory courses in universities was that they were assigned to a new instructor every term and that, because the new person started all over with his or her own ideas, any possibility of learning from experience was eliminated.
Bullshit.
This may happen in a few small courses at a few small places, but departments guard their introductory courses carefully. There’s much internal discussion of purpose, content, and outcomes and there’s usually a person assigned to oversee multiple sections.
Another piece of lunacy is the idea, advanced by a major player in higher education, that there’s a huge problem with faculty teaching their academic specialties rather than required undergraduate content. You know, the students get “all about dark matter” rather than Physics 101.
Bullshit squared.
In introductory courses, as well as in most upper division offerings, faculty have a curriculum to follow and are expected to do that. They might sometimes choose their field as an example, but they still cover the expected topics at the right level. And, despite what you may heard, others in the department will know and object if they don’t.
Also, if there’s a special upper level course on dark matter taught by an expert in that field, personally I think it’s a very good thing for the students.
Again, I’m confident that somewhere out there in the system one can find examples both of reinventing and excessive focus on personal interests. But frequently? At a sufficient scale to have even a tiny effect on educational success? No. Only someone who has never been around academic departments teaching introductory courses can believe these are big problems.
Back to flipping. When and how much you flip depends on the discipline, the topic, and more.
I was fortunate enough that one of the university courses I taught for over a decade used lots of guest lecturers. For most, I required readings in advance. For some I didn’t. James Scanlan’s lecture was one of the latter.
Scanlan is a brilliant teacher who was just amazing in my classes; he could condense a thoughtful and thorough introduction to Marxism into 48 minutes—with time for questions. I suppose you could do all that in a well-produced video, but there was something more. Scanlan is an exceptionally fair and honest man. The students in the room could feel that he wasn’t spinning them. When a student offered a typically incredulous American question he’d answer, “Now a Marxist would respond to that by saying…” the students knew they were being given an honest answer, not some simple spin to make Marxists look bad. This made them think.
I followed Scanlan’s lecture with readings and more discussion. Why? The students approached the readings with much more engagement when they had Scanlan’s introduction to get them going.
For another example of a flipless approach, consider the émigré Czech journalist.
A fascinating person with fascinating experiences in the worst days of communism, Jiri Hochman was a star with my students. But some always complained he was hard to understand. And that could be true. Jiri had learned English late in life and, although he spoke fluently, his intonation was certainly at variance with the norm. You had to focus a bit to lock on to his tonal wavelength. But if you did you’d be very curious or even excited to read the documents about communist society that were assigned to follow and then be discussed in class (they were available beforehand as well).
As an aside, in light of our experts’ infatuation with technology and online instruction, is it a bad thing for students to have to learn to deal with a foreign accent? Would a smoothly edited video really be better? I don’t think so.
The good news for American students is that the world speaks English; unlike other people’s children, ours are highly unlikely to have to learn another language to communicate within a business. But the bad news is that many of those other English-speakers have an array of widely varying accents. Young Americans are going to have to learn to deal with those folks at some point, why not in college? Again, would a sanitized video or online animation be better than the ragged-edged reality of the world?
Even more than just differences in language, isn’t introducing students to the variety of people in the real world one of the things we’re supposed to be doing in college? American students--more than ever the demographers say--are growing up in neighborhoods and attending schools that are economically homogenous. In other words, they mainly only meet people who are like them. College changes that, not only with roommates and classmates but also with instructors who come from many different backgrounds.
If the wackos in the House Finance Committee continue their romance with the education experts, we’re likely to supplement computer taught classes with virtual roommates.
I can think of lots of other examples when it makes more sense to introduce a topic in class, then read, then discuss. I do believe that the flipped approach is the best one most of the time, and consider that most faculty and many teachers do as well. For example, it’s pretty much always used in graduate instruction.
The ignorance that has made “flipped” a fad suggests we need to do something about influential people who don’t have enough experience in the instructional world to know what’s going on. We desperately need to reeducate these experts. They are so divorced from practice, immersed in theory and drunk on data that they are leading us from one foolish and wasteful fad to another. And now, with Common Core, we’re being pulled from good ideas to disastrous mistakes.
The fundamental concepts in Common Core are sound and research based. The key idea is that students in K-12 need to approach content in a way that is less superficial and more analytical. That’s important because that’s what students are expected to do in college. For example, History in high school is multiple choice; in college it’s essay exams and papers (or should be). Students’ continuing inability to think and work analytically is the principal reason why so many do poorly and drop out in the first year.
But it seems that Common Core overall, and especially its implementation, was designed by experts rather than practitioners. Notably, it wasn’t field tested and there appears to have been no attempt to phase it in so that teachers could get used to the new approaches. As I’ve noted before, I don’t know but have good reason to believe that we had this sharp shift from one mode to another so that the data-crazed experts could get a cool looking comparison graph from their spreadsheets.
The implementation of the Common Core has been a disaster and, because the concepts are going to be tossed out with the tests, America is going to be much the worse for it.
So, my suggestion is a summer boot camp for educational theorists.
Our two-month event, “Camp Just Say I Don’t Know,” would be run by current teachers and instructors. The curriculum would be up to them, but I’d guess they’d start by requiring experts to do some teaching themselves. My suggestion is they would have to explain their ideas about educational reform to average people recruited from the community who have no interest or affinity in their topics. As the experts drone on, the puzzled looks in the classroom would tell a story. Then the teachers monitoring the class would offer their critiques.
I’ll bet the experts would prefer a five mile run.
Most of the experts are good people who just happened to skip a stage in their education—the part where understanding that being a specialist in instructional outcomes means you have to do some teaching yourself—or at least be around people who teach.
Maybe, once we’ve started the boot camps, we could require everyone pushing reform at a conference to wear a bright green badge saying, “I taught.” Some similar kind of annotation could be used for books and journals.
Boot camps for experts, plus requiring some visible indication that presenters and writers know what they’re talking about, would surely be a welcome flip in the debate on how to improve education.
