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Education Dive
Amid limited research, educators find success with flipped classroom model
Early success with the approach, which has students consume traditional
lecture material at home, led one Michigan school to expand it
building-wide.
Shawna De La Rosa
Oct. 9, 2019
According to a recent study published in AERA Open, a publication of
the American Educational Research Association, the flipped classroom
model has a slightly positive impact on student learning and
satisfaction — but what are schools that have implemented the model
seeing on the frontlines?
The authors of the meta-analysis suggest educators experience at least
small positive impacts on student learning under flipped models, but
that little is known about why it works well in some situations and not
so much in others. They ultimately call for more strictly designed
studies with more thorough reporting on the model.
Flipped classrooms' star has been on the rise nationwide over the past
decade, and Clintondale High School in Clinton Township, Michigan,
implemented the concept for its entire 400-student school about that
long ago.
In 2010, Principal Greg Green — now the district's superintendent — was
overseeing a failing public high school and needed to do something
drastic to turn things around. He had heard about the flipped model and
it seemed promising, but he was leery.
“We were taking something that’s been entrenched in society for 300
years and changing it,” he said, referring to the traditional
sit-and-get teaching model. “But we weren’t being successful at what we
were doing. Failure forces you to think outside of the box, and that
allows for growth.”
Growth came in the form of flipping one class that included at-risk
students. By the end of the year, that group was outperforming the
students in traditional classrooms. So Green started expanding the
program across the entire school.
While students in a traditional classroom passively receive a lecture
in class and then go home to complete assignments around writing, math
problems or science lab reports as homework, the flipped model sees
teachers outsource their lessons to videos that students consume at
home. What would have previously been "homework" is then completed at
school under the guidance of teachers, who now have much more time to
devote to individual guidance.
“The problem we kept hearing was that we weren’t offering enough
support,” Green said. “We thought about how to give them support, and
decided this was the best way to do it. Teach them the lessons at home
and then use the class period to support them.”
Since flipping the entire school, he has seen an increase in attendance and college acceptance, and a drop in failure rates.
Green emphasizes that he didn’t build the model around any specific
technology because that all changes. He explains that the school
developed an “ecosystem” that allows for teachers to sit with the
students, working with them through the learning process.
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