What is a flipped-class?
Homework — something teachers love giving, but few students enjoy doing. Sure, it can be good review of what you learn in class, but we would rather be doing something else with our time. What if there was a way to make homework more interesting and meaningful while saving time in the lesson for something more beneficial and enjoyable?
Traditional Classes
In a traditional class, an old school class, the teacher will lecture during the lesson and then give homework exercises for the students to complete individually or in groups. This is the process that many of us are familiar with and one we rarely ever question.
Are there any problems with this traditional approach?
For starters, students these days don’t want to spend class time listening to a teacher lecture. Instead, they want to interact with their classmates while working on fun and interesting projects. Sure, a teacher could assign group work as homework, but not every student has the ability to meet up with their classmates outside of school because or time, distance, or other factors.
Another problem is that students only have one chance to listen to and understand their teacher. Even if they have the chance to ask questions, they may still leave the class with uncertainty and an inability to complete the homework.
An Alternative
A flipped classroom provides an alternative to a traditional classroom. In a flipped classroom, the students do their homework BEFORE the lesson, not after.
Not sure what that means?
Imagine you have class with your teacher on Tuesdays. In a flipped classroom, the teacher will give you work to do on Monday that will prepare you for class on Tuesday. The Monday homework will usually be a video or a reading that the student will watch or read in order to understand the topic or information. Often the students will also complete a task to demonstrate they understood the information.
The next day, when students come to class, the students will spend the class time applying what they learned from Monday’s homework, usually by completing some project work with their peers.
The Advantages
There are a number of advantages of this approach.
Teachers don’t have to spend the lesson lecturing, and students don’t have to listen to the teacher lecture. Lectures are rarely fun for anyone.
Students can watch the video or read the text given as homework as many times as they like if they don’t understand. When information is presented in a lecture, students might only have one chance to understand what a teacher means and also might not have the chance to ask questions. Videos can be watched again and again until it’s clear.
By completing a comprehension task after watching or reading, the teacher will know exactly what the students are struggling with before the start of the lesson. This will save even more time since the teacher doesn’t have to waste time going over concepts the students already understand.
Students get to spend more time in class doing what they enjoy — interacting with their peers and using the new language. After all, depending on where they are in the world, they may not get many chances outside of the class to use the new language.
When looking for an online teacher or school, you should ask if they use a flipped-classroom approach. eSchool does. Contact us to learn more about how we “flip our online classrooms” to create a more enjoyable and effective learning experience.