'Flipped' instruction turns traditional teaching on its head

The traditional way to teach is have students listen to lectures and then take home assignments to master on their own.

But math teachers at the College Community School District's Prairie Point School are flip-flopping that routine when it comes to teaching algebra. In fact, the technique is actually called the “Flipped Classroom.”

At night, students watch a 10-minute video lecture from their teacher. The next morning, they do their “homework” in class. And as they work through the assignment, the teacher has more time to provide one-on-one help and answer questions.

If you didn't know Megan Olson was teaching a “flipped” class, you probably couldn't tell at first glance. But as the class progresses, she doesn't spend as much time lecturing in front of the whiteboard. She circulates among the students coaching them through homework problems. And students themselves tend to group together to work on problems. That's a development the flipped classroom encourages.

Chaz Fields, an eighth grader at Prairie Point, said it took some getting used to at first.

“I like doing it now because you have more freedom of how you learn it," Fields said. "Because if you don't understand your own teacher all the other teachers have their videos on the website as well. You can watch how a different teacher teaches it.”

Six Prairie Point teachers are instructing about 425 eighth and ninth graders using the flipped class method. Every day after school, each instructor prepares a video lecture on a laptop computer and uploads it to the school website. The students are supposed to watch at home every night.

Teachers say some students like the ability to pause and go back to review the video lecture if they don't understand something the first time. In a regular classroom, constantly stopping the teacher to ask for an explanation can slow things down for everyone.

"For some students, that (video lecture) is even more engaging," math teacher Madison Atwood said. “They can actually pay more attention watching a video versus seeing me up in front of the classroom.”

Olson gave an example of how flipped classrooms now seem normal for algebra instruction at Prairie Point.

“We had one unit where we kind of went backwards for a couple of lessons and we taught traditionally. That's when they appreciated I was doing most of the talking,” she said.

Both Atwood and Olson approached administrators with the idea of trying flipped classrooms. They didn't originate the idea, but saw demonstrations of the program online and decided to try it.

They say a lot of students like the approach and wouldn't want to “flip” back to the traditional way of doing things.