Education Week August 29, 2012 - A Special Report on E-Learning - S7

Schools Open Doors to New E-Learning Rules, Ideas

EDUCATION WEEK AUGUST 29, 2012 > www.edweek.org/go/elearning-rules
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Illustration by Chris Whetzel

curious about the method and hosting conferences on flipping. They recently co-wrote a book called Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day, published in July of 2012 by the International Society for Technology in Education and the ascd. “You need to figure out the answer to the question: What’s the best use of your face-to-face instruction time?” Mr. Bergmann said. After the first year, he and Mr. Sams made adjustments to the flipped classroom, moving from what they call the “traditional” flip to the “mastery based” flipped classroom. In the mastery-based model, students are not required to watch videos at home on a specific day. Instead, they are given an outline for each unit that includes all the resources they might need for each objective, including videos, worksheets, and textbook excerpts. They can then work through the material at their own pace, even taking tests and quizzes and performing labs when they are ready rather than as a whole class. Using technology to create test-question banks that could be randomized, so that no two students receive the same test and may receive completely different questions altogether, made the mastery flipped model possible, said Mr. Bergmann.

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DEB WOLF

You can’t just hand the flipped classroom off to an ineffective teacher and say you’re going to transform the classroom.”

High School Instructional Coach, Sioux Falls, S.D.

‘SELF-PACED BECAME NO PACE’
Deb Wolf, a high school instructional coach for the 24,000-student Sioux Falls district in South Dakota, also uses the mastery technique. Instead of letting students have complete control over their pace, though, she sets deadlines to keep everyone on track. “For students who had not been challenged in the classroom, this was an opportunity for them to just fly,” she said. “For others, it was an opportunity to take the time that they needed to move slower. And

for some, self-paced became no pace,” and teachers had to step in and create deadlines. Ms. Wolf began flipping her chemistry class at Roosevelt High School in the spring of 2008 after hearing about the technique from Mr. Bergmann and Mr. Sams. During the 2008-09 school year, all the chemistry teachers in her school flipped their classrooms, and the next year, the district applied for a federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant, which Ms. Wolf facilitated, that provided professional development for the district’s 35 math and science teachers around technology in the classroom. “Most of them took away from that grant the idea that they could use technology to help provide stu-

dents opportunities to master content in a variety of ways so that time became the variable, … not learning,” she said. “We didn’t have 35 teachers that all suddenly flipped their classrooms, but the take-away was that by harnessing technology, they provided students the opportunity to master what they didn’t master the first time.” Still, engaging reluctant learners continues to be a challenge, said Ms. Wolf. “[Our teachers] realized that we were dragging [such learners] along. They may have been in class, but they weren’t engaged. I know that we weren’t meeting all of their needs in the traditional classroom, and I’m not sure that we were meeting their needs in a flipped classroom either,” she said. Like Mr. Musallam, Ms. Wolf emphasized that flipping is one approach in a wider framework of instructional methods to help reach students. “You can’t just hand the flipped classroom off to an ineffective teacher and say you’re going to transform the classroom,” she said. “It’s not going to make a bad teacher a good teacher.” Students and teachers at the Havana Community Unit School District’s 1,100-student high school in rural central Illinois will try their hands at the flipped technique when the entire school flips this fall. In a district where 65 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, Superintendent Patrick Twomey hopes that flipping the school will help address the inequalities that hamper the high school’s population of students deemed at risk academically. “[In the current model], one student goes home to educated parents who can help him with his homework, while another student goes home and gets no help,” Mr. Twomey said. “In the flipped model, both of those kids come back to the classroom after receiving the content, and now all of the help with the homework is given by the expert in the field.” n

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Education Week August 29, 2012 - A Special Report on E-Learning

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