As the internet revolution continues to build and increasingly influence everything under the sun, so too it is going to have a massive impact on teaching and learning in K-12 schools. Educators who don’t anticipate this change and work to ride the wave will be subsumed by it, I fear.
Quality instructional delivery for grades 5-12– lecturing, skill training, and modeling– is especially vulnerable in our schools. Increasingly on-line delivery is not just equal but superior, and often enormously less expensive, than what happens in our buildings.
To deliver true value in this environment demands we invert the norm, and one of the best developing models for this is called, I have learned recently, “reverse instruction.” I believe I first heard the concept described at length at the NAIS Annual Conference last winter, when, if I recall correctly, a co-author of Disrupting Class, the excellent innovative educator Michael B. Horn, spoke about it.
I first learned of the term, reverse instruction, right here at Connected Principals, in a comment John Sowash provided on my blog post about Khan Academy. (I appreciate John’s teaching me greatly, and I am so happy the way Connected Principals is providing me so much learning!) John then went on, after his comment on my post, to write a very fine piece on Reverse instruction on his own blog.
If kids can get the lectures, can get the content delivery and skill modeling as well (or often better) by computer lecture than in person, why do we have use precious class-time for this purpose? Why do we, in the status quo, replicate in person in our classrooms what is easily available elsewhere, the content delivery/skill modeling, and then have kids apply their learning to difficult problems at home, without us there to help?
Increasingly, education’s value-add is and will be in the coaching and troubleshooting when students are applying their learning, and in challenging students to apply their thinking to hands-on learning by doing and teaming: so let’s have them do these things in class, not sit and listen. We know that collaboration is a critical skill set which can’t be developed easily either on-line or at home alone– let’s have students learn it with us in our classrooms. Let every classroom be a collaborative problem solving laboratory or studio.
Dan Pink has recently also “discovered” this technique, and written about in a (not excellent) article in the Daily Telegraph: Flip Thinking. Pink is writing about the exciting innovation in this teaching style by the excellent ed/tech blogger, Karl Fisch.
instead of lecturing about polynomials and exponents during class time – and then giving his young charges 30 problems to work on at home – Fisch has flipped the sequence. He’s recorded his lectures on video and uploaded them to YouTube for his 28 students to watch at home. Then, in class, he works with students as they solve problems and experiment with the concepts. Lectures at night, “homework” during the day. Call it the Fisch Flip.
“When you do a standard lecture in class, and then the students go home to do the problems, some of them are lost. They spend a whole lot of time being frustrated and, even worse, doing it wrong,” Fisch told me.
“The idea behind the videos was to flip it. The students can watch it outside of class, pause it, replay it, view it several times, even mute me if they want,” says Fisch, who emphasises that he didn’t come up with the idea, nor is he the only teacher in the country giving it a try. “That allows us to work on what we used to do as homework when I’m they’re to help students and they’re there to help each other.”
When he puts it like that, you want to slap your forehead at the idea’s inexorable logic. You wonder why more schools aren’t doing it this way.
As Pink and Fisch point out, Fisch is not the originator of this concept, and others deserve important credit. If you are interested, be sure to read the comments at the bottom of the article.
Our Webpage: http://educationalvodcasting.com/
Our NING: http://vodcasting.ning.com/
Article About us: http://thejournal.com/Articles/2009/08/09/Vodcasting.aspx?Page=1
Video about us (news station): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1962958416930816240&ei=27elSrfHIILIqQLq_N3uBA&q=woodland+park+podcasting#
Self Made Video for our Students:http://chempodcasts.mindbites.com/lesson/5093-chemistry-1-a-introduction-to-chemistry
John Sowash’s piece, referenced above, has a “lessons learned” discussion is worth its weight in gold as teachers begin to experiment with this technique. I will just quote a couple of them, but read the whole post:
- Hold students accountable to the lectures. I did a credit/no credit lecture notes check at the beginning of each class period to ensure that students were actually viewing the lectures. Another idea (which I haven’t tried yet) is including a secret word or number somewhere in the lecture and asking students to write it down in class the following day. They only way to find out what the number/word is, is to watch/listen to the lecture.
- Use Google Docs! If you’re like me, you are always updating, tweaking, and improving your lectures and presentations. Making sure that the most updated copy is available for students can become a nightmare. If you use Google Docs to share all of your presentations and handouts, when you make a change, all of the public copies are automatically updated throughout the web. What a time saver!
- Now that you’ve freed up class time, you need to use it productively. This can be a challenge. You’ve spent all of your time and energy developing your lectures and now you don’t have the time/energy to develop new, innovative, interactive classroom activities. This is where I need to improve. It takes a while!
Adam Taylor is another teacher working on this practice of reverse learning, and has a nice post about his adventures with it: The Revolution of Reverse Learning.
So when students walked into my biology and honors biology class last week I told them they would be watching the lecture at home online. “So I have to be bored at home” one said. “Yep” I responded, “but it is only for 15 min.”
This process allows students to get a basic understanding of a concept, come to class, and use the information with hands-on activities, and projects.
At my own school, some of our fine teachers are venturing forth. Our Chemistry teacher has posted all his lectures as podcasts to his website, and he is having his students begin to shift to taking his lesson delivery that way, freeing up more time for experimentation. One of our math teachers is experimenting with this in both calculus and pre-calc. I intend to write up more about their experiments, experiences, and lessons learned in the months to come.
Take the plunge, do the flip, and reposition learning in your school in a way that will continue to offer real value as the on-line learning revolution unfolds.