Flipping with a Jigsaw

Part 1: Why I Flipped

I flipped my Social Psychology course for the first time in the spring 2014 semester. At that point I had been teaching that course for nearly 20 years, with some success. My teaching evaluations had always been at least adequate, the written comments were generally positive, and I enjoyed teaching the class. My approach to the class was fairly typical for a mid-level course: mostly lecture, with some sort of active learning activity in nearly every class meeting. I had revised and crafted many of these activities over the years until I thought they accomplished the goals I had for them. I also enjoyed lecturing, and I even thought some of my lectures flowed with increasing tension, cliffhangers, and surprise endings. But several events conspired to prompt me to radically change my entire approach to the course.

One of those events was attending a session on campus by Dee Fink (http://www.deefinkandassociates.com/). If you get a chance to see him speak, I encourage you to. Perhaps it was a matter of fortuitous timing, but I walked out of that session thinking differently about my teaching and determined to change what I did in the classroom. One of Fink’s most important ideas for me was his emphasis on significantly learning experiences. Up to that point I focused my teaching on trying to force-feed my students the entire content of my courses. Fink got me to think about what I thought the most important outcomes of my teaching were – was it remembering every detail, every concept or theory, every researcher’s name? How would that affect my students a year after taking my class, or 20 years later? He also asked us to remember the most significant classes from our college years. The memories shared by the attendees made it clear that those memorable classes were not typically the ones that resulted in mastery of the most content. Instead they were significant for other reasons; an anecdote that stuck, an instructor that cared about the students, a skill they used to this day. And this was a crowd of faculty, who were typically the better students in class, the ones with all the motivation and ability to do well in the course, and who likely did do well. Still, it was not the content mastery that was most memorable, most significant. It was often not even a class in the attendee’s major, where you might expect the most motivation to engage in the class. Fink challenged us to create courses like this that would be significant learning experiences, memorable years or decades later.

He also asked us to consider what would happen if we had the ideal group of students in class, the most motivated, intelligent, diligent, gritty students we could imagine. What would the outcome be then? What could they accomplish? In then, importantly, do we have the course design to take advantage of that opportunity? Would we change our lectures, our assignments, our expectations? If we would, then how do we know if we made those changes with our actual students they wouldn’t produce the same results as the ideal class? How can we expect passionate and inspiring work from our students if we don’t give them the class design that would allow for it? Why not design our courses for the ideal student and see what happens? This is what having high expectations really looks like.

The other key events were my increasing exposure to flipped instruction and my increased involvement in online instruction. Flipped instruction has been building in popularity in the last ten years, with several books published about it [Bergmann & Sams’ (2012) Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day and Bretzmann’s (2013) Flipping 2.0: Practical Strategies for Flipping Your Class are good choices] and even more websites (http://flippedclassroom.org/) and twitter hashtags (e.g., #flipclass) devoted to flipping. Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/) has also played an important and high-profile role in the rise of flipping. Flipping has been identified by the NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition (http://redarchive.nmc.org/publications/2014-horizon-report-higher-ed) as an important development in education technology. In short, flipping is a hot topic and promising trend in education.

As I will point out below, flipping a class requires instructors to devise a way to deliver content outside of class time. Online teaching has the same requirement, as there is no in-person class time. I had recently developed my Social Psychology course for our new online psychology major, meaning that I had created videos of narrated presentations, essentially my in-class lectures repackaged for an online audience. This took considerable time and effort. It also made the idea of delivering live a presentation that I also had recorded seem like an unnecessary duplication of effort.

So those three events, plus my penchant for trying new things, lead me to undertake the flip.

Next up: The Mechanics of Flipping