Flipped Learning for English Instruction

Jonathan Bergmann, Aaron Sams

• Publisher: International Society for Technology in Education
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781564845214
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungsstandards

From the authors of the bestselling Flip Your Classroom, this book shows educators how to successfully apply the flipped classroom model in English classrooms. Following up on their landmark book, flipped education innovators Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams return with a book series that supports flipped learning in the four topic areas of science, math, English and social studies, as well as the elementary classroom. This book is a practical guide for English teachers interested in flipping their classrooms.Each chapter offers practical guidance on:

• How to approach lesson planning
• What to do with class time
• How to employ project-based learning techniques

Flipped Learning for English Instruction helps English teachers deal with the realities of teaching in an increasingly interconnected and digital world. This book serves as a guide for English teachers who are beginning to flip their classes, or are interested in exploring the flipped model for the first time. Audience: K-12 language arts teachers

Chapter 1

why you should flip your class

FLIPPED LEARNING has a deep impact on the professional lives of teachers, but more importantly, flipped learning positively affects the lives of students. The experiences that teachers Cheryl Morris and Andrew Thomasson shared with us are good examples.

Andrew Thomasson, a high school English teacher in North Carolina, was on the verge of burning out. Even though he believes he was a good lecturer at the time, Andrew was struggling as a teacher. After first being introduced to flipping through a video he found online in 2011, he continued to learn from others about flipping by later attending the annual flipped learning conference, FlipCon 2012. He also got involved in a professional learning community on Twitter that uses the hashtag #flipclass, a group that meets virtually on Monday nights. Through the support, motivation, and new ideas of his newfound flipped community, Andrew flipped his own classes and reinvigorated his teaching career. By engaging his students in active learning and giving them immediate feedback, Andrew now fosters a more challenging and accountable classroom environment that changes students’ mindsets from “point earners to learners.”

At FlipCon 2012, Andrew met Cheryl Morris, a high school English teacher in California, who would eventually become his collaborative partner in flipping. Cheryl first heard about flipping when her school district showed a video featuring Aaron, called “Putting Students at the Center” (TechSmith, n.d.). That video got her thinking about how the concept of flipped learning might work in her classroom. Once she received a district-issued iPad, Cheryl started making her own videos. Initially, her students struggled to apply the concepts that they learned. When Cheryl started flipping her class, she was able to give her students the proper starting points they needed. In addition, the increased class time flipping provided enabled Cheryl to better help her students take ownership of their own learning.

Before flipping, Cheryl had always approached teaching as an individual pursuit, even though she is naturally collaborative. For her, flipping has opened up avenues of connection and the sharing of ideas with other flipped classroom teachers. Cheryl has also found the #flipclass group on Twitter especially helpful for learning more about flipping from her peers. After she met Andrew at FlipCon 2012, the pair started to share resources and develop content together, which eventually led to many opportunities to teach students as a team and present professional development workshops to help other teachers improve their flipped classes.

Flipped Class 101

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

—LEONARDO DA VINCI

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most profound. Think back to BlackBerry phones with their many buttons. Everybody wanted one, until Steve Jobs at Apple told his design team to create a phone with one button. As they say, the rest is history. The flipped class technique is a simple idea at its core, based on these two steps:

•   Move the direct instruction (often called the lecture) away from the group space. This usually means that students watch and interact with an instructional video (flipped video) prior to coming to class.

•   Engage in various types of activities that allow students to practice learned concepts and use higher-order thinking.

We call this simple time shift Flipped Class 101, which reflects what people popularly refer to as a flipped classroom. Flip the homework with the direct instruction, and you have a flipped class. This simple time shift has significant benefits, such as the following:

•   In a typical classroom, students often go home with difficult homework. They do this work independently and have little or no help. Some are successful, but many are not. In a flipped class, students do the difficult tasks in class in the presence of an expert, the teacher.

•   Because the presentation of content is removed from class time, there is more time for teachers to interact and help students.

•   Students can pause and rewind a video. In a traditional lecture class, students cannot pause their teacher.

There are many other benefits, described in our previous books. Recognizing those benefits, the focus of this book is to give ELA teachers practical strategies to help them reach students using the flipped model.

The One Question

Another way to think about the simplicity of the flipped classroom model is to boil it down to one simple question: What is the best use of your face-to-face class time? Is the best use of the valuable time with students dissemination of information, or is it something else? In a flipped classroom setting, the direct instruction is offloaded to the individual space and the class time is used for something else. In ELA classes, this “something else” is more hands-on activities, more inquiry, more projects, and more guided time with the teacher.

When we flipped our classes, our students performed significantly better on our unit exams, enabling us to do 50% more hands-on activities (Bergmann & Sams, 2012). What started as an experiment to help meet the needs of our students became a new technique that radically changed our classrooms and the classrooms of many other teachers.

Given that we experienced success with this model, you would expect that we would have continued to use it. However, after the first year of the flipped class, we didn’t simply repeat the previous year—we reinvented our class again, adding mastery learning to our repertoire. Based on the work of Benjamin Bloom (1968), the flipped-mastery model is an asynchronous approach in which students demonstrate mastery of content before moving on to new topics. Each student moves at a flexible pace, which allows advanced students to get the challenges they need and provides extra support for struggling students.

Beyond the Flipped Class

Why do we call it Flipped Class 101? Though we believe the flipped class is a viable method, with benefits over more traditional forms of instruction, we believe you can take the flipped class to the next level. We see teachers flip their classrooms for one or two years and then move to deeper learning strategies, such as flipped-mastery, or a more inquiry or project-based model. We do not categorize these as a flipped classroom, but as flipped learning. Flipped learning is the second iteration of the flipped classroom, where teachers move beyond the basic Flipped Class 101 model to more content-rich, inquiry-driven, and project-based classes. We document this transformation completely in our book Flipped Learning: Gateway to Student Engagement. Additionally, we will share how these strategies work, specifically in an ELA class, toward the end of this book. For now, let’s explore Flipped Class 101 a little more deeply.

Chapter 2

flipped class 101

THOUGH THE FLIPPED CLASSROOM MODEL is a simple idea, it can be complex for teachers to implement. Simply telling students to watch a video and then come to class to learn more deeply sounds good, but what if students do not watch the video? What if students do not have access to technology at home? What is a teacher to do then?

There are four major hurdles to flipping that you need to overcome. These are:

• Flipping your thinking

• Technological barriers

• Finding the time

• Training yourself, students, and parents

Flipping Your Thinking

Flipping your thinking as an ELA teacher may be the most important hurdle to overcome. Why is this a big hurdle? Perhaps it is because many of us have been “doing school” the same way for many years and find change difficult.

Jon spent 19 years as a lecture/discussion teacher. He knew very well how to teach that way. In fact, he reached the point where if you told him the topic of the day, he could probably start teaching that topic without any notes, simply from his years of experience. In 2007, when we decided to begin using video as our primary means of direct instruction, Jon was the hesitant one. He didn’t want to give up lecture time. He was a good lecturer (or at least he thought he was). He liked being the center of attention and enjoyed engaging a whole group of students in instruction. His class was well structured, and he liked being in control of all that was happening. But when he flipped his class, he had to surrender control of the learning to the students. That was not easy, but it was the best thing he ever did in his teaching career.

Anyone born before the 1990s grew up in an information-scarce world. We had to search through card catalogs and microfiche to access information. Information was localized at the schoolhouses, in textbooks and libraries, and in the heads of our teachers. Today, students can access virtually any information, simply by accessing a device they most likely have in their pocket.

In light of this change, we must rethink how we teach our students. When talking to ELA teachers, we find that most of them primarily use video for content delivery (such as vocabulary and grammar) and for skill building. Consider any topic you currently teach—for example, diagramming sentences, understanding literary techniques, writing expository essays, or delivering an effective speech. A quick search of YouTube reveals a myriad of videos available to explain these concepts. So the bigger question is this: How do we teach when our students already have access to an enormous amount of information? In this information-saturated world, the better question is: How do we teach them to filter and discern valuable information?

Stacy Dawes, an English teacher at a Title 1 high school in New York, has adapted Cornell Notes with the “Notice and Focus” analytical method from Writing Analytically (Rosenwasser & Stephen, 2014) to slow students down while evaluating source material. Stacy observed that students often draw quick conclusions, make snap judgments, and fail to properly collect and understand how to view data. To teach them, Stacy has her students analyze a picture or a written work. She blends Cornell Notes with an inquiry-based approach having her students begin by listing notes, details, data, and information without making conclusions or judgments. Students then analyze that information and search for patterns of repetition, binaries, and anomalies, counting and ranking the instances of each. The final part of the assignment answers the formulaic statement, “This could be about X, but it could be about Y,” which are the summaries and conclusions students draw from the data. This exercise forces students to slow down, gather, and analyze before drawing conclusions or making claims.

Stacy asserts that her job is to help students become “problem solvers, not excuse makers.” For other flipped assignments, she has students watch a short video she has created or curated for the introductory material and resources. She encourages teachers to do more than teach to the test when she says, “Get rid of the carrot and the stick and make self-sufficient learners with intrinsic motivation.”

Technological Barriers of the Flipped Classroom

Many educators have pigeonholed the flipped class model as a technological solution to education. Much of the buzz about flipping has to do with using video as an instructional tool, which does involve a technological component. However, we disagree with those who see flipped learning as a technology-based educational practice. We see it as a pedagogical solution with an underlying technological component.

What, then, are the technological tools you need to master to flip your English language arts class? Teachers often ask us, “What is the best tool to flip my class?” To this question we respond, “It is the one you will actually use.” Our answer has a lot to do with you and your skills and needs. What type of a computer do you have? Do you have tablets? Do your students have devices? What is your comfort leve...