Flipped Learning for Social Studies Instruction

Jonathan Bergmann, Aaron Sams

• Publisher: International Society for Technology in Education
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781564845238
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Standards

From the authors of the bestselling Flip Your Classroom, this book shows educators how to successfully apply the flipped classroom model in social studies 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 social studies 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 flip interactive social studies simulations

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

Chapter 1

why you should flip your class

FLIPPED LEARNING has a deep impact on the professional lives of teachers, but more important, flipped learning positively affects the lives of students. A good example is Dan Jones, a middle school social studies teacher in Ohio, who started flipping his classes a year ago. Dan started out primarily lecturing in his classes, but became frustrated after his first year when his students failed to respond. Feeling his passion for teaching slipping away, he eventually got to the point where he actually hated being a teacher. Dan realized he had to either find a different way to teach or find a different job. He shared his concerns with his administration, who encouraged him to explore different teaching methods. After discovering flipped learning, Dan decided to flip all of his classes. At first, Dan’s students struggled with the flipped class concept. In fact, it took him 17 weeks to transition his students from being “spoon-fed” passive learners to becoming more involved in their own learning. Once students made that paradigm shift, Dan started seeing immediate improvement in their learning. Students went on to score 15% higher on state tests just one year later.

Dan uses project-based learning as a major component of his classes, and he says students are now diving into the content at a depth he never could have imagined. Flipped learning also allows him to work directly with students, which is why he got into teaching in the first place. Dan can now focus on his students and be more creative in planning for his classes. Although flipping his classroom has been a challenge at times—particularly with some of his students’ limited access to technology at home—Dan is now a believer and has actively started to promote flipping with others.

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 of 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 in class.

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 typical class, you cannot pause your teacher.

There are many other benefits, which we have chronicled in our previous books. Recognizing those benefits, the focus of this book is to give social studies 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 this valuable time with students best used for dissemination of information, or for 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 social studies 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 continue 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 (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. We will share how these strategies work, specifically in a social studies 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 students, yourself, and parents

Flipping Your Thinking

Flipping your thinking as a social studies 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 to be 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. So, 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 by simply accessing a device they most likely have in their pocket.

In light of this change, we must rethink how we teach our students. Consider any topic you might teach—battlefield techniques of the U.S. Civil War, political activism of Western Europe, or the economic impact of river traffic on the Nile. 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 have an oversupply of information?

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 flipped learning as a pedagogical solution with an underlying technological component.

What, then, are the technological tools you need to master to flip your social studies 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 level with technology?

There are a whole host of technological tools available. Some are limited in features and are easy to use, whereas others are more complicated and offer more powerful features that add to the production value of your produced content. We understand that not all teachers are tech experts, so the tool you might use has a high degree of variability. We do see a few categories of technological tools that teachers must master to flip a class effectively, but before we discuss them, we should address a key question.

Who Should Make the Videos?

Should you make the flipped videos when there are already videos on every conceivable topic on YouTube? There is no question that anything you teach has probably been posted, but we believe that one of the hallmarks of a successful flipped classroom is the use of videos created by the teacher or a team of teachers at the local school. When we visit struggling flipped classrooms, we often see that the teacher is simply assigning video content created either commercially or by teachers outside their immediate network, rather than making their own. Conversely, when we walk into successful flipped classrooms, we usually find that the teacher is the video creator. We think the reason teacher-created videos are more successful is because they involve one of the fundamental features of good teaching: relationships with kids who know you! You are their teacher. Some random person on the internet is not as familiar. Students see your investment in them through the content you provide. They recognize that someone who has direct involvement in their lives created custom content for them.

Video Creation Tools

As of the writing of this book (bearing in mind that technology tools are always in flux), we continually observe five categories of video creation tools teachers are using to create flipped class videos: video cameras...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About ISTE
• About the Authors
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Why You Should Flip Your Class
• Chapter 2: Flipped Class 101
• Chapter 3: Planning for the Flipped Classroom
• Chapter 4: Traditional Resources and Choice in Flipped Learning
• Chapter 5: Rethinking Class Time
• Chapter 6: Flipping with Interactive Social Studies Simulations
• Chapter 7: Mastery Learning in the Flipped Classroom
• Chapter 8: Inquiry and Flipped Learning
• Chapter 9: Projects
• Chapter 10: Conclusion
• References