Flipped Learning for Science Instruction

Jonathan Bergmann, Aaron Sams

• Publisher: International Society for Technology in Education
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781564845276
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Normas de la educación

From the authors of the bestselling Flip Your Classroom, this book shows educators how to successfully apply the flipped classroom model in science 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 science teachers interested in flipping their classrooms.Each chapter offers practical guidance on:

• How to approach lesson planning
• What to do with class and lab time
• How the flipped model can work alongside learning through inquiry and project-based techniques

Flipped Learning for Science Instruction helps science teachers deal with the realities of teaching in an increasingly interconnected and digital world. This book serves as a guide for science teachers who are beginning to flip their classes, or are interested in exploring the flipped model for the first time. Audience: K-12 science 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. The following is a true story about one of our former students.

Alyssa was a bright and energetic young person who didn—t perform particularly well in school. She was her own person. She would frequently change her hair color to match her mood. Alyssa was a free spirit and a bit awkward. She didn—t fit the mold as a typical student either socially or academically. She had not earned great grades. They were not bad, but they were not great. Alyssa was extremely bright, but she was not a student who played the game of school very well. School didn—t seem relevant to her, and she often wondered why she was there. To some degree, she resented her teachers for constantly pressing her to simply get things done. Ultimately, she wanted more control of her learning. However, her lack of effort had taken its toll. Because she resented school, she had missed some key points in her learning and had some significant gaps. Her math background was weak, and she was a little bit behind other students with similar academic abilities.

We have all had students like Alyssa who don—t like to play the game that school often is, and other students who are behind for a variety of other reasons. How can we reach students like Alyssa, provide for their needs, and create a place where the Alyssas of the world will engage and fulfill their potential?

Alyssa was one of the first students to learn in Jon’s flipped-mastery chemistry course. She stepped into a world where she had more control of her learning, could get the extra support she needed to help with her deficiencies, and could create better relationships and connections with her peers and her teacher. That first year Alyssa realized that she did not have to simply sit and listen to Jon. She could actively engage him in conversation one-on-one, get help in areas she struggled in, and discover a passion for science she never knew she had.

Toward the end of the year, she asked Jon if she should take Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry. Jon, knowing that AP Chemistry would be a huge stretch for her, encouraged her to do it. Because AP Chemistry was also a flipped course, he realized she would have more support to help her. The following year she was in Aaron’s AP Chemistry course, and it was in that class that Alyssa came into her own as a learner and as a scientist. She realized she had what it took to be something great. Her mother approached Jon and thanked us for creating a spark in her daughter that gave her courage to succeed in something she would have never thought possible. Because Alyssa had started high school behind, she really struggled with AP Chemistry. That summer she got her score, and she had earned a 1 out of a possible 5. Not very good, but something had awakened in Alyssa.

During her senior year, she approached Aaron to ask if she could continue to work in chemistry. She did a senior independent research project where she created a fuel cell powered by the sun that charged a mobile device. Through this project, she learned a great deal of the material she hadn—t learned during her previous two years in chemistry.

The story gets better. Alyssa applied and was accepted to the Colorado School of Mines and ended up pursuing a degree in mining engineering, graduating in the spring of 2015. Alyssa attributes much of her success to learning in a flipped classroom, and the greatest share of that success she attributes to the relationships she established with teachers and the support they provided on her journey from struggling student to engineer. Our hope is that this book will help science teachers reach students like Alyssa who need more autonomy and more control over their learning. We also hope this book will help science teachers reach not only students like Alyssa, but all of their students, by awakening each of them to the possibilities that lie ahead.

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. And, as they say, the rest is history. The flipped class technique at its core is a simple idea, 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) before coming to class.

•  Repurpose class time that you freed up from direct instruction and use it to practice learned concepts, engaging activities, and higher order thinking.

We call this simple time-shift Flipped Class 101, and this 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 with an expert present, 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, mentioned earlier. The focus of this book is to give science 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 content 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 science classes, this “something else” is more hands-on lab time, more inquiry, more projects, and more guided practice time with the teacher present.

We began pioneering this instructional model in 2006 for our Chemistry, AP Chemistry, and Earth & Space classes. At first, our simplistic answer to the question about best use of face-to-face time was that we wanted our students to have more time to get help on their assignments from us and for our students to conduct more experiments. When we flipped our science classes, our students performed significantly better on our unit exams, and we were able to do 50% more labs (Bergmann & Sams, 2014). 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 and added 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 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 students who struggle. The next year we began to bring in more inquiry, especially using Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL, http://pogil.org). The point is that we kept iterating and changing to improve our class and move beyond the flipped classroom.

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 feel you can take the flipped class to the next level. We see teachers flip their classrooms for one to two years and then move to deeper learning strategies such as flipped-mastery, or a more inquiry- or project-based model. These we categorize not as flipped classrooms, 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, project-based classes. We chronicle this transformation thoroughly in our book Flipped Learning: Gateway to Student Engagement. We will share how these strategies work specifically in a science class toward the end of this book.

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 a science 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 how to teach that way...