Flipped Learning for Elementary Instruction

Jonathan Bergmann, Aaron Sams

• Publisher: International Society for Technology in Education
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781564845191
• 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 elementary 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 elementary 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 Elementary Instruction helps elementary teachers deal with the realities of teaching in an increasingly interconnected and digital world. This book serves as a guide for elementary teachers who are beginning to flip their classes, or are interested in exploring the flipped model for the first time. Audience: K-5 classroom 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. Such is the case for Matt Burns, a fifth grade teacher in Australia. Two years ago, Matt wondered how he could leverage the power of technology to improve his teaching, including the technological devices his students brought to school, as well as the vast resources available on the internet. He realized that if he could record his lessons, his students could access them at their own pace and convenience. After sharing this with his supervisor, Matt was introduced to our book, Flip Your Classroom, which he eagerly consumed in two hours.

With these new ideas he turned his attention to his own teaching. After discovering his classroom was equipped with a screencasting device on his interactive whiteboard, Matt created a few math screencasts for his students, also incorporating videos others had created. He showed his students how to access the math videos, and sent slips of paper home with them instructing them which videos to watch each night.

Although his efforts were proving successful, his principal pushed Matt to further explore flipping his classes. Matt started to differentiate his math instruction based on a pretest by directing students to the appropriate videos based on their unique math abilities. Over time, he also started flipping his science, English, and history classes, and has incorporated more advanced flipping strategies, like In-Flip, project-based learning (PBL), and flipped-mastery (all concepts described in later chapters). Matt has continued to create flipped videos and now has a 130-video repository at his disposal. These days Matt flips everything he can, claiming he could never go back to conventional ways of teaching.

Matt’s students are earning better grades as a result of the flipped classes. They are also growing socially with the increase in classroom discussion and opportunities to meet individually with him. His school’s administrators recognized this success and asked Matt to present his flipped class methods to his peers throughout the entire school district. Two high school math teachers jumped on board right away. The elementary school teachers were slower to respond initially, but over time, he has seen increasing number of them starting to flip their classes.

This year, Matt has been assigned to be a K–12 flipped trainer in his district, explaining the benefits of flipping and teaching others how to do it. Matt believes the fear of losing control of the classroom is the primary reason teachers choose not to flip their classes. We understand this fear, but hope the teacher stories we share in this book will alleviate any fears you might have.

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.

We call this basic 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, like 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 the classroom, 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, which we have described in our previous books. In recognition of those benefits, the focus of this book is to give elementary 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 this valuable time with students the 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.

The flipped classroom also helps the teacher deliver content consistently, and to all students. As you know, this can be a challenge in the elementary classroom, as students are frequently pulled out of class for a variety of reasons. With students leaving class for individual education programs, band, orchestra, individual assistance, or many other reasons, there can be times when only a few students remain in class. Shifting the delivery of the lesson’s content helps protect against students missing important information, and saves the teacher time in helping those students catch up.

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 (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 that has advantages 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 they move to deeper learning strategies, such as flipped-mastery, or a more 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 completely document this transformation in our book Flipped Learning: Gateway to Student Engagement (Bergmann & Sams, 2014). In this book, we will share how these strategies work, specifically in the elementary classroom. For now, let’s explore Flipped Class 101 a little more deeply.

Chapter 2

implementing flipped class 101

THOUGH THE FLIPPED CLASSROOM MODEL is a simple idea, it can be complex for teachers to implement. It sounds good to simply tell students to watch a video and then come to class to learn more deeply, 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, Parents, and Yourself

Flipping Your Thinking

Flipping your thinking 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. That was a way he knew very well how to teach. 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 his lecture time, as he was a good lecturer (or at least he thought he was).

He liked being the center of attention, and enjoyed engaging in instruction a whole group of students. In his well-structured class, he liked being in control of all that was happening. When he flipped his class, he had to surrender control of the learning to his students. That was not easy, but it was the best thing he ever did in his entire teaching career.

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

In light of this change, we must rethink how we teach our students. Consider any topic you currently teach, such as math multiplication, using a compass and protractor, creative writing, state history, or identifying the bones in the body. A quick search of YouTube reveals an array 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 this valuable information?

Angela Boratko, a sixth and seventh grade math teacher in Connecticut, stated that both her students and their parents urged her to use a flipped curriculum. She adopted flipped learning to help meet those demands and to foster a better learning environment, stating, “Teaching my kids how to learn is more important than teaching them content.” According to Angela, the flipped model works well with the culture of today’s young students, as they look to the internet for most of their resources. Because of this, they are very comfortable going online for her video lectures. In fact, it is so natural that she knows that students in other classes seek out her videos. As a result of flipping her classroom, Angela says, her students learn more content than ever before.

Technological Barriers of the Flipped Classroom

In addition to his teaching career, Jon also worked as a lead technology facilitator at an elementary school. He and Aaron know that many educators have pigeonholed the flipped class model as only a technological solution to education. Much of the buzz about flipping has to do with using video as an instructional tool, which admittedly 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 elementary classroom? 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?

We know that there are a whole host of technological tools available for the elementary school teacher. Some are limited in features and are easy to use, while 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 technology 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 online videos on every conceivable topic? Without question, anything you teach has probably already 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 by 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 between kids and their teacher! Some random person on the internet is not as familiar. Students recognize your investment in them through the content you provide. They see that someone who has direct involvement in their lives created custom content for them.

Despite the distinct advantages of using teacher-created videos, it is not absolutely critical to create your own videos to flip your classroom. If this is your first foray into flipping, or you don’t have the time or technological skills to make a video, you should feel free to use videos other teachers and content experts have made. Although we know students really respond to the unique videos made specifically for them, we have met elementary school teachers who effectively use other videos, either as the primary source or as a supplement to their own.

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, document cameras, screencasting programs, tablet apps, and smart pens.

Video cameras. The easiest tool for most teachers to use is the c...