In 1991, Harvard professor Eric Mazur was trying to find a better way to teach his students physics. He was often unable to explain things to his students because he possessed such a mastery of the material that he couldn’t understand where and how students were misinterpreting it. Eric realized that other students who had a stronger grasp of the material could help those struggling students because they better understood what they were thinking. Eric soon came to believe that the time spent lecturing his students would be better spent in peer discussion. He changed his entire teaching model: his students would read the material before coming to class and they would spend their class time reviewing concepts they didn’t grasp with peers and doing practice problems to solidify their knowledge. What Eric named Peer Review was one of the first modern models of what is now known as “flipped learning.”
In typical classrooms, children are (A) bored because they grasped the information quickly and have to sit through the teacher reviewing it, (B) learning the information at the same speed the teacher teaches it—what school systems hope for—or (C) falling behind because the teacher is moving too fast. I have been in each of those situations more than once, as I’m sure many people have also been. In this normal teaching style, students are taught the material at a pace that satisfies the courses’ time requirement, not the learning needs of the individual students. If a student doesn’t understand the concepts by the end of class, he must then complete the homework, a more difficult test of the conceptual knowledge which he does yet understand, all on his own. Is the educational environment we want our children to be raised in?
The future of education is constantly discussed, but what do we have to show for it? Is the future just high-tech gadgets, or should we change the way students learn. I believe that flipped learning is the future of education. It offers the students the opportunity to view the material as many times as they need to understand it; they can skip ahead or go at a slower pace until they get it. If they still don’t comprehend it, they have the entire next day of class to receive help from classmates who did understand it or the teacher. And this is just with books—technology can truly revolutionize the way children learn and are taught. In fact, it's happening now.
The Khan Academy is a website created for students and educators. It has over 3,000 videos offering lectures in subjects from advanced physics to 3rd-grade math. But for mathematics, the subject for which Khan Academy was initially created, it is so much more than just a lecture library. Khan Academy prompts quizzes after every mathematical concept taught. Students must get 10 problems on a certain topic correct before they can advance to the next. To measure students’ progress, Khan Academy has a teacher interface designed for teachers: teachers can view the individual quizzes students take and see which concepts they’re struggling on, at what point in time they completed different benchmarks, and more individualized information. This allows the teacher to come to a student knowing exactly what they’re struggling with.
Khan academy has taken education to a personal level and children and educators love it; kids are talking about math in the hallways and they’re excited to go home and do work. And teachers won't lose jobs over this new type of learning. As the embedded video shows, the teacher is still essential; their method of teaching just changes from static to dynamic. Getting kids involved in programs like these could eliminate the kids who just assume they’re “bad at school.” The personalized learning will allow a much higher percentage of students to understand the material; students will learn the material better, and more importantly, gain confidence in their abilities. Adopting a flipped learning model is so simple, too--the professors wouldn't have to do much differently and they already possess the materials to make it happen. It is important to note, however, that the flipped learning approach doesn’t apply to every class model, nor should it be a substitute for all types of learning; it applies best to lecture-based classes where the teacher is writing equations on a board or going through a powerpoint for students to copy down.
Though some college classes are starting to be taught with a flipped model in mind, many still aren’t. Worse yet, almost no classes in levels of lower education are taught this way. Why is this? Flipped learning is of course a new concept, so it’s possible many just do not know about it (I didn’t until recently). But there’s a bigger reason: society is hesitant to change the status quo. When it comes to something as precious as our children, why change what has been working for ages? There is always a risk in change, that is true. But change consistently occurs because the potential results are too great to pass up. In schools, every effort should be given to nest learning at the core of students’ interests. We don’t want to wait for those who change the world, we want to shape them.
