Tom Clancy, one of our QEP coordinators, is teaching a Literary Forms class this semester. He graciously let us use him as our guinea pig, allowing us to re-vamp his syllabus into a Flipped classroom. This is a relatively new concept to us, but it shows great promise. It is a natural step to support our connectivist teaching philosophy as well as using JiTTs in order to allow students to gain more out of the classroom experience.
We have been pushing writing to learn in the classrooms by utilizing wikis and blogs. However, one of the major roadblocks that I have heard from the teachers is the fact that students don’t actively participate. I have been trying to think of ways to help them encourage student participation. A statement by Keith Hamon, our other coordinator set off the lightbulb in my brain. We have been going about this problem from the wrong end!!
Apparently, in a flipped classroom, you don’t just have the boring text readings done before class, leaving time for class discussion and other interactive activities, you also flip the grading scale!! For example, class participation usually only counts 5 to 10% in a class. If you keep giving JiTT assignments, and assign blog postings and only give this small amount of weight to it, of course the average student isn’t going to take it seriously. What if they were (gasp!) sufficiently motivated to learn? What if class participation was the meat and potatoes of the course, earning 70 - 80% of your grade? That would motivate!
Testing is just a tool to see how well a student can memorize facts. By the time a student takes a test, the lesson has long been over, and it’s often to late to go back over the missed objectives. Is it not more important to see the students progress during class? Monitor their postings to see if they “get it” or not??
I know this sounds radical and revolutionary to most people. In all honesty, as a former high school teacher, I ask myself the same questions the college professors ask about the practicality of it all. At the end of the day, I think it’s doable. It’s just going to take some time to re-train our brains as well as the students’.
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Yes, I love that lightbulb! Our biggest problem is that we have competing concerns: the individual as learner and society as the recipient of the learner's skills. How do we manage credentials and accountability but still re-shape the learning experience into what it should be? I think there is a happy medium somewhere, and I hope we find it. Color me optimistic...
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