<p>I think this sounds great. I know that I, who loves to learn pretty much anything, was bored senseless in science classes. Biology seemed like just memorization of different arbitrary classification / taxonomy schemes, and chemistry was spent on the periodic table. It left me not caring to learn any more and forgetting whatever I did learn. I would have loved this kind of approach. Thoughts?</p>
<p>D and I were talking about her classes this quarter, and she said, very casually, that one of her classes, was a “flipped classroom”. She is a sophomore, and was taking a introductory engineering class. She did well, understood the material, and viewed it as no big deal. She had material to read before class, then they did problems during class, and worked on the problems in the programming language they were learning. I know it is a big change for professors, but I was very pleased they were using this approach.</p>
<p>it’s another fad that will pass. It doesn’t matter how it is taught there is no getting around that lower division STEM courses are strictly curved, unlike nearly every other course offered in college. It’s those C’s (and worse) that cause folks to drop STEM majors.</p>
<p>Besides the curve, such a course is probably not-ecnomical.</p>
<p>btw; I happened to search for the Davis Prof who is featured, and the one thing that struck me in her reviews is that every student said that they had to learn the material themselves. Perhaps not a bad thing, but what’s the use of a Prof if I have to study self-prep the material and be ready for Socratic-like discussion the next day with TA’s? If I don’t understand the material, and then get cold-called the next day, I’ll be embarrassed and…hmmmmm</p>
<p>They doing the “flipped” classes for some of Georgia Techs engineering classes. From what I’ve read on Reddit the kids do not like it. </p>
<p>I’ve experimented with flipping classes. Kids want it both ways–they like doing problems in class instead of at home, but don’t like having to do reading/watch videos at home in lieu of in-school lectures. Simply put, they do not like working outside of school be it reading/studying, or doing problems. </p>
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<p>To me, that’s a motivation problem and not a problem with your teaching style. If someone wants to learn something, they’ll put in the work – whether it’s reading outside of class or doing problems or whatever. If they don’t, then they won’t – it doesn’t matter what the professor’s expectation is, they just won’t do it because they don’t care enough about the work.</p>
<p>It’s obviously impractical to cover all of the material in your average class session (I feel safe betting that if you proposed no homework of any kind in exchange for having five-hour sessions three times a week they wouldn’t like that either). Even if you could cram in all of the material, people who had trouble following it might need to read on their own, meet with the professor outside of class to ask questions, and practice in some way to keep up with everyone else. There’s just no way around that for everyone no matter how the classes are structured.</p>
<p>I don’t think that this approach is bad, it’s just that if the students don’t want to cooperate with it, or the professors don’t want to use it, it won’t work. That’s the same with basically any system – if the people it’s made for don’t use it, then it’s useless. </p>
<p>I like the interactive approach better too. Turns out, a hour of lecture is just not a good way for people to learn. Almost everyone, including good students, zones out after about ten minutes. They might continue to take notes, but the material is not going into their brains.</p>
<p>Learning is an active procedure, not a passive procedure. That’s why I like the interactive classes that force students to think and problem-solve, because that’s the way they’ll make the connections in their brain that are the essence of learning.</p>
<p>Anything that makes the student learn the material, outside of class, helps improve performance. Giving them more quizzes, test and homework, will help force them to put in the time, each week, to study (and to form study groups). You can’t learn this stuff from an hour lecture, you have to grind. </p>
<p>“Flipped Classrooms” are the sexy hook for the NYT article, but what really is impacting performance is finding ways to get the student to put in the time, outside of the classroom, to study and learn. </p>
<p>My daughter’s school did some flipped classes in math - they were not successful and they switched back. Reading something before class is fine - having to teach yourself the material before class is not.<br>
Her really good math teachers manage to teach material and cover problems in the time allocated.</p>
<p>It doesn’t sound possible to make science more interesting than it already is.</p>
<p>kids are born scientists.
My experience has been that as long as they are allowed to experiment and discover the world around them and explore the way materials interact, they will continue to build on that knowledge.
If you do a search for Teacher Tom blog, you will see budding engineers, in a preschool.
I’m assuming students have had at LEAST bio, chem and physics in high school, so not sure why they don’t already have the background for interesting science courses in college.</p>
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A lot of my students have barely had anything relevant in HS. Their math skills are non-existent. They are lost from the outset. On top of that, there are always those who will do anything they can to thwart the efforts of the professoriate to get them to do something. Anything. </p>
<p>I’ve looked at the idea of “flipping” a classroom and I can tell you exactly how that would go: a large percentage of the students would not read or watch the assignments prior to the lecture. They would come to class and be vegetables, copying whatever those few who were working produced and turning it in. In all likelihood, some of them would make it through the semester without ever hearing, reading, or seeing a single concept. </p>
<p>An idea like this is more likely to work at a place where the bulk of the students were well-prepared and motivated students. But in that place, pretty much any approach works to greater extent.</p>
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<p>In other words, students aren’t learning from traditional lectures. </p>
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<p>I don’t see how this system is worse for lazy students who don’t do their homework. Sounds like the students who don’t do the homework before the class end up failing the class. But students who don’t do the homework will always fail a class. And students who sit in class being vegetables aren’t learning in either system.</p>
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<p>And this is different from the lecture system how? Students who don’t pay attention and who don’t do the homework aren’t going to learn. Students who do pay attention are better off in a system that makes them better at paying attention. </p>
<p>^How does this particular approach make them better at paying attention?</p>
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<p>Is this a school with entrance requirements, or open admission?</p>
<p>Sylvan, what is easier to pay attention to, a lecture that lasts three minutes, or a lecture that lasts 80 minutes?</p>
<p>Here’s a survey article that [discusses some of the research that has been done on attention](<a href=“Why School Should Focus on Engagement Instead of Lectures | TIME.com”>Adam Cohen: A Back-to-School Fight over the Right to Classroom Prayer | TIME.com).</p>
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<p>The research is clear. People are bad at paying attention to 80 minute lectures. Your students are people, and therefore they are bad at paying attention for 60 or 80 minutes.</p>
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Actually, their acceptance rate last year was 49%. Just as a lot of top students are competing at top schools, a lot of lower tier students are competing at lower schools. Amazingly enough, life’s competition doesn’t end at the gates of Harvard. </p>
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I rarely lecture for 60 or 80 minutes. Generally, the class time is broken into various parts depending on how long the classtime is. The fact that straight lectures are not effective does not mean that straight “problem solving” or some other thing is going to be more effective. There are deeper problems here than can be overcome by a simple switch in teaching methods.</p>
<p>But at Davis they tested the new interactive learning against the old version of the classes and it WAS better.</p>
<p>while active learning maybe more preferable to passive learning, the fact is that it won;t change the grades, which are curved. In other words, while students may learn more collectively, their overall grades will not change. Those with lower grades will continue to drop out of the science programs. C’s ain’t gonna cut it for grad school, for professional school, for getting a job in a lab.</p>