Introduction to the Four Pillars of Flipped Learning

Video Transcription

Hello. And thank you for joining me for the Introduction to the Four Pillars of Flipped Learning. By the end of today's tutorial, we will be able to answer the essential question of, what are the four pillars of flipped learning? We'll also go more in depth and explore what each pillar entails.

Four pillars are flexible learning environment, learning culture shift, intentional content, and professional educators. Let's take a minute to look at each one more in depth.

We'll begin with flexible learning environment. In a flexible learning environment, the classroom setup is flexible and can change in order to accommodate for different learning activities. So that means moving around the desks, rearranging the room, not having a set seating chart, putting students in various groups, and having students who are up and moving around the classroom.

It's supposed to be set up so that students can collaborate in small groups, participate in the scientific method of experimentation, and also do research. So in a flipped learning classroom, you might have tables instead of desks. Or you might have a computer station.

The flexible learning environment also includes flexible groupings, meaning that the groups change as needs and tasks change. This is really important. You might want to group students together who all have a similar interest or a similar strength.

Or you might want to mix up student interests and student strengths. This is especially important when you're trying to have students learn skills from others. You want to put students who have a deficiency in one area with a student who has a strength in that same area so they can learn some skills to be successful. This also means that the teacher is flexible and that he or she is able to support students both in small groups or in a one-to-one setting.

Pillar number two is learning culture shift. This is where the teacher's role is changing. They're no longer up in the front of the classroom lecturing at the blackboard or at the ELMO. They're no longer the sage on the stage. They're not delivering the content to the student.

In a flipped learning environment, the student is actually getting the content at home. So the teacher's role is really changing to where they're not lecturing. They're more facilitating the student's active engagement in the learning.

This leads us to students' ownership. So students are taking ownership of their own learning. They're responsible for learning the content outside of the class and then applying the concepts inside of class. So they're really going to be the ones who determine what they get out of the content based on their own participation and their engagement.

Instructional time is also going to change, because it's taking place at home. So it's going to rely more heavily on a technology than it would if the teacher were lecturing in the classroom. At the same time, the classroom environment is changing, because it's going to be less students sitting in desks, staring at the front of the classroom, taking notes while the teacher lectures.

As I've said before, the teaching of the content takes place at home. The student is responsible for it. So the classroom is going to be this noisy, active place where students are up, and they're moving around. And they're making meaning for themselves out of the learning. They're actively engaged.

And also, the culture is changing. It's really moving towards a more constructivist nature. Remember, constructivism is where students construct their own meaning and their own learning. And so the students are just actively involved in the development of their knowledge through participation in the learning activities. So in a constructivist classroom, you're going to see things like PBL.

Then you also have intentional content as pillar number three. So this just means it's a meaningful choice in the content of instruction, both for homework and in class. So the teacher needs to really intentionally choose the tutorials or intentionally choose the materials they're going to include in the online tutorials that the students are using.

So they need to also in order to do that evaluate the needs of their students. A tutorial for one student may not look the same as a tutorial for another student. The teacher still needs to differentiate learning and differentiate these tutorials even though the students are receiving the material at home.

The same is true not just for the choice of content, but also for the activities that are happening in the class time to build on the content. This leads really to maximizing classroom time, using that time not to reteach necessarily because the teacher's been intentional with the content, but to clear up any misconceptions and come up with some interesting activities to further the student's understanding of the content.

And lastly, we have professional educators. It's really important to make sure that the teacher who is the educator in the flipped learning classroom is really married to the idea of being a facilitator rather than a lecturer. They are also going to be someone who's still collecting a lot of data. They're using formative assessments all the time to make sure that the students are actually learning the content at home.

They're also going to be someone who is very reflective on their practices. And if you remember, we talked about a variety of different ways to reflect on practices. And it can be just as simple as doing a plus/minus delta, what worked, what didn't, and how can I fix the things that didn't.

We need someone who's reflecting. And we also need someone who's going to be collaborating with other teachers to find out what's working in their classroom, how would they tackle this problem, et cetera. So just because the role of teacher has shifted from lecturer to facilitator doesn't mean that the teacher's collecting any less data or being any less involved in the creation of the content than someone in a traditional classroom.

Let's reflect for a moment. Which pillar are you most willing to explore in your own classroom, and why? How would you implement this change? Which pillar are you most hesitant to try, and why?

So to review, today we talked about what the four pillars of flipped learning are. And we'll go more in depth with these in future tutorials. As you reflect on how this new information can be applied, you may want to explore the Additional Resources section that accompanies this video presentation. This is where you'll find links to resources chosen to help you deepen your learning and explore ways to apply your newly acquired skill set.

Thank you for joining me. And happy teaching.