What to Consider When Considering Flipping Your Classroom

Susie Kimport

 

Last semester, Fall 2014, I taught calculus in a flipped classroom environment.  Before every class, my students would watch short videos introducing the topics of the day and complete a series of online “prep-problems” for each video.  A few hours before every class, I received a computer-generated summary from our web platform of how my students did on these problems.  The hope was that I could use that data to better tailor examples and in-class activities to the topics with which my students were struggling.

This is normally how a flipped classroom is designed.  The basic idea is to take introductory material out of the classroom and instead use class time for hands-on examples and more interaction between the instructor and the students.   The main difference between my experience and that of most people who talk about flipping their classrooms is that I did not create or choose the videos for my students.  I was teaching as part of a coordinated course and it was our course director who created the videos two years ago.  This meant that I entered into the semester hoping to learn more about the flipped classroom and honestly, to be convinced that it could work, without having to invest a large amount of time into implementation.

While most of the things I noticed during the semester are specific to our implementation and our videos, I think the following three points are valuable to anyone considering flipping the classroom:

1.      Think about content. A pre-class video is another way to present material, just like lecture, demonstrations, or using props in class.

a.       There is some material that lends itself wonderfully to videos.  I loved the videos that meant I did not have to attempt (and fail) to draw 3D pictures on the board.  Many students spoke highly of the videos where the main goal was to derive a formula.

b.      But for the more conceptual ideas?  Videos did not cut it.  Yes, students could pause and rewind, but the explanation never changed.  This meant that some students came to class already extremely frustrated that “the videos didn’t teach [them] anything.” You may want to consider having an alternative explanation or teaching method on hand for difficult concepts.

2.      Think about the in-class experience just as much, if not more, than the videos. Before you flip a classroom with videos, you need videos.  In April, Simona Lorenzini and I will lead a workshop exactly aimed at creating this video content.  But once you have the videos, you have to use them!  The most important questions to ask yourself are:

a.       How do I gauge what my students have learned from these videos?  How can I leverage that to improve the in-class experience for all my students?

b.      How do I make my classroom as active as possible, so students stay engaged despite “learning” the material via videos?

c.       How can I make the constant transition between video and in-class and back again as seamless as possible?

3.      Just because students watched a video does not mean they have learned and internalized everything.  One selling point of the flipped classroom is that it removes some of the tedious lecture from class and therefore allows instructors to do more.  However, the students are not always as far along after watching the videos as you might hope.  Speaking from my own experience, I was often tempted to use the videos and prep-problems to justify (to myself) skipping some more basic examples. 

When I taught Calculus II without videos, I would do 3-4 simple examples in class with the students (let’s say level 1 or 2 for a scale).  If those went well, I would do a couple more complicated problems (say level 3 or 4 if they were really getting it). Last semester, one basic (level 1) example was in the video.  The prep-problems (usually) asked the students to do 2-3 level 2 or 3 examples.  Thus, it often felt natural to start class with a level 3 problem and then dive in to level 4 problems.

The problem with this: students often struggled through the prep-problems and (since they were online) sometimes got the correct answer without internalizing why.  Therefore, starting class at level 2 would have been a safer bet.  If that example goes off without issue, then slowly make your way up to levels 3 and 4.

Overall, I am happy that I tried the flipped classroom and would look forward to doing it again, though most likely with videos I picked out or created myself.  It is a different type of teaching and I think its value comes in how each person can adapt (or steal from) the concept to improve and critically reflect on their teaching, including taking those ideas back to a “traditional” classroom.

Let's Get to the Point: Implementing Two-Sentence Summaries in Your Classroom

Elizabeth Morse

Cell Biology Ph.D. Candidate, Yale Teaching Center Fellow

It's Tuesday night at 7PM, and it’s time to begin another one of your fantastically stimulating discussion sections. The article you assigned your students to read was, of course, academically intoxicating, and somehow, today, you overcame your research or grant-writing to get to this highly anticipated moment. This article represents a pivotal turning point in your field, a cataclysmic push to a new frontier of knowledge; its significance - clearly world-changing.  

 
And so you begin.    
 
“So, who wants to start us off and tell us about this week’s reading?”

Sudden silence. The pre-class chatter about exam results and Facebook and Miley Cyrus has ceased. There are twenty-three faces in front of you, carrying forty-six undergraduate eyes, and not one of them is looking at you. Did you realize how large that stain is on the carpet? Can you believe how many crumbs from dinner are now stuck behind your finger nails? Does the clock on the wall always tick that loudly?

 

Like most awkward silences, this moment was likely preventable. While I do not claim to have the miracle cure-all that will alleviate all of your symptoms of uncomfortable silence, sustained student disinterest or general academic complacency, I would like to offer you a technique proven (in my hands) to increase student engagement, bolster academic discussion and immediately focus student attention on course material. If desired, this technique can be adapted such that it simultaneously gauges initial student understanding (what the teaching world calls “pre-assessment”), takes your attendance and provides an easy means of encouraging – and grading – participation. It does just about everything but walk your dog.

Intrigued? I give you: The Two-Sentence Summary.

  

The Two-Sentence Summary: What Is It?

The beauty of the two-sentence summary is its simplicity: upon entering the classroom, students pick-up an index card and are instructed to compose a concise statement (no more than two sentences) that summarizes the main point of an assigned reading. That’s it. After students have had a few minutes to write, you, the instructor, begin class with a slightly altered version of the question above:

“So, who wants to start us off and share his or her two-sentence summary of this week’s reading?”

 Awesome. By giving students time to quietly think, and by making your initial question slightly more specific, suddenly there are hands raised. You have made your expectations clear, and you have given your students space to compose a response that reflects their current understanding of the material. The section begins with a discussion of the most important, take-home message, and you can immediately assess whether your students identified this point (or points) or will need your guidance to do so.

The Two-Sentence Summary: Advantages for Students and Instructors Alike

In regularly implementing two-sentence summaries in my class, a science section that discusses a primary scientific literature article each week, I observed four key advantages to this activity:

1)     A memorable main point – Countless studies have demonstrated that students learn better when they are actively involved in their own learning – through writing, discussing, participating in group work, problem-solving, etc. (i.e. “active learning”). When asked to critically evaluate the main point of an assignment rather than passively receiving this information from an instructor, students are more likely to remember the take-home message. 

 

2)     Students settle down to summarize – We must acknowledge that this week’s assignment might not be the first thing on our students’ minds when they enter our classrooms. As such, the brilliance of the authors’ experimental methods to determine the infection mode of the bacterium Listeria might not be their current focus. When students enter my class, I typically display a PowerPoint slide with a two-sentence summary prompt and the location of index cards. Without any additional direction from me, students wind down the pre-class chatter and begin to focus on the task at hand. Over time, I even noticed that some students started arriving a few minutes earlier to have more time to review their materials and compose their summaries before class. Ah, the joy of prepared students!

3)     Concise communication – Research from a wide variety of disciplines is often reported in the mass media, on the nightly news or on NPR, in short sound bites. How do we teach our students to accurately – and concisely – summarize important findings, so that no meaning is lost? Practice. Lots and lots of practice, beginning with when they first encounter the pivotal findings of others in our classrooms. Don’t be surprised if you encounter some resistance to brevity. I have had the pleasure of challenging the ninja-like semi-colon that camouflages superfluous independent clauses.

4)     Inclusivity – What I have loved about two-sentence summaries is the environment of inclusivity it creates at the start of class. Students who have struggled with the intricacies of a reading can check their understanding by focusing on the overarching message. As one of my students commented on a course evaluation, “Participation was handled in a way that everyone could contribute even if the information was difficult to understand.” On the other hand, advanced students who have readily digested the material may be challenged to develop the language skills required to concisely craft their statements. 

The Two-Sentence Summary: Adapting to Your Classroom

If you are considering implementing two-sentence summaries in your classroom, here are some adaptations you might consider:

Why, yes, I have attendance records! – Want to monitor attendance without taking extra time out of your class? Have students write their names on their two-sentence summaries and collect them. Voila! You know who was in class (and who did the reading).

Participation: To Grade or Not to Grade? – You might use the two-sentence summaries as an assessment, assigning point values to their completion and/or quality. In a class I taught in which the lead instructor required participation, I used the index card as the physical “ticket” to their participation grade. The first time that a student participated in a given class, he/she turned in his/her index card to me. At the start of class, everyone wanted to get rid of his or her card! This got the discussion rolling right from the start, and also prevented a handful of students from dominating the discussion. As one of my students wrote on the subsequent course evaluation, “I enjoy how my section leader goes out of her way to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to participate.”

 

Pre- and Post-Assessment – Have you asked your students to summarize a finding at the start of class to gauge their initial understanding (i.e. pre-assessment)? Why not collect these summaries, and have them again summarize the finding at the end of class, or at the end of a unit, to collect real data on the effectiveness of your teaching (i.e. post-assessment)? Has your students’ understanding evolved? For the true over-achieving teachers, present the “before” and “after” snapshots to your students to encourage them to be cognizant of their own learning (i.e. “meta-cognition”).

 

The Two-Sentence Summary: A Two-Sentence Summary 

When emphasizing the main point of an assignment or concept, students may be asked to produce a concise summary of the take-home message in two sentences or less. By providing students with time to independently reflect, your students will be more actively involved in their learning, and in your class! 

Tell us about it! If you have tried out two-sentence summaries in your class, we would love to hear from you! Please feel free to comment with your experiences or suggestions on this post. 

 

“Choice Architecture” and Teaching

Do you think that the choices your students make shape what they get out of your class?  Most teachers, if not all, would respond to that question with a rousing “Of course!”  Now, don’t you wish there was an easy way to get them to make better choices?  I’m Celia, a PhD candidate in Political Science and a Fellow with the Yale Teaching Center, and today I’m going to describe why thinking of yourself as a “choice architect” might help.

“Choice architecture” is not simply about physical buildings and structures (although they do play a role).  Rather, choice architecture is about the norms, habits, practices, and patterns that structure our social, political, and institutional lives.

Of course, these aren’t just my ideas – I’m working with a framework developed by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their recent book Nudge:Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.  While Sunstein is a legal scholar and Thaler is a behavioral economist, political scientists frequently draw on Sunstein and Thaler’s work as well.  What do all these disciplines have in common?  They all share a concern with how people make choices and the factors that determine whether those choices are optimal or less than optimal. 

Sunstein and Thaler make a few key claims about choices:

• Small changes in context make a big difference in the choices people make.
• Individuals’ “true” preferences are hard to define and often not set in stone.
•  When you are organizing a context in which people make decisions, “there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ design.” (Sunstein and Thaler, p. 3)

Now, just think about all the choices your students make when it comes to your class.  Every week, they decide whether or not to do the reading.  They decide whether or not to speak in class.  They decide whether or not to take notes, and they decide whether to be there in class in the first place.  Moreover, they decide what kind of attitude to take – skeptical, engaged, bored, distracted, excited, or domineering.

You don’t have full control over ANY of these decisions.  Sure, you can lay down class rules and determine grades, and these are important instruments for shaping some of your students’ behaviors – but rules and grades are just too blunt to shape every single decision your students will be faced with.  

That’s where choice architecture comes in.  You want to organize your classroom to nudge students towards the best choices.  What are some ways to do that?  Here are a few:

1) Leverage the power of habit.  For example, you want to get your students talking during discussions?  Have them fill out weekly online response forms.  Just the act of writing something, anything about what they’ve read will help get them in the habit of A) doing the reading and B) having something to say about it.  Even if the response forms only account for some small percentage of their participation grade, they can have an outsize effect on student readiness to engage in class discussion.

2) Use social pressure to your advantage.  Split students up randomly into pairs to discuss a question, and walk around the room listening in.  The goal is not to create a high pressure situation, but rather to create a situation where the default is to participate.  Your students will feel more awkward if they sit silently with their partner than if they talk about the readings, especially if they see you walking around and listening in.

3)  Change the physical space.  Consider how you can modify the physical space of the classroom to address any challenges you might be facing.  If you’ve got only a few students in a big classroom, conversation often lags – you could try to get assigned a new room or get to the classroom early and use the chairs to create a smaller area in which to hold class.

Some of my favorite activities are those that combine several of these elements at once.  For example, last semester, when we were reviewing major Supreme Court cases relating to the Interstate Commerce Clause, I came up with a jigsaw activity for my students.[1]   I split students up into four groups and assigned one Supreme Court case to each group.  Each group had just ten minutes to prepare a brief presentation on the case and write an outline of their presentation on the board.  After the first set of presentations, each case would be passed to another group, and that group would have just a few minutes to prepare a presentation on the interpretation of the Commerce Clause in that particular case.  Then there would be a second round of presentations, after which each case would be passed to a third group, who would apply legal principles from that case to a new case currently before the Court.  Before each case was passed, the group about to receive the case would have the chance to ask questions of the group currently in possession of the case.

This activity ended up being a lot of fun – the students were engaged and enthusiastic – so that’s part of why I remember it fondly.  But it’s also a nice illustration of choice architecture in action.  Since students were in small groups, there was some social pressure to participate.  Because the activity involved writing on the board and time pressure, it got students moving and raised the energy level in the room.  Finally, because students had to ask each other questions before the cases were handed from group to group, they started to develop the habit of talking to each other about the material, and not just directing all their comments towards me.

I'd love to hear reactions to these ideas in the comments below.  What are other ways you could apply the principles of choice architecture to your classroom?  How might the features of choice architecture vary across classrooms in different disciplines?  What other insights about teaching can we draw from Nudge, or from other work in behavioral economics and behavioral psychology? 

References:

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[1] The jigsaw classroom is a form of cooperative classroom learning, so-called because “just as in a jigsaw puzzle, each piece--each student's part--is essential for the completion and full understanding of the final product.”  For more information, see http://www.jigsaw.org/overview.htm. 

Museum as Classroom

Hello Teaching World! I am Alex, a 6th-year PhD candidate in the History of Art Department and a YTC Fellow. Today I'd like to tell you a little about teaching with art and, for those of you teaching in or around Yale, the wonderful Yale University Art Gallery, which reopens on Wednesday, December 12th.

Contrary to popular belief, museums are not scary places. Nor are they the private domain of experts, aficionados, and elites. No way! They are for the people, especially the free-of-charge YUAG, which has been from its inception a teaching institution. Better still, the museum has just undergone a substantial renovation and re-installation, nearly tripling its previous size. 

Even if you aren't teaching art history, a museum has much to offer many disciplines from Medicine to Japanese, especially the temporally- and geographically-extensive YUAG. The education department would be happy to help you select material and arrange a visit (contact David.Odo@yale.edu for more info). The objects you select could be similar to your discipline's subject (e.g. medical students looking at medical images) or similar to its methodology (e.g. anthropology students analyzing museum visitors' interaction with art objects.)

In this post, I will focus on the pedagogical benefits of close-looking at art objects.  The cornerstone of art historical methodology is visual analysis -- a close-looking of an object to build an interpretation. Formal analysis is analogous to "close-reading" in literature, but through parsing visual details rather than textual. The benefit of having a real, live art object is that you can look really, REALLY, REALLY closely -- sometimes even with a magnifying glass! This ability allows you (and your students) to more thoroughly understand the artist's choices, the life of the artwork, the chemical basis of the materials, and much more.

The first and foremost pedagogical benefit of a museum visit is how it can add variety to your teaching style. For most, getting out of the classroom is an invigorating experience that can inject any class with new breath. Additionally, a visit will activate  learning styles (VARK) sometimes lost in the classroom -- kinesthetic and visual -- through the sheer physicality of being in a museum and, of course, the visual material. Furthermore, you can use the museum  outside of classroom time, assigning short papers or presentations based on student research and/or observation.

Second, developing critical thinking through close-looking can aid in a student's overall intellectual development. It can make students more cognizant of their visual surroundings -- prompting them to question the images that bombard us daily, ranging from iPhone apps to CNN to fast-food ads. In the classroom, visual analysis provides an analogous method of critical thinking, which students may apply to other disciplines and contexts. The process of building an interpertation based on careful observation can also aid in the development of expository writing or even diagnosis.
 

Alongside this post I have a attached some Instagram photos I snapped at the YUAG last week. With these photos as an example, I would like to suggest a museum activity that you can use with your students, in a class or as an assignment:
1) Tell the students to bring a smartphone to photograph object(s) of their choosing.  
2) Have them also select frames and filters for their images. (Most young folk are very familiar with these photo-editing apps like Instgram, Picfx, or even Facebook).  
3) Depending on your class's subject matter, add a theoretical framework through which they should make these choices. This could be gender, spirituality, historical events, chemistry, physics, post-structuralism -- you name it! 
4) Then have the students present their photos and why they chose the object, composition, frame, and lens with regard to the theoretical framework. 
5) Commence fruitful discussion!

Thanks for listening! I hope you all get a chance to see the new YUAG soon! 

Images:
1. Central Stairway, Yale University Art Gallery, Louis Kahn Building, 1953
2. Benedetto Bonfigli, Christ the Redeemer, ca. 1455–1460  
3. Fukami Sueharu, View of Distant Sea II, ca. 1985 
4. Portrait of a Man, c. 300 A.D., and Portrait of a Young Man, 140-160 A.D., Ancient Rome (in far background: Joseph Wright, Portrait of Mr. William Chase, Sr., ca. 1760-6)
5. Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #786A, 1995
 

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

This week’s post is about “A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods” (henceforth APTOVM), a resource that details and categorizes the many ways of presenting information visually.  I’m Damian, a Ph.D. candidate in Music Theory.

Here at the Graduate Teaching Center we believe that one of the foundational skills of successful teaching is understanding how people learn and teaching accordingly.  There are several inventories that conceptualize the ways in which people learn (see Coffield, F., D. Moseley, et al. (2004) for an overview of learning-style inventories); one particular inventory that APTOVM directly speaks to is VARK.  The VARK inventory posits that information can be presented in Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, or Kinesthetic modalities, and that different people have different ways (or combinations of ways) in which they prefer to take in (or give out) information.  As teachers, then, we can strive to find modes of presentation that that best suit both the material and our students’ learning preferences

The Visual preference “includes the depiction of information in maps, spider diagrams, charts, graphs, flow charts, labeled diagrams, and all the symbolic arrows, circles, hierarchies and other devices, which instructors use to represent what could have been presented in words.  It could have been called Graphic as that better explains what it covers” (from www.vark-learn.com; visit to learn more about VARK!).  APTOVM can help us both devise ways to present information visually and concoct activities/assignments that give students the opportunity to interface with information visually.  The table groups methods into data-, information-, concept-, strategy-, metaphor-, and compound-visualization categories; it also labels whether each method depicts structure or processes, details or an overview, and divergent or convergent thinking.

While we might initially associate the visual presentation of information with quantitative fields (graphs, charts, and the like), APTOVM demonstrates how visualization methods can be applied in any class.  Some ways that I’ve used visualization methods in my own teaching have been:

• having students produce their own decision-tree algorithm of how to harmonize a simple melody
• diagramming sonata forms’ thematic-material and harmonic relationships with boxes at the blackboard

I hope you have fun exploring the table, and would love to read in the comments about the ways you use visualization methods in your own teaching!

Prezi

This week’s post is about Prezi, a free, cloud-based, non-linear presentation tool. I’m Dustin, a graduate student in French, and I’ll be writing about my experience using Prezi.

Prezi’s basic workspace is its 2.5D canvas—a visual map for sharing and exploring texts, images, videos, and other presentation media. The Zooming User Interface (ZUI) allows users to navigate their canvas by panning and zooming. Users can structure their presentations with a pre-set path, but diverge from that path and explore other parts of the canvas when it might be productive. They can also forgo a pre-set path entirely and instead explore the map according to the interests of the audience. Since Prezi is cloud-based, users can access and present their Prezis from any computer with an Internet browser and Adobe Flash. They can also share and simultaneously edit their Prezis with their audience. The best part is that Prezi is free for those of us with .edu email addresses!

Prezi works great for visualizing systems, diagrams, networks, maps, data, narratives, and other complex thoughts. I used Prezi for the first time Monday in French 255/Film 259, an undergraduate seminar on French cinema. My Prezi focused on Italian Neorealism, a postwar cinematic movement influential throughout Europe, and on a prime example of Neorealism, Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Theives) (1948) in particular.

We started by looking at texts, images, and clips from Ladri di biciclette. In the screen shot above, most of the media appears to be very small, but Prezi’s zoom function allowed me to zoom into each image that the class wanted to discuss. As we panned across the map, we analyzed the texts, images, and clips, noted key stylistic characteristics, and suggested interpretations. Depending on the interests of my students, I zoomed into certain bits of media and passed over others. Once we had finished discussing the film, we zoomed out and saw how the film fit into the cinematographic movement (see below). The key Italian Neorealist directors and their films, as well as the basic characteristics of many Neorealist films helped to contextualize Ladri di biciclette. Since Prezi’s canvas is infinite, I can continue to add to it throughout the semester as my class traces the history of French and European cinema. I can also have my students add their own research to it.

Why, you might ask, should I use Prezi instead of PowerPoint? Prezi allows learners to see the big picture. Guiding concepts and relationships are represented visually, as central features of the canvas, whereas in PowerPoint they are just part of another slide. This visual/spatial representation also speaks to visual learners, who tend to learn well with maps and diagrams. Prezi also allows for a student-led classroom. Teachers can upload a bank of resources to their Prezis before class, and take cues from their students about which things they would like to discuss. Teachers can also have students upload resources to the Prezi before class to prepare for discussion. If you don’t get a chance to discuss everything, students can access the Prezi after class. Lastly, Prezi is easy to use and it’s free. Embedding Google images or YouTube videos is very simple. Printing doesn’t work well on Prezi, but teachers can save paper by giving their students a link to their Prezi instead.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself! Your students will be impressed.

http://prezi.com/explore/education/

Backward Design

This week’s post is written by Sarah. I am an almost finished PhD candidate in Geology and Geophysics.

I wanted to write a little about a concept that the GTC (and lots of other people - see some more links below) thinks is important and that we introduce in many workshops that we lead: backward design. I’ll also talk about a discussion that we had in my Fundamentals of Teaching Science workshop about backward design, where participants felt it was a little impractical.

Backward design emphasizes learning goals and outcomes as opposed to starting by deciding what topics you need to cover. Instead of first deciding what content you will teach or what activities you will do, backward design begins with figuring out what your desired results are.

Basically, you start out by deciding how you want students to be different when you’re done teaching. What do you want them to be able to do or know?

Then you decide how you’ll be able to tell if that was done. Is there a test question that would let you know? Should you have them do an experiment or demonstration to show you they know how? Should they write a paper about it?

Then you’ll decide what you as a teacher will do to help your students reach these goals. Is a lecture the best way? Should you have them go outside and observe a phenomenon? Should you assign a book or paper for them to read and discuss with other students?

Cue infographic:

(Image from Wikipedia)

After presenting this to our first Fundamentals session this fall, we were met with some skepticism. Would this really be feasible in someone’s first semester of teaching a class at a brand new job at a brand new university when they have so much other stuff to do? I suppose the official answer could be that it shouldn’t matter, you want the best for your students no matter how long it takes. But yes, it is overwhelming to think about redesigning a whole course when there is already one being taught that seems to be working fine.

That, to me, is the beauty of backward design. It is not all or nothing. This can be your framework for so many scales, from entire curricula to a semester-long course to a 50 minute class to a 10 minute activity. If there is a class that you may not have a lot of control over the whole thing (or you don’t want to change the whole thing) this is still a great way to make your activities and lessons align with your learning goals.

It was said at Teaching at Yale Day last month and many more times at GTC events – we want people to try new things even if they aren’t sure it will work. Otherwise, how do you know? I hope my skeptical workshop participants now feel a little more confident to try backwards design at least on a small scale because otherwise how will they know how cool it is?

So does starting on a small scale make it seem more doable? A devil’s advocate asked me, isn’t this just teaching to the test? What do you think?

Here are some other people talking about this:

A Chronicle article

Lots of examples and resource