Not So Easy to Flip Your Mid(dle Years Classes)

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If there's one thing I can credit the COETAIL program for, it's for getting me to think and reflect on my teaching and my thoughts about different teaching styles and techniques. A lot of those reflections have appeared in previous blog posts and have seemed appropriate and organic with what was going on with my teaching at the time. As I work through the fourth course of the COETAIL program, we've been asked to more specifically target the subjects of our blog posts based on an assigned weekly subject. Typically, these writing prompts have been helpful but this has actually been a bit challenging for me with the week three requirement of blogging about the flipped classroom. I have my opinions about the flipped classroom (if you're not up to date on what a flipped classroom is, check here for an infographic overview) but I feel like I've already blogged about a flipped classroom in the past and I haven't really had anything new to say about it lately. Then, just the other day, I was looking through the results of an end of trimester survey I had gotten my Year 9s to fill out and just like that, I had something to write about.

The students had worked through a unit that involved using Scratch to make an interactive quiz about social media. As a test to see how responsible my Year 9s could be about their own learning (and because we had lost a couple of lessons from the floods late last year), I decided that after one lesson of explaining some of the basics of Scratch, I would leave it to them to follow the well produced tutorials on the Learn Scratch website. I gave them a list of all the available lessons on that site, indexed by name and number and recommended ones that would be useful. Most lessons would take, on average, 2-5 minutes to work through. Students had about two months before they needed to use the skills so, had they even done one lesson per night, they should have had more than enough time to get through them. Every lesson, I would remind them that the online tutorials needed to be completed by the time they started in Scratch but, I wish I could say it was entirely unexpected, by the time they needed to know those skills, there were very few students who had been responsible enough to have gone through the tutorials on their own.

Why did the survey remind me of this? Well, in the open comments section which asked for suggestions for improving the course, there were a number of students who mentioned that they wished that I had taught them Scratch more explicitly and not just assigned the tutorials. Though it can be quite complicated if you need it to be, Scratch is generally a fairly easy program to work with. When it came time to create their quizzes, within half a lesson, I had taught the students enough skills to allow them to create their interactive quizzes. Not surprisingly though, the students who had worked their way through the tutorials tended to include more advanced features (like effective scorekeeping, for example) and were able to solve more problems on their own. So I have some personal evidence to support that this flipped approach can work.

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So what does this mean with regards to my thoughts on the flipped classroom approach? Well, a lot of the literature being written about the flipped classroom - like this article about flipping Stanford classrooms -  tends to be in reference to university or upper level classes (A-Level, IB Diploma, etc.). At that level, most  many students have started to take a more active role in selecting courses of interest to them which, I think, makes it easier for them to get interested in learning more outside of the traditional classroom. In the middle school years, students are more than capable of learning from a video tutorial but it's a matter of motivation and desire.

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Many students still seem to struggle with planning, foresight, and seeing the bigger picture when it comes to a project. It seems that no matter how many reminders I gave them, for most of them, there was still a disconnect between learning the skills and having to apply the skills a few weeks later. So far, in my experience with using video tutorials and other student guided learning at a middle year level, these seem to work well for reinforcing things that I have already taught in the classroom. If students forget how to do something but know they've been taught it before, they seem more willing to follow a video tutorial than if it is a completely new concept or skill.

In conclusion, while I think that the flipped classroom is a good idea for upper years, I'm skeptical that it could be successfully integrated into most younger, middle year classrooms. And why should it? Sadly, I know that some students spend hours and hours working on assignments for my classes, as students either struggle with the material or set unrealistic goals for the given timeframe of their project but ultimately, I don't want my students taking too much of their non-school time to do these things. These kids are only 10-14 years old. They'll have plenty of time to work too much. For now, they need to enjoy being kids and I'm happy to try to to do my part to help them do just that!