Reads: Flip Your Classroom

Professional Reading is Reinvigorating

A hidden blessing of this difficult time is the ability to reconnect with your professional library. One of the books I have had on my shelf for a long time, that I have frequently referenced but never read cover to cover is Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams. With so many schools moving to exclusively online formats, I thought it appropriate to start here. While we are working remotely, we have a golden opportunity to reinvigorate our teaching and leadership by committing to professional reading and other forms of professional development.

Quick and Approachable

At a breezy 112 pages, Flip Your Classroom is a quick read. Although not in one sitting, I was able to finish it in one day. It was also eminently approachable and conversational. The authors went out of their way to provide general guidelines, not hard and fast rules or restrictive models. Some people might actually find this frustrating, but it is not meant to be a blueprint. Approach it in the spirit of a guide and I think you’ll get more use and enjoyment out of the read.

What is the Flipped Classroom?

Although the authors are quick to point out that there is no one definition of a flipped classroom and no one “owns” the term per se, their general definition is a classroom where primary direct instruction (e.g. the traditional lecture format) is delivered outside of class, and class time is spent working asynchronously on clarification and re-teaching, learning activities, enrichment, and more. The idea is to free up class time for personalized instruction after putting students in charge of the lectures and note-taking.

Bergmann and Sams, who have both moved on to other roles in the intervening years since they wrote the book, used a combination of video lectures/conversations accompanied the Cornell note-taking format to accomplish this, though they point out that the flipped classroom does not have to occur only in this manner.

The Flipped Classroom and COVID-19

The obvious challenge today is that many are currently missing the in-class component of the flipped classroom due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I suspect Bergmann and Sams would have something to say about this, namely that teachers can maintain “the flip” - lectures delivered in video format via a learning management system (LMS), for example - and then use the LMS to set up personalized instruction and coaching sessions as needed.

Dated, but Relevant and Timely

Being technology-focused, some aspects of the book are a bit dated - a reference to MySpace, for example - but 99% of it is still extremely relevant. It is also timely, for the aforementioned reasons. I saw a viral social media post recently that has lauded educators for “Apollo 13-ing” the current problem of closed schools and shifting to online instruction almost overnight. While I agree with this sentiment, our challenge now is to sustain this initiative and keep kids engaged. When the pandemic abates and we return to our schools, I hope that our world has been improved in some way - and that’s why I started with Flip Your Classroom!

Have you read Flip Your Classroom? Any takeaways or things you did differently as a result? What are you reading “in the field” that we should check out?