Seven years ago it was 2014 and CAFE at the time
was called EdTech. Back then we were helping instructors redesign their course in a process
called "flipping." Dr. Katie Shannon, a teaching professor in Biological Sciences noticed her Cell
Bio students weren't hitting the "application" levels of learning that she was hoping for
them to achieve in this course. So instead of doing a full flip, Dr. Shannon decided to do her
regular lecture on Monday and Wednesday classes, and then for Friday classes the students had
to watch a video prior to coming into class. Once they arrived they were typically put into
groups and worked on problem sets together. Here's a look into our conversation
on why Katie found the partial flip significantly helped her
student learning objectives, and reached those deeper levels of learning
she was looking for in this course. So my main motivation for doing the
flip was to have some class time to do kind of application type of problems where
students had to take what they had learned and apply it to a new problem that they hadn't seen
before. And I found that if I gave those types of questions on a homework it freaks some students
out because they would say, "the answer is not in the textbook." And yes the answer is not in the
textbook, right, you're supposed to be able to you know make your best guess kind of, but they
were really uncomfortable with that. And so in doing the flip I put the lecture content
online in videos for them to watch before class, and then in-class they were working in groups, on a problem set to kind of tackle these
problems in a setting where they could get help from their classmates. And also I would
walk around and get help if they were stuck. Yeah, so tell me more about that in-class meeting
when they're working on the application part of it. You were talking to me about Bloom's
Taxonomy and how that really adjusted how you thought about teaching and how you you
thought you know - if I do this flip I can reach a little bit higher levels of learning.
Right. So, I think our students are really comfortable with sort of the knowledge level,
right? Repeating, memorizing, and repeating it back, but again, I wanted to get more at this
application sort of higher level Bloom's thinking, and that's what I felt like we didn't have time
for maybe before. And so doing the flip was a way to make time in the classroom for them
to figure out how to approach problems where again they don't know the answer, they have
to make a prediction, or um you know again more like analysis, and apply level Bloom's...
There is research showing that you know working in groups - if they have a functional group -
right which is different. Very true! Right, but working in groups can be - they can bounce ideas
off each other and you know explaining it to other students is a really good way to make sure
that they themselves understand the material. So that's one of the reasons why again it's
you know doing that in the classroom makes that group work possible, whereas assigning it
outside of class it would be a lot harder... Hi I'm Beth Reardon and I'm an Instructional
Designer here at CAFE. Research that's conducted by ED-Week Research Center Studies found that
nearly 50 percent of students self-reported that their motivation and morale
significantly decreased as a result of teaching changes caused by the pandemic. It's
true - though we don't have a lot of information yet about the effects of remote learning on
students, we do know it has made it more difficult for faculty to create class structures with high
student engagement. On the flip side of that, we know that when students are more engaged, their
morale and motivation to learn also increases. Not only that, according to education neuroscience
expert, Dr. David Souza, higher student engagement also motivates students to persist through
academic challenges. There are a variety of ways to form your class structure to enhance
student engagement. One way Dr. Shannon found most useful in her Cell Bio course was to incorporate
more group work. When students are encouraged to make discoveries on their own or in a group
without much direct influence from the instructor, this is known as "academic autonomy" and also
has been proven to increase student engagement. Consider the way you can incorporate group work
into your class for higher student engagement. ..."The sage on the stage"... right the sort of
thing about flipping that people say is it changes the instructor's role from "the sage on the
stage, to the guide on the side." That's it. So and on those days right I'm not sort of standing
up in front of the classroom, I'm walking around you know listening to what they're talking about,
trying to help. Again not give them the answer, but sort of say, "okay why do you think it's this
answer?" Or you know sometimes they're completely stuck and I'll say, "Okay, well in the video we
talked about this, right?" And so again trying to guide them towards how to find the answer.
As far as student grades, do you notice anything with that? As far as
from the time you flipped to now? So I did do a little research to try to
figure out you know what was going on. So their exam averages did not change
from before the flip to after the flip. So on the one hand it didn't improve over all
the grades, but on the other hand it also didn't decrease it. But I also feel like I was asking
again, higher level Blooms questions after the flip, and they were able to do those without
their exam average going down. And then I also look to see right part of what's important about
the flip is that they come to class prepared and so I was assigning textbook reading
before lectures, and then these videos before class, and they also have to take a quiz on the
videos before class, because if they don't know anything they're not going to be able to work
on the problems. And so I went back and analyzed how much they watch the videos because all
that data is captured and also I surveyed them about how much they were reading the textbook,
because it's hard otherwise to measure that. And both of those - reading the textbook, and watching
the videos, was positively correlated with their exam grade which was nice. So I can show that it's
not just what we're doing in class but also them engaging with the material outside of the class
that's important for how well they do overall. Another thing I like about the flip that I think
is important, is students taking responsibility for getting some of the content knowledge on their
own, and not just waiting, you know, coming to class completely unprepared and just waiting for
you to like fill their brains, right. It's like they need to come to class having already done
something and then we're going to do something in class that depended on them doing that
thing before, and then maybe I'll give it a little lecture and we can do some other active
learning things, again like think-pair-share. I like to do a lot and I use clickers
and so I'm trying to think about how to structure it you know, keeping I
think keeping the flip part is important, but it's like do I want to segregate it one day
a week or do I want to sort of mix it in?... It's so cool now that you have like all these
different tools you can use though because you practiced it, you know, prototyped it all. So
well yeah and you know last semester when we were doing - I was doing it as a blended class
because of the pandemic, I sort of made videos of everything you know. So the Flipped Friday
stuff I already had videos for but then I went and I made videos basically of all my lectures
in chunks; chunked them up, so normally it's like what I would give in one class -- lectures,
maybe 3 short videos but now I have like all of the videos and so again it's like I could
just maybe have them watch 1 before every class, and mix it up a little bit because I've
done that making the video work already. [Beth] When it comes to flipping your class, yes,
usually the most time consuming and difficult part is the video making process, but it can also be
the most rewarding part of the experience. Many instructors go into a redesigned thinking "video
creation is about replicating my lecture in an online format. Instead of students in front of me,
I have a camera in front of me as I'm speaking." Contrary to this mindset, a more effective
redesign is thinking about how you can take the key elements from your 50-minute lecture
and emphasize them in 3-4 eight minute videos, then have students be responsible for
building their knowledge through different assignments, links, and other resources.
Research shows that short bite-sized videos, instead of 50-minute lecture videos, not only
enhance student learning, but also allow you, as the video maker, to create content that is
more manageable for times when you need to go in and tweak and edit. Bite-sized videos also
allow the student to go back and re-watch the areas where they need more help. This creates
reusable content for your future classes which proved to be helpful for Katie when
we switched over for the pandemic in 2020. I would say that the extra work is worth it
because it helps the students learn. And there's a lot of research that says that lecture is really
a poor way for students to learn. And so doing active things like clickers and think-pair-share
is better, as well as group learning is better. And I think the flip - if it's done the right
way - is also another tool where students are applying the knowledge, and they're not just
sitting there passively trying to absorb the knowledge. And so I think, you know, my goal is I
want students to really learn it, not just learn it and forget it. And so the research says that
the flipping is part of that deeper learning. Awesome, and I love also what you said about the
students become more of the responsible party in the learning, and like if they have to watch
something before they come in they're sort of already they're taking responsibility of - I'm
building my foundation, come to class, now we're adding on - so yeah and they're already thinking
about it a little bit. Maybe they can then more easily come up with questions or fit it into what
they already know, so it's like "priming" them... If you're interested in how you can "prime"
your students to take more responsibility in their learning, you can contact Dr. Shannon
for even more ideas, or feel free to reach out to any members in our group here at CAFE.
We love to champion instructors who are going about new ways in teaching to reach their
students best. To see semester interviews, you can hit that "subscribe" button and to hear
our audio-only version, check out the link below for our podcast. I'm Victoria, and I'll
see you next time on CAFE Creative.
