City embraces the ‘flipped classroom’
Innovative homework approach has students learn concepts via video, solve problems with the teacher
When some students head back to class this fall, they’ll leave their math homework at school some nights. And no, it won’t be by accident.
Rather than grapple with rows of tricky textbook problems, the students will be asked to hit “play” on instructional videos designed to teach math concepts in an engaging way.
Working on those problems, which traditionally would have been assigned as homework, will instead fill their in-class time.
The arrangement is known as the “flipped classroom,” and it’s gaining traction throughout North America, with some teachers claiming it has increased attendance and graduation numbers, helped to lower failure rates and improved grades.
In the GTA, classrooms in nearly every board have given it a go.
This September will mark the second year that it’s been used by a handful of teachers at Sir William Mulock Secondary School in Newmarket.
Donna Green, a Grade 10 math instructor at the school, said students were “excited” about the model when it was first introduced in her class because “it was something different than just going to math class and listening to a lecture for an hour.”
“They like the fact that they get extra time in class to do homework,” she said. “It means doing more math in school and less math at home.”
It also means there’s more time for Green and fellow “flipped classroom” teacher Amanda Belanger to spend getting to know students and identifying ex- actly what parts of the course they’re finding troublesome.
Usually, the pair prepare 10- to 15-minute videos outlining basic math concepts in advance.
When a new topic is introduced to their lessons, students are assigned to watch a matching video uploaded to a website — more than once if they need to.
The next day, they dedicate the first 20 minutes of class to fielding questions about anything the students might not have been able to understand from the video.
Following the discussion, they dole out in-class work, which is often done in a group setting.
The success of the model “relies completely” on the quality of the videos, said Charles Pascal, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, who had never encountered the concept until the Star asked him about it.
“When educational television first came out, years and years ago, there were professors who used the same bad lecturing techniques that they did with 100 students for 1,000 students, because it could be broadcast at the same time,” he said, warning that if a flipped classroom video simply replicates a standard chalkboard lecture on camera, it’s “just another pseudo-innovation that simply won’t add much value.”
Video, he said, is conducive for deductive thinkers, who can “take in lots of content, sentence after sentence,” but hard for inductive learners, who “can’t process lots of information being presented in a unidirectional and dense manner.”
Green conceded that by the end of one of her semesters teaching students in a flipped classroom, about one-third said they still preferred traditional techniques.
She mixes conventional teaching methods and homework with the flipped concept and spends extra time reviewing any parts of her videos students might have found confusing.
She told the Star, “I can’t pick a teaching style that is going to please every single student, but I like the fact that there were a significant number of students who did like this.”