Classroom flip-flops

I’m a classroom teacher. After 30-odd years, I should be accustomed to education absurdity. For example, it’s long been an article of faith among reformers that lecturing is bad. Experts even go so far as to ridicule teachers who lecture as “sages on a stage.” Education reform has become so extreme and nonsensical that its boosters actually prefer that teachers not be sages.

While lecturing isn’t the only way to teach, it is a valid, appropriate teaching method. The practice and the word itself date back to when books were scarce and students listened to their teacher read from books that the students didn’t have. Now, lectures more often involve a teacher sharing his knowledge and leading a discussion. While I’m no sage, I do hopefully know more than my students. Otherwise, you’d be wise to show me the door.

Reformers prescribe that I function instead as a “guide on the side.” They argue that my job is not to impart knowledge, but to step back and “facilitate” while 12-year-olds purportedly “follow the science,” “take a bigger role in shaping their own learning,” and otherwise investigate topics according to their “student-centered” individual interests. Leave them alone, and they’ll come home, wagging their intellectual curiosity behind them.

Forty years of education reform have proven to everyone except education reformers that this doesn’t work. In fact, reformers’ aversion to imparting knowledge is one reason so many students don’t have much. Ironically, while experts howl against lecturing, this is the chief instructional method they themselves employ when delivering their wisdom at teacher workshops. Visiting sages commonly read their PowerPoint presentations while their teacher audience simultaneously reads it to themselves off a large video screen.

There’s more to the reform faith than its hypocritical disdain for lecturing. In a perversion of reason almost as startling as lecturing against lecturing, reformers reject assigning homework on the grounds that it unfairly places students who don’t do it at a disadvantage because they wind up learning less than the students who do. Reformers apparently prefer that everyone be equally disadvantaged and learn equally less. At the same time, of course, all students will be successfully meeting new, world-class, even higher standards.

If at this point you’re laughing, bear in mind how calamitously stupid this all is. On the other hand, if you’re weeping for the future of the nation, it’s all so absurd, it is kind of funny.

Speaking of stupid and absurd, welcome to the “flipped classroom.” This new “technology-driven teaching method” can allegedly “reach every student in every class every day.” Not only is it “student-centered,” but it involves technology, which for twentyfirst century reformers automatically renders it a gift from God.

Under the old instructional “model,” homework involved reading to prepare for the next day’s class or practicing a skill students had learned in class that day. Teachers used class time to go over students’ independent homework, to explain new material, and for group discussion of what everyone was supposed to be learning. “Flipping” boosters simplistically reduce this to class was for “lecturing,” and home was for “practice.”

In the “flipped” model students at home watch “an eight- to 10-minute video” of what would have been their teacher’s classroom lesson and then in class the next day, practice what would have been their homework while their teacher floats around and facilitates. The video, by the way, often consists of “simply filming the whiteboard as the teacher makes notations and recording their [sic]voice.”

Apparently, classroom lecturing where students can ask questions and discuss things is bad, but a video of a lecture where they can’t is good.

Equally perplexing, if the teacher’s lesson can be reduced to an eight-minute video, what’s been happening previously during the rest of the class? Either the lesson can’t really be reduced to eight minutes, which it hopefully can’t be, in which case flipping slashes the time devoted to explaining new material, or there was already time during class to go over homework.

Proponents contend that “flipping” enables teachers and students to “discuss what they did at home.” There’s nothing new about this, except that in the past what students did at home meant what they’d practiced and read independently. Now instead of practicing skills and reading new material, they watch a video. All this somehow results in “students being responsible for their learning.” Substituting videos for books also solves our literacy problem by eliminating independent reading.

Apostles claim flipping means that “now teachers are actually working with kids.” Listen. I already discuss my students’ independent homework with them in class. I also introduce new material face to face, so I can gauge their reactions and tailor what I say and how I say it to the look on their faces. Anyone who tells you I can accomplish that in an eightminute video of my disembodied voice is guilty of either gross folly or deceit.

In the end, flipping accomplishes three essential reform goals. It gives technology purveyors yet another excuse to peddle their products to schools. It solves the problem of students not doing homework by eliminating homework. Worst of all, it employs words like “responsibility” and “work” to mask the sad reality that too many of our students, like too many of the rest of us, prefer a world where someone else is responsible and someone else does the work.