“Think of the presidential election process as having two parts.” A student in the third seat of the second row caught my eye, and I drifted toward her as I continued our lesson. “The first part involves state-level elections.”
Lily tapped her iPad screen woodpecker-like and bit her lip.
I leaned toward her. Lowered my voice. “You okay?”
“It’s logged me out. I can’t get back in.”
A moment later, I returned Lily’s tamed iPad to her desk and posed a question to get the class back on track. “How would you describe a popular election? Sam, go ahead.”
“A popular election is when everyone gets a vote.”
“Good start. How is a winner determined? Who wins?”
Javier raised his hand.
I clapped dramatically and pointed. “Take it, Javie!”
“Can I go to the bathroom?”
I deflated like a balloon yet tried not to let it show. “I appreciate you asking, but, remember, you don’t need to if you see the pass. Make sure you sign-out.”
“Mr. Cooper?”
“Yes, Sarah.”
“Did you say the presidential election process has two parts or three?”
Experiences like this led me to experiment with the flipped classroom teaching strategy, and my interest grew as access to technology and our use of it grew during the two-thousand teens, but convincing me the flipped approach had real value for middle school students took a pandemic and a school shutdown. Even then, I only realized significant benefits after I flipped the flipped approach by creating pre-recorded video clips of content and directions to use during class instruction— not, necessarily, for use at home.
More on the Flipped Approach
A Brookings Institute commentary entitled “Flipped learning: What is it, and when is it effective?” authored by Patricia Roehling and Carrie Bredow in 2021 offered a clear description of flipped learning and a helpful synthesis of over 300 studies regarding its use. The true flipped classroom, in essence, calls upon a teacher to conduct an in-class introduction to a given topic; to provide resources, materials, and a clear expectation for students to explore the topic at home; and, to facilitate active-learning experiences in the classroom to construct meaning from what students could acquire on their own. This all sounded great to me, especially for mature self-directed students, but what did this look like in real-world application for younger students?
Some of my early experiments with true “classroom flipping” yielded three obstacles: 1) I could not guarantee all students had access to devices and internet connections to conduct the “homework,” 2) the work at home would not always be accomplished, and 3) I could not always tell who did the work— was it the student or overly-helpful Uncle Leroy? Despite these obstacles, I learned enough to see how I could modify the flipped approach for in-class applications increasing student-directed learning experiences and to make myself more available for one-on-one support.
Conveying Content
As much as we educators would like to eliminate passive learning approaches from our tool kits, like the transmission model of teaching (in other words, lecture), there are simply times when we need to provide students with some background content in order to launch them into something more active. I found recording these bits of lecture and providing the recordings through our school’s online learning management system yielded multiple benefits for students and their families:
- Students could rewatch recordings whenever necessary;
- Students could use the pause button to help with pacing (to facilitate note-taking or use with an activity);
- Families trying to help their students at home could also access our content;
- Absent students would have access to the same material as students in the classroom, and
- Recordings were available 24/7 for students to reference when reviewing for summative assessments.
Providing Activity Directions
Multi-step directions can be hard to write, hard to convey, and hard for students still developing executive-functioning skills to interpret and carry-out. The benefits of using pre-recorded directions, or offering these to complement live directions, are the same as those for conveying content in the flipped-flipped fashion plus one big one— the teacher is more available to move around the room to assist struggling students. Anyone who has led a group of students through a set of directions knows the challenges: students needing steps repeated, spying a student flying his construction paper like a pterodactyl instead of doing step number three, noticing a girl painting her hand with glue, having to stop for a student arriving to class half-way through the activity— and the list continues.
How Do I Make The Recordings?
Recordings do not need to be Hollywood productions. The cameras and native video-editing apps on phones, tablets, and laptops are more than adequate to create helpful recordings, and most devices enable you to capture screen-recordings to create read-aloud or to share digital documents while providing voice-over narrations.
For instance, at the time I wrote this post, Apple users can use the shift-command-5 keystroke to enable the screen capture utility. Users can choose to capture selected windows, portions of windows, entire screens, or make video recordings of the same. Photo Booth is an Apple-native application enabling users to snap photos or video-record using the device’s camera. These two capabilities are my go-to’s when creating “raw material.” I then import this material into iMovie, another staple of the Apple world, to clean it up and cut mistakes.
Some Helpful Tips When Making Recordings
- Create a bullet-point list of what you wish to convey to students and avoid writing word-by-word scripts. I have found cuing from anything more than lists of important points results in a recording sounding like a recitation– mechanical and lifeless. My best recordings tended to be when I “taught to the camera.”
- Record in front of a simple and still background– don’t record from the middle of a freeway.
- Come-up with some kind of “Schlick” and use this to connect videos. I have a bad hat I use in many of my videos, and students will often ask, “Is the hat in this one?”
- Keep going if you make a mistake and simply repeat correctly what you wanted to say initially. You can split/cut and merge digital footage later. Keeping the camera rolling will help you stay “in the flow” and reduces lost time stopping, restarting, and managing multiple documents in post-production.
- Don’t obsess. Remember, this is a recording for your classroom and will not be considered for an Academy Award. Relax, be natural, make your recording, and clean-up what is necessary in “post production” but don’t go down the rabbit hole of unrealistic expectations.
In Conclusion
I saved one important benefit of flipping the flipped classroom for the end. A little something for readers who have made it this far in the post. Once you have made your recordings, you have them for future use and collaboration. Do you plan to use your lesson on the history of squirting corsages and rubber noses again next year? Well, you now have a five-minute content video and a three-minute set of activity directions you can use again or revise to improve. Your Clown Sciences teacher up the hall wants to use your lesson? Share your video resources along with your handouts.
The most important benefit I see in all of this is a way to increase the number of one-on-one interactions in the classroom, something becoming more difficult in schools with increasing numbers of students and needs. Every student deserves at least a moment of our attention each day. Hopefully, adding this approach to your toolbox will help to make this a reality.
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