Flipped Learning Part 1 - Setting Tasks

Flipping without flopping part 1

Relevant for A-Level

Every year, there is a new idea that it is claimed will revolutionise teaching. Over the last few years, that idea has been flipped learning. Until recently, I had been very sceptical about completely transforming how I teach the A-Level to use flipped learning. Like many teachers who I discussed the idea with, I had some major concerns: what if the students don't do it? Then the whole lesson will be ruined! What if they don't understand it? Then I'll have to change my lesson and teach it anyway. Will I have to mark more? Is there any way that they could understand it as well as if I had taught it to them? So I wrote it off.

However, last year we had a reduction in the number of teaching hours for A-Level classes. As I believed I had used every hour wisely, I knew that I would need to try something drastic to fit in the content. When reflecting on my A-Level lessons, I felt like I was spending a large proportion of them defining new key terms, and that time to practise higher-level skills was suffering as a result. Suddenly, flipped learning seemed like not only a necessary idea, but a sensible one! Students could learn the key terms for the lessons at home, and then we could practise applying them in lessons and focus more on the higher-levels skills.

So I used my gained time before last summer to plan how to integrate flipped learning thoughout the A-Level. I am sure there are many ways to do this effectively, but I settled on two strategies that I thought would work for my students. I teach the extremes of mixed ability, so I focused on strategies that would allow all students to access the basics of the upcoming lesson, with a focus on the key terms and knowledge. I then added challenge tasks that would allow the top end to extend their learning beyond the A-Level course.

Strategy 1 - Prescriptive tasks (my main focus)

Students are given a bullet point list of what they need to know for the lesson. This is generally a list of key terms that they need definitions of, strengths and weaknesses tables that they need to create (for Research Methods content), or the names of theories/studies that they need to describe.

Particularly at the beginning of year 12, I make the tasks completely unambiguous. For instance, with key studies, I make it clear exactly how many bullet points of information they need about the aim, procedure, results and conclusion. I even specify how students should set out their work (see left and above for examples) to support those who have not yet developed the independent study skills to do this effectively. I emphasise to students that I am happy for them to use different revision strategies if they prefer (I find a lot of girls like flashcards for key terms) as long as they still cover the information on the task sheet. This gives them some ownership over the work that they are preparing.

I give students one week to complete each set of 'prep work' and revise the content ready for the lesson.

Strategy 2 - Creative tasks (revision lessons)

Towards the end of the year, I wanted students to be actively revising content outside of class as well as in my lessons. To facilitate this, I divided students into groups and each group was given the responsibility of creating revision tasks on a particular part of a topic ready for next week's lessons. As you can see from the example, each group's content was put onto the same sheet. This was done deliberately so that everyone could see what the lessons were going to be on, and so could revise the appropriate content. I am constantly amazed by the creativity of students. This example resulted in tasks from card sorts to crosswords, a 'Take Me Out' style board game (where the statistical test was looking for its data match) and a 'Guess Who?' style board game (where each statistical test was a different person e.g. 'Sally Spearman'). Students then completed the activities in class in a carousel, and I added activities to the mix afterwards to clear up any misconceptions and ensure the practise of effective exam technique.

Despite my scepticism, after a whole year of consistently using flipped learning, I wouldn't go back. It really works - I teach far fewer key terms and I save class time for higher-level skills. My exam results last year were just as good as the year before, and students' knowledge was still far above the national averages across topics. I've never marked work set for flipped learning - I check that students have done the work over the course of the lesson, but I never take it in. I've never had a problem with students not doing the work, even those who I struggle to get any other homework from always do the prep work. In the entire year, I had one student who didn't do the prep work once. I sent her away from the lesson to do the prep work, and then set her an after school detention to catch up the class work (detentions can be set in our Sixth Form for lack of homework). She didn't make the mistake again. I asked a colleague to independently interview some of my students to assess their feelings of flipped learning, and the overwhelming majority really like it. They feel that they are more in control of their learning, they know what the upcoming lesson will be on, and they feel safe in the knowledge that if they don't understand any of it, they can ask in the lesson and we'll go through it. They commented on how they had realised that sometimes I skipped flipped learning (for instance when we covered inferential statistics), and they appreciated doing the most challenging concepts from scratch in class. They even mentioned how they liked how we could spend lots of time on application and evaluation!

I would highly recommend flipped learning; give it a go and let me know how it works out.

If you are keen to give flipped learning a go but are not quite sure how your lessons would then be structured, comment on here or on Facebook to let me know that you want me to cover how to assess the learning from the prep work for my next post.