On flipped learning

My experience of why it works and doesn't work

Another metaphor of the cycle, in this case going nowhere.

Have you heard of the chef’s dinner or the mechanic’s car? The cheese toastie and piece of crap Corolla respectively. Well, I have the teacher’s kids. If you ask any teacher, this can go one of two ways. The over-involved, “Don’t you know I’m a Dean at (insert GPS school here?)” or the more common free-range style parent, too busy with other people’s kids to put anything more than blind faith into their parenting. The latter is me.

I love my girls, so I’ve outsourced things like caring about their education - I’m being facetious. They have a great mathematics tutor, a super smart ex-student of mine who is no-nonsense and who they want to please by doing things like independent practice. It turns out that the girls’ environment has played a big part in their intrinsic motivation. They go to a public girls school in a leafy suburb, where parents and students care about education, and I talk about achievement all the time. So it turns out they don’t need a tutor but we keep her as a kind of security blanket. Not uncommon. This gets me, in a long-winded recipe-blog kind of way, to flipped learning.

For the last couple of years, both girls have been working with their tutor from a text book above grade level. This has led to their massive confidence in test-taking and my eldest is taking Mathematics Extension next year, having already worked her way through at least a term of 2022 work. They’ve essentially been following a principle of flipped learning but with the added benefit of spaced practice and retrieval. My eldest tells me that she has loved being taught tough concepts in Mathematics for the second time by her school teacher. By the time she studies for a test, she is getting her third exposure. And according to Graham Nuthall, the third time is the trick. There are two things that frustrate me about this amazing opportunity.

Most students can’t access this kind of iterative learning. It’s grossly impractical in schools and for most it would be prohibitively expensive to maintain tutor fees. We stumbled on it as a success almost by accident. Because I like to at least offer a solution, might I suggest that curricula are way too crowded and we could achieve these iterative cycles with a rethink of volume? There’s not an easy way to implement this one, but I feel intuitively - and with the benefit of knowing a bit about how learning happens - that it’s been a large factor in my eldest daughter’s success.

Flipped learning is a kind of solution to iterative learning and maximising teacher time for discussion and clarification, but it doesn’t usually take advantage of spacing, which I actually think could be key. I have tried to flip various aspects of learning, mainly the pre-reading of course materials, and its second fundamental problem is that more often than not, a handful of students don’t engage with the flipped learning materials. Probably these reasons are contextual - family busyness, student organisation and motivation, an infinite list of other demands and distractions. But it only takes a couple of unprepared students to derail the lesson.

I think part of the success of this accidental teaching and learning cycle is that my girls have no choice about when or how many times they will engage with the materials, other than when/if they cram their study. From what I have seen, their pre-test study with their tutor seems to be mainly practising areas of weakness rather than a true third exposure. The difficulty level is then high and we know that additional challenge helps memory. I do wonder how iterative cycles might work in my own subject. I teach mainly seniors where we have to cram in close study of oh, I don’t know, a whole novel and a Shakespeare play in eight weeks. The case for flipped learning is strong but the implementation is challenging and risky. What if the success I have seen at home is more to do with the multiple exposures, and not just the flipping?

It seems to me that we know all the theory about learning and memory but often don’t have a lot of time to actually implement best practice. It sounds to me like a great action research focus, but potentially a lot of extra work. Feel free to share your flipping and classroom revision hacks with me. Hopefully there are some great minds reading this that can solve this dilemma.