Why Flip? Robert Talbert, a professor of mathematics at Grand Valley State University (MI), was drawn to the flipped model because it requires students to be active agents of their own learning, rather than rely on the expertise of their professor. The whole point of college is to learn how to teach yourself--thats what the rest of your life is going to require, he insists. You have to know how to find your own resources, make sense of them, and then put them to work as best as you can. In a flipped classroom, a professor is able to teach both content and process, he explains. The kinds of problems that people with degrees in mathematics get hired to work on are amorphous and poorly defined, Talbert continues. A lot of the problems my students will face dont even exist yet. We cant just focus on content coverage. We have to teach the ability to adapt and evolve along with the problems. Its a sentiment echoed by Eric Mazur, a professor of physics at Harvard University (MA). Learning is a two-step process, he says. First, you must have some transfer of information; second, you must make sense of that information by connecting it to your own experiences and organizing the information in your brain. In a traditional classroom, the transfer of information happens during class time, and the student is left to process the information on his own. About 22 years ago, I realized that we professors were focusing on the easy part--the transfer of information--rather than on the harder part, on helping students make sense of that information, remarks Mazur. With two decades of experience, Mazur can attest to the success of the flipped classroom model. When I taught using traditional lectures, I got high ratings, but students didnt learn even the most basic things in class, he admits. The only thing they were able to do was regurgitate information. In a flipped classroom, Mazurs students learn physics outside the classroom so that they can apply that information to collaborative, real-world projects, such as developing a Rube Goldberg contraption or planning an unmanned mission to Mars. The students get excited about the projects because they apply to the real world, but in order to complete a project, they need to learn the physics, he says. They quickly realize that if they dont participate in the pre-class homework, then theyre not able to participate in a meaningful way on these collaborative projects in class. The driving motivation for learning then becomes an intrinsic one rather than an extrinsic one. Its amazing how well it works.
Posted on: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 08:09:05 +0000
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