Author A Grace Martin: The Flipped Classroom

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The Flipped Classroom

Students not doing their homework?

Maybe the problem is that they need to switch things up! If you have a science student that goes home to BMX all night, then why not give the student enough materials to learn about the mechanics of ramps and bicycles at home, then let him/her come into class and do the homework on it?

I have often thought about using a flipped classroom for a high school physics course. So often physics teachers send home assignments with practice problems of increasing difficulty. By the time students have worked their way to the more complicated questions, they realize that they have no idea how to tackle them any more.

What I would do is create lecture videos or notes for the students to watch or read at home. When they come to class all we would do is work on practice problems from different approaches and in different styles. This would reduce the amount of time that students need to put toward their homework because they only have to watch a 30 minute video or read a set of notes, versus spending hours banging their heads trying to figure out the problems on their homework assignment and getting nowhere. Do you think that this approach could actually enable physics teachers to assign more homework, because students will understand the approach and complete the assignments faster than they would with the traditional structure of a classroom?

I want to avoid the situation in which my students feel like they don't actually know what is being asked of them. I do not think that we should throw our students into a marathon of questions after they have only just learned how to walk with the formulas. In conclusion, I want to avoid making them feel like this: