Charles M. Reigeluth

Chapter 12

Designing Instruction for Flipped Classrooms

Jeremy Strayer

 

Editors’ Foreword

 

Preconditions (when to use the theory)

      Content

• The content during class must include learner-centered tasks that are completed as part of

                a learning community.

      Learners

• All Students.

      Learning environments

• Students must meet regularly in a face-to-face setting.

• Students must have access to technology for communicating outside of class.

      Instructional development constraints

• Time and possibly money and equipment are needed to prepare the out-of-class materials and activities.

 

Values (opinions about what is important)

      About ends (learning goals)

• The development of student thinking, reasoning, and communication skills is highly valued.

      About means (instructional methods)

• Learning by doing (active learning) is highly valued.

• Learning from peers by collaborating to solve non-routine problems is highly valued.

• Teachers should prepare students outside of class, to facilitate instructional efficiency in class.

      About priorities (criteria for successful instruction)

• Efficiency is highly valued. Teachers use digital technologies to communicate with students outside of class to facilitate instructional efficiency.

      About power (to make decisions about the previous three)

• Students should take responsibility for their learning both outside and inside the classroom.

 

Universal Methods

     1. Use out-of-class activities to encourage student reflection and elicit a response from students.

• Determine the information that is important for in-class tasks.

• Reify (concretize) the information.

• Convey reified information to students prior to class to initiate construction of knowledge.

• Elicit a response from students to assess understanding and guide in-class tasks.

     2. Use in-class tasks to build new knowledge as part of a learning community.

• Require students to reflect on and critique their reasoning and the reasoning of other community members.

• Use tasks that ask students to draw on past experience and/or initiate a new experience for students to consider in the classroom.

• Facilitate discussion with the goal of connecting students’ thinking, strategies, and representations to relevant course content.

     3. Use the same instructional approach for out-of-class-activities and in-class tasks.

 

Situational Principles

Situational principles are based on the instructional approach used and are determined by aligning the components (i.e., methods) of the approach with the universal principles for flipped instruction. The author provides situational principles for two instructional approaches as examples to guide application of flipped instruction to other approaches.

     For a discussion approach

• Use out-of-class activities to create opportunities for students to share what they have learned (e.g., their analyses and solutions) with the learning community.

• Use out-of-class activities to have students prepare responses to what their classmates have shared.

• Use in-class tasks to facilitate productive discussions that require students to critically respond to arguments made by others in the learning community.

• Use in-class tasks to create opportunities for students to draw conclusions supported by evidence, based on the information shared by members of the learning community.

     For a problem-based instruction approach

• Use out-of-class activities to pose the problem under study and provide supporting content materials. Initial guidance/modeling for students may entail creating new media.

• During in-class tasks, require students to find and present solutions to authentic, complex, ill-structured problems while scaffolding their understanding and supporting reflection on learning.

• Use additional out-of-class activities to build on in-class work to support students’ metacognitive processing and problem solving skills and support students’ debriefing of the problem.

• Use additional in-class tasks to assess students’ content knowledge and problem solving skill and connect to out-of-class activities that support debriefing of the problem.

 

Implementation Issues

• Care must be taken that flipped instruction does not devolve into lecture/homework cycles of instruction.

• Initially, students may react negatively.

• Teachers may find the approach time consuming.

• Teachers may have difficulties in addressing students’ varied ways of thinking.

                                                                                                                                                                                       –  C.M.R., B.J.B & R.D.M.

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