Defining the Flipped Classroom

What counts as a flipped classroom, and what doesn’t? This was a question that I and colleagues at Edinburgh Physics Education Research (EdPER) group faced recently. We have just had a paper accepted with the title ‘Characterizing interactive engagement activities in a flipped introductory physics class’.

The referees’ comments were helpful and constructive, but one referee requested that we remove all reference to flipping because what we described wasn’t a true flipped classroom. Their comment really surprised me:

This referee wrote ‘While I know that there are multiple definitions of flipped classrooms, as I understand, all flipped classrooms have some element of watching video lectures at home...’. The classes I studied do not use video lectures, instead students are asked to read a textbook/online notes before the lecture and to complete a quiz. Hence the referee’s issue.

Image:

Alper Çuğun

on Flickr

It is true that Jon Bergman, who essentially invented the flipped classroom for high school science classes, originally used videos to deliver the content prior to the lesson. It is also true that many people still do this. But I had no idea that people still think this is an essential part of the pedagogy.

Certainly both Eric Mazur (who invented Peer Instruction- the use of conceptual questions together with peer-discussion within lectures), makes is clear that videos are not a requisite part of the flipped classroom protocol.  But he does this in blogs and interviews, not in the published literature (that I know of – if you’ve seen anything, I’d love to hear about it).

So I was surprised to find that there are very few good clear definitions in the literature, even though the term is used widely. And even more surprised to find that one of the most cited papers, written by Bishop(2013), that contains a definition of the flipped classroom, does in fact state that

‘We restrict this definition to exclude designs that do not employ videos as an outside of the classroom activity.’

To me this doesn’t make any sense, and seems to loose sight of the goal of a flipped classroom (better conceptual understanding).

For me, (and Ross Galloway who taught the courses that I researched), the flipped classroom is based on the philosophy that a flipped course is one in which the content is delivered before the lecture, thus freeing up class time to be spent on more in-depth thinking about the content.

Jon Bergmann describes it as when ‘ direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space’

Videos may be the best way to deliver content, but other methods may be equally as good, or even better (see this blog post for more on pre-lecture activities). The goal of pre-lecture activities is not to use a particular technology, but to equip the students with the basic knowledge that they need to make the most of the active learning activities that take place during the lecture itself.


The closest definition to this in the literature that we found is given by Abeysekera and Dawson. (2015) and contains three components:

1.  move most information-transmission teaching out of class
2. use class time for learning activities that are active and social and
3. require students to complete pre- and/or post-class activities to fully benefit from in-class work.

However, we have issues with this one as well, particularly point 2, which seems to imply that all class time should be used for active and social learning activities.[Edit: Phillip Dawson, author of this work got in touch to say that this is not what he meant by point 2. However, it is how the referee interpreted it.]

In the first year physics lectures at the University of Edinburgh it is certainly true that the lecturer does not spend time delivering new content. He may however provide additional explanations or demonstrations. In fact we found that around 55% of the lecture time was spent on didactic lecturing. We suspect that this is quite low, even for lectures that claim to use active engagement pedagogies. I would certainly be surprised if anyone spends the entire contact time on active learning and social activities in higher education lectures – particularly as this gives no time for individual problem solving which happens as part of Peer Instruction. But very little research has looked at this in detail so far (and this was in fact the motivation for our paper).

It seems that a better definition of the flipped classroom is needed, but one that reflects practice as it happens in science instruction. To do that, we need to know what happens. Our paper proposes a simple framework that can be used to quantitatively characterise what happens in active learning lectures. So, if you are interested in adding to the literature in this area, look out for our paper, to be published in Physical Review, Physics Education Research, in the next few weeks!

Abeysekera, L., & Dawson, P. (2015). Motivation and cognitive load in the flipped classroom: definition, rationale and a call for research. Higher Education Research & Development, 34(1), 1–14.
Bishop, J. L., & Verleger, M. A. (2013). The flipped classroom: A survey of the research. In ASEE National Conference Proceedings, Atlanta, GA. Retrieved from http://www.studiesuccesho.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/flipped-classroom-artikel.pdf

Defining the Flipped Classroom, by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.