Thoughts on "Flipping the Classroom" - Joseph Sears School, Kenilworth

I am looking forward to flipping my classroom next year.

My motivations are:

1. Gaining back 10-15 minutes per day of one-on-one student-teacher time.
2. Moving to more advanced problems in-class, rather than catering to the struggling learners during lecture.
3. Enabling advanced students to move ahead at their own pace.

Potential issues:

1. Lack of computer availability.  This will be mitigated if every student has their own device to take home.
2. Lack of internet connection.  This can be mitigated if either the videos are kept short enough that students can do them as soon as they get to school, or if the videos are pushed to the device and are stored locally (i.e. iTunes University, or similar).
3. Students not paying attention during the video.  As recommended by Justyna Kalinowska (jkalinowska@kenilworth.org), insert pause points in the video, where students are required to stop and do the example problem.
4. Students not watching the video.  Do a short formative quiz at the beginning of the period that quickly identifies students who didn't watch the video.
5. Significant prep time associated with creating videos.  The teachers at Joseph Sears School both said that it typically takes 1 hour to prepare for 5 minutes of completed video.  This can be mitigated by using Khan Academy videos (http://www.khanacademy.org/), or similar.  Unfortunately, Sal Khan doesn't pause to allow students to try the work themselves, so it might be necessary to create our own.

-Chris Bruce
Physics Teacher
Conant High School