Flipping the Classroom in a Dream World and in the Real One [Module 4]

There is a given starting point in this flipped classroom thinking, which is the idea that students are automatically motivated to study at home or somewhere outside the classroom. They are thought to be interested and willing to inquire the given subject. I have to admit that I struggle a bit with this kind of view. I've seen so many students who don’t bother to watch any kind of video no matter how interestingly it may look to me. And they don’t read texts or listen audio materials which I have carefully uploaded to the web for them. I think that this starting point - that students are always motivated to learn - should be problematized a bit. Why should we suggest this in the first place? Is there any basis or evidence for this kind of presumption? And another question is the limited time. Some students just don’t have time enough for all the homework at their spare time.

In some cases this will work, some students are motivated to do this, but the major problem is with those student who doesn't work at home. And if I build my whole teaching on this supposition that knowledge is absorbed from the web at home and then in school we just apply this knowledge and practice skills, quite many students will simply drop off since they don’t have any glue what we are talking about on my lessons. The very idea that we should practice skills and apply knowledge together at school is excellent, but the supposition that students will do all the needed work outside the classroom just like that is far too idealistic.

Of course there are some ways to motivate the students to work outside the lessons. We just should bare in mind that the motivation won't pump up automatically with each and every student. So after all I am in favor of flipped classroom and I have tried to develop this kind of teaching practices.

I teach history and civics and in my subjects thinking is done with concepts. Concepts are a kind of tools which we need in order to think properly and if you don’t master the needed concepts it would be the same thing as try to build a house without any tools. Concepts have to be learned, memorized, practiced, and applied and we don’t have enough time to do all this at school. Therefore it would be wise to take over these tools at home and learn to apply those with other students at school - for instance through discussions, group work and arguments. This has been my teaching philosophy for last years and there is some similarities with the idea of flipped classroom.

I have tried to apply this philosophy with assignments, texts, timelines and videos which I have uploaded to Moodle learning environment. The idea is that students will read the textbook at home and work with simple assignments, or they watch a video from Youtube and make these assignments. I have used assignments in order to take care that students will get some sort of basic understanding of the given subject. At the classroom I've tried to to encourage the students to discuss and argue with each other and implement some critical thinking and analysis. At least sometimes and for some part I have succeeded, but there is still far too many students who won’t participate and who don’t bother to strain their brains.