21k12

This is a five minute presentation I am making today as part of an NAIS 3 hour workshop, Becoming A School of the Future: The conversation continues.  The slides themselves are almost entirely image driven; my talking points for each slide are below.

Notes on slides:

Slide 2. What does reverse instruction reverse?  It reverses what is still the most conventional mode of teaching (but that it is conventional does not mean it is universal): in this mode, teachers lecture, using class-time for presenting and delivering content knowledge.

(NB: I love this particular photo of a lecturing teacher, but the teacher in question actually lectures rarely and is one of my school’s best practicioners of reverse instruction).

Slide 3. In the conventional mode, then, students having received “content delivery” in class during the school-day, work at home on their homework, applying what they have learned (or not) to the problems testing their acquired knowledge.   As they do, they are isolated in their work, potentially stymied by it, and do not have the teacher available to support or coach.

Slide 4. We have however fast-changing developments in the availability online of content delivery vehicles.   Pat Bassett has been saying for at least a year, maybe longer that Khan Academy is going to be tranformative in ways we are only beginning to perceive.  Khan Academy, you know, has literally thousands of lectures in the sciences and math, but swiftly expanding, in which he carefully and effectively explains key concepts online, succinctly, for free.

Slide 5. It is not just basic instructions or simple lectures only that are available, but also high quality university lectures such as via MIT OpenCourse ware.   Our students now and increasingly will have great teaching (in the form of content delivery) widely and freely available to them.  (And in fact, the ideas and practices of reverse instruction are being discussed much more widely on a college level than in K-12 for these reasons).

Slide 6.  Meanwhile conventional classrooms are not working well for our students.  I am not sure they ever worked well; this was problematic long before the digital revolution: remember Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?   In the Fall of 2008 I visited 21 high schools, spending full school days shadowing a student at each, and I saw exactly this picture far too often.   When kids can get better lectures and content delivery free and online, what is going to entice them to keep coming to school?

Slide 7.  This is the argument, most of you know, of Disrupting Class: that the online learning revolution is coming, and will be highly disruptive to schools.   Online content delivery will exceed dramatically in value what can be delivered by many of our teachers, and schools, it is argued, must regroup and rethink what their value is to remain relevant.

Slide 8.  Do the Flip. Reverse Instruction isn’t a Panacea.   And it is isn’t new, altogether, but it is newly and dramatically enabled by a myriad of new technologies.   It is also uncomplicated– so uncomplicated that sometimes it seems a bit silly to be making too much of it– and yet, I think that even thought it is not altogether new and not uncomplicated, it is transformative and essential.

Slide 9: Flip teaching entails teachers redeploying the content delivery, whether through using the free resources of Khan Academy, MIT, and other such sites, or, and this is just as important, by making their own lectures available for studentsvia podcast, vodcast, webvideo,

Slide 10 and narrated powerpoints.

Slide 11. Students can now watch teacher lectures on computers, and there is some reason to think that as a vehicle for content delivery they prefer this to reading textbooks.   Delivering content this way has other advantages: absent students can always access the important lectures they missed, and students can pause and replay sections of lectures as often as they need, and can return to them later in the semester.

Slide 12. With content delivery “flipped” the classroom time become newly available, far more than before, for active, hands on learning, in the space where the materials are.   The new Guide to becoming a School of the Future calls upon us to implement Project Based Learning in our classrooms, but I know teachers often feel they don’t have time.   Flip teaching to make the time.

Slide 13. Flipping also creates more time for student collaboration in class.

Slide 14: And for more ability of teachers to work closely to support students.

Slide 15: Ditto

Slide 16. A quick tangent, in conclusion.  I am very fascinated by this book, Where Good Ideas Come From, and other books and articles like it (Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, and Chris Anderson’s Wired Magazine Article and TED Talk, Crowd Accelerated Innovation) which discuss the process of innovation; each of them describes the way the internet facilitates the swift spread and development of an idea, tool, or technique.  It has been fun to watch this happen in the past months around Reverse Instruction.

Slide 17. A ning site, moderated by two Colorado teachers who are among the key pioneers in this practice, has been an important forum for developing the tools of what they first called Teacher Vodcasting and now, only last week, changed the name to The Flipped Classroom.

Slide 18. In summer I began writing about Khan Academy and its looming impact, and as I tweeted about it, others tweeted back with references to Teacher Vodcasting and the Fisch Flip.

Slide 19. I wrote this after an article by Dan Pink appeared in the Telegraph, in London, about the teaching of Karl Fisch in Colorado– and the Pink article only came to my attention via Twitter– and I posted it onto a shared blogsite called Connected Principals, which is a far more socially neworked site than my own individual blog.   It has since been viewed  nearly 4000 times since November, at a pretty steady flow of 25-40 a day, and retweeted several hundred times: what has been especially fun is to see teachers in Canada, Singapore, Texas, Connecticut, and elsewhere blog posts about their Flipping experiments citing my post as a resource– all thanks to the social and innovative power of the web.

Slide 20.  Similarly, Chris Bigenho, of Greenhills School (TX), who does such a great job promoting social networking among NAIS educators, has been using his NAIS AC platform to promote and train people on what he is calling the “Snow Day Flip” – a variant on flipping.