Reflection on Flipping - Instructor's point of view

Note to self:  blogging is a terrible in-class activity!  If I were to actually use this technique in my classroom, I would want to use the time for interactive engagement - which I guess we accomplished for part of the time...  - but I think the real power here is for experiential learning where activities and active learning that are unlikely to happen independently can be carried out.  For example, guided lab activities, field trips, and discussions or Q and A sessions about specific content that is learned at home could really expand students' understanding of and engagement in the activity.  Blogging?  Probably not so much.

Ok, Ok, I wrote the above during class when I was really feeling anxious about just milling around (or turning to my own blog) while the rest of the class was working independently on their blog entries for ~8 minutes of class.   As an instructor/facilitator, it's hard to balance the desire to leave everyone alone so they can independently accomplish a task, with the desire to interact with students to make sure they are getting the most out of an activity.  I think the exercise we did in the TTT about Flipping the Classroom was a nice way to demonstrate the potential format (and therefore some possible strengths/weaknesses) of the Flipping technique, and probably gave folks a chance to reflect on the experience a little.   But it definitely marginalized us as the presenters!

One thing that came up for me is that since we didn't actually "transmit" a lot of the information that we had gathered in preparation for this class session, it was a lot harder to get the discussion going the same way it usually does when you've just presented something.  If you discuss something right after the lecture, it's usually right there at the forefront of everyone's brain and easy to have a common "jumping off point".  Since we really didn't check in with folks about their present level of understanding of the concept (or whether they had watched our brief powerpoint, or the TED talk, or even had prior experience implementing this technique themselves!), it was hard to know if the discussion and other in-class activities were effective or useful.  I think that this aspect of my experience "instructing" a flipped classroom was probably exacerbated because we were also instructing as a team, which inherently makes it harder (I think) for instructor(s) and students to be totally on the same page. 

Even in light of these potential drawbacks, I can definitely see some promising possibilities for using this technique in the Ecology classroom.  There are so many times when it seems like a subject in ecology could really "come alive" for the students much more effectively if they were doing something hands-on (be it via computer simulations or experiments) - and to a large extent, this obvious need for experiential learning is met by lab exercises.  But at the end of the day, the majority of time is often spent in lecture, with labs only comprising a small amount of engagement with the material.  I think partly this is due to the challenges of developing, funding, and implementing hands-on exercises, especially ones that can be completed and provide meaningful insights in a 50 or 75 minute period.  Still, for some particular topics, this seems like a worthy endeavor, and I plan to take the Protist Biology Flipped syllabus as a springboard for my future efforts at incorporating this method into my teaching!