How the Tables Have Turned

Salvete omnes and welcome back! Before we delve into this week’s blog topic, I need you to do something for me. Imagine with me please, you’re sitting in math class doing everything you are supposed to do. You’re paying attention to the teacher, you’re taking comprehensive notes, and you’re raising your hand to ask questions about concepts that seem a bit confusing. By the time class ends you feel like you have a pretty good grasp on everything you just learned. Now jump ahead with me a few hours and imagine that you are at home. You’re sitting down and beginning to start your math homework. You take a look at the first question and .... nothing.  Everything you learned has flown out the window and you are left confused and frustrated.

My sweet reader has this ever happened to you? Because, if so you are not alone and if I’m being honest with you this was my experience with all my math classes throughout high school. But what if I told you there was another way? Acknowledging the possibility of sounding like an infomercial, I’m excited to tell you that there is!

Flipping the classroom is an instructional approach that has been gaining a lot of  popularity and momentum recently. But wait a second! What is a flipped classroom?

A flipped classroom is the complete opposite from traditional classroom practices. In his article, Flipping Your EL Classroom: A Primer, John Graney explains that a flipped classroom can be broken into three parts: work at home, work in class, work after class.

Work at home: This is where the actual instruction takes place. Teachers can share or record their own videos that they assign for students to watch.  In the article, Three Reasons to Flip Your Classroom, the author Helaine Marshall explains that this enables students to work at their own pace as well as look up additional sources to help increase their comprehension of the material.

Work in class: Here students can utilize what they had previously learned in their studies in collaborative class activities. This setting is also more student-centered and allows teachers the ability to address any issues students may be having with the material and adapt to a group or individual student’s learning needs.

Work after class: This is the final part and here teachers can create or select assignments or activities to expand and broaden students’ understanding.

I’ve always been a fan of flipped classrooms but I have never had a name to connect with the concept. I think flipped classrooms have great potential to be used in LOTE classrooms because it would allow for the class to focus more on communication aspects of a second language that I feel sometimes get pushed aside to focus on the grammatical aspects of language. Currently within my graduate studies, I am in a flipped Latin class where we are studying the grammar and syntax of Latin compositions by taking Latin sentences and translating them into Latin. Similar to what was stated in the articles, I do enjoy the class more because I am able to learn at my own pace  I also feel that I am grasping the information better because I am able to further delve into material that I may be having problems with outside of the classroom.

And for just three low payments of $19.99…. Wait, I said this wasn’t going to be an infomercial. See you all next time.