the flipped classroom in elt 1

8/20/2019 The Flipped Classroom in ELT 1

1/3

Cambridge English Teacher © Cambridge University Press and Cambridge English Language Assessment 2014

The Flipped Classroom in ELT; Part 1

Flipped learning – or the flipped classroom – is one of the hot topics in education at the moment.It’s a core part of the drive towards integrating technology into learning in order to improve studentoutcomes. So, what exactly is the flipped classroom and what could it mean for ELT? And how welldoes the concept even work for language teaching?

Definition

Flipped learning reverses the ‘standard’ model of teaching by delivering instruction and input tostudents at home through self-study materials and moving the ‘homework’ element to the

classroom. The idea is that class time is therefore focused on the elements of learning that benefitthe most from the support and input of the teacher and fellow students. Straightforward knowledgetransmission can be covered just as well (maybe better, in fact) through online self-study, withstudents able to work at their own pace until they’ve got the basics covered. So, it’s essentially aform of blended learning, but a little more prescriptive in terms of what should best be done athome and what should best be done in class.

How is it done?

The flipped classroom seems to be gaining most traction in the US education system, where ittends to consist of teachers or university lecturers making video lectures which they then makeavailable online, with students then doing practice activities and problem-solving tasks in class.That does suggest that the standard ‘unflipped’ classroom involves a teacher mainly lecturingstudents – something that is hopefully less common in ELT.

Why do it?

Well, it certainly sounds logical and attractive. Some of the key benefits are:

•

Students get more 1:1 time with their teacher because less classroom time is spent with theteacher talking at the students.• It helps to facilitate peer teaching.• It makes it easier to group and pair students more effectively – for example, learners who

struggled with a concept at home can be paired with students who found it straightforward.• It allows teachers to build a resource of online materials (video lectures or explanations for

example) which they can re-use and share with colleagues.• It allows students to work more at their pace and catch up on missed lessons.• It helps to create a collaborative learning environment in the classroom, since more time can be

spent communicating, rather than sitting listening to the teacher.


2/3


According to adaptive learning company Knewton, student engagement with concepts taught inschools generally is poor, while 30% of internet users have used online educational videos, such asthose provided by the Khan Academy; these two facts suggest that the flipped classroom could bea way of improving education. Knewton say that some of the benefits of the flipped model are:

• Students get instant feedback on practice activities, since they are done in class with theteacher.

• If they get stuck with their ‘homework’ they have a teacher (and other students) on hand to getthem through the brick wall.

Students can build a list of questions as they watch the online video and bring them in to class forthe teacher to go through with them – this ensures that classroom time is spent working on theareas that students most need help with.

There is some evidence (including in the Knewton article) that moving to a flipped model can resultin more engaged, better behaved students and improved learning outcomes. As the flipped modelmatures and continues to grow in popularity, we’ll see more examples and get a better sense ofhow effective it is and how best to apply it.

Any disadvantages?

The obvious issue is that it relies 100% on all students being able to access the online content. And if that content is primarily video-based, then they’ll need reasonably fast internet access. Another problem is the need to create all of that self-study online content. Even simple video clipsare an extra stage in the process of setting up a course, new skills for a teacher to develop andextra preparation time. There are blended learning options available from publishers which couldbe used in a flipped class course, but none of them were really designed specifically for it, so therewill always be compromises, and deciding which elements to do in class and which your studentsshould do at home isn’t necessarily all that straightforward. Also, there may be a risk of studentsfeeling they’re not getting full value if the ‘main’ instructional content is delivered online rather than

by the teacher. And finally, how ready are the students to take responsibility for their own learning?If they don’t bother to do the online learning, then you may end up using classroom time to coverthe input material that the students were supposed to have engaged with at home.


3/3


Does ELT need flipping?

If you’re reading this, then I suspect you’ve never taught English by simply giving lectures to yourstudents every lesson and then asking them to do sets of practice activities as homework. So,perhaps flipped learning as it’s usually defined isn’t really an inversion of the communicativeapproach in English language teaching. But the basic principle behind what flipped learning oughtto be is as valid for language learning as it is for anything else – identify which areas are primarilyabout input and get students to do those outside class so that in-class time is spent on areas wherethe presence of a teacher, and other learners, is most useful. Applying this principle may result in aless dramatic change to a communicative ELT classroom than it does to, say, a US university, but

there are still interesting possibilities and implications in our industry. Part two of the article will lookat some of the practical issues surrounding the flipped classroom.

References

http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/

https://www.khanacademy.org/about

the flipped classroom in elt 1

Documents