Throughout Elea High Online School’s website and social media posting you’ll see regular reference to ‘Flipped Learning’ and may well wonder what it is and why it’s so important.
The traditional model for class teaching is for a teacher to deliver the lesson content then ask the students to do work based on it. The negatives of this approach are the time taken to deliver the lesson content and ensuring it is delivered in a way that all students will understand and be able to access. Whilst all work should be differentiated for different abilities and learning styles, the elephant in most staff rooms is that differentiating effectively is nearly impossible unless copious time and resources are spent on it.
Flipped learning addresses elements of the problem as well as saving learning time by ‘flipping’ the structure of the lesson so the students undertake the preparation for the lesson before it, arriving at the lesson with the knowledge needed, ready to use that knowledge to solve problems, engage in critical thinking or undertake a task.
The teacher led element of a lesson typically uses around 40 – 50% of the lesson time, time saved if the student prepares in advance and is ready to start on the learning activity as soon as they sit down. The preparation is guided by the teacher and can be as simple as reading a text, a poem or trying out a maths problem in advance of being taught the method. It can be expanded or differentiated by adding in short relevant video clips or contextual information and it can be reworded at different levels. The student benefits too from being able to absorb the information at their own pace, go back over certain parts or use a dictionary for unfamiliar terms.
Studies show that the time saved in class, spent more productively, can have a dramatic effect on outcomes, leading to greater understanding of the material and better ability to apply the learning in different situations.
So, hopefully now you can understand the rationale behind Elea High Online School’s flipped learning approach and, when your child joins the school, be able to support them in the flipped element of their learning.
