Flip Your Classroom: Reaching Every Student in Every Class Every Day

Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every DayAuthors: Jonathan Bergmann & Aaron SamsIste: Eugene, Oregon, Washington, DC; ASCD: Alexandria, VirginiaNonfiction: Education, Student Centered Learning, Flipped ClassroomBackground: Jonathan and Aaron were two teachers who taught science at the same school. They began developing lessons together. Their school was in a rural setting and several students missed class because of sports and activities. Students struggled to keep up with the course work. Getting tired of the same problem over and over, Aaron found software in a technology magazine that showed screen casting abilities for recording tools like PowerPoint. He showed his discovery to Jonathan. They thought this would help their students, so they began recording their lessons in 2007. They initially recorded there videos out of "selfishness" they were tired or re-teaching lessons to students who missed class. They then decided to flip their classroom to increase learning in the classroom. This book shows what worked in their experience and also what did not work for them.Some of my favorite quotations from the book are as follows. I have also included some that I believe are most important.This is a question that one of the authors always asks. I believe this is an imperative questions in which the results lead to high student achievement."What is best for the students in my classroom?""Personalize the students' education."Note: The authors did not come up with the term of flipped classroom. They were not the first to use this model and they used a lot of inquiry in their lessons before they went to the flipped model. Jonathan and Aaron posted all their AP and regular chemistry lessons online. They began to get all sorts of feedback from teachers and students all of the country. They compared year to year results and concluded that the flipped model was a better approach than the traditional."Flipping the classroom establishes a framework that ensures students receive a personalized education tailored to their individual needs.""Educators are expected to find a way to reach these students with their very different needs. Personalization of education has been proposed as a solution."The first year was full of a lot of inexperience and they made a lot of mistakes. When they reflected whether they should continue they decided they couldn't go back to the old way."Our method was changing students' abilities to become self-directed learners.""Our ultimate goal is for all students to really learn chemistry." They shared this book with their experiences so that if the reader decides to flip they can learn from their mistakes and successes."Flipping the classroom is more about a mindset: redirecting attention away from the t teacher and putting attention on the learner and the learning."This a great book full of helpful details and experiences of two teachers and how they flipped their classroom. It was a very quick read, and very interesting. I thought they even added some humor to their writing. I learned a lot about how I want to go about flipping my classroom.I basically agreed with everything this book said. It was like they were reading my mind the whole time. The authors are much more knowledgeable on this topic than me, and I learned a lot from them. I do not remember blatantly disagreeing with them at all. Everything they said, they had valid reasons, and evidence to back it up. I just love the idea of flipping the classroom, and am very excited to do this to my classroom.The book talks about losing face to face interaction. It mentions several ways in which they actually instead, increase interaction with their students. There are several stories on how they go to know students even better had they not changed their classroom structure. It also talks about the student's end of the year performance compared to the traditional approach. It does not elaborate much on grades because the change was not that significant. It also brings up the issue of teaching all learners which is a very important topic to address in this era. Students with this model will be in charge of their learning. And it is taking the focus off the teacher and putting it on the students. It even mentioned once that they wanted to change what their classroom was called to learning spaces. I love this idea too, and might adopt it in my future classroom.This book just solidified my beliefs of flipping my classroom. I am now a complete and true believer. I always knew I wanted to, I just didn't know all the small details, or where to start. I feel like I know have a good grasp of what I want to achieve. Since I will be in a math classroom I feel this reversing the role is a great idea.Overall, this is a wonderful book to read. I will most definitely be reading it again in the future to try and perfect my classroom. There are a lot of good tips in about how to increase learning in the classroom. The authors were always talking about how the focus is on the students. This book gives great tips on how to flip a classroom. There are real life examples of successes and failures of two high school teachers. They have great reasons why they did what they did, and a great story to tell. It was well worth the read, even if you do not want to flip your classroom. The reader can learn a lot about teaching too. I would recommend this to any teacher or educator interested in improving the quality of their class.

Unlike the other reviewers, I am not a teacher. I started my career as one but after 5 years transitioned to designing corporate training. A big topic now that's of great personal interest to teachers AND trainers is how technology and eLearning are changing our perceptions not only about how people learn best (at all stages of their academic and work lives) but also whether it's time to realign an archaic teaching model. As you can imagine, those with years in the classroom staunchly defend the importance of working with learners face-to-face, while technology-oriented people argue for the scale, the ability to access learning when needed and to work at one's own pace that self-directed learning offers.From a political perspective teachers are made to feel guilty for graduating students who "are not equipped for today's jobs." Some blame teachers for not accepting technology because that's not the way they learned. Others argue for technology because many more people in all locations can be taught simultaneously. What seems strange is that in the 90's there was a lot of interest in the school-to-work transition. There were conferences about it. Companies were "adopting" schools to help them. Technology companies were even working with young children as focus groups to see how they thought about new technologies. Then--suddenly--all that interest seemed to fade away and there was more of a disconnect between schools and job providers. If you want to be cynical, perhaps companies figured out they could send their jobs off-shore and so they didn't care so much about American education. And so today, we have people wondering whether a college degree is "worth it" anymore if it doesn't lead to good jobs.It was within these two personal and political contexts that I read "Flip Your Classroom." The book is simple and well-put-together. It argues for using video screencasts to capture the lectures that teachers do and making that homework so students can come to class ready to work and discuss their assignments. The teachers can then focus almost all the valuable classroom time on helping their individual or small groups of students to progress through the curriculum at their own best pace and to succeed. What's great about this book is that on a personal level it helps those face-to-face teachers and those technology-oriented teachers to do both/all of the things they're lobbying for. It's not one or the other but both approaches that lead to success.For me, the implications of flipping have even greater consequence in the political context. Here are two teachers who used the knowledge of their subject and their interest in technology and personally decided to do something dramatic. They didn't ask for permission. When others realized what they were doing, they started to emulate the approach (the book contains some testimonials of others who took similar approaches). While their success seems somewhat localized, you can see how this can lead to a sense of empowerment as teachers and trainers no longer feel powerless to personalize their content and activities to their audiences (even if those audiences exist virtually around the world). Today's generation of teachers -- empowered by their own second-nature familiarity with Google, YouTube, Twitter, etc. and wanting desperately to help their kids against all odds -- seem primed to finally change a teaching model that's been around for way too long.Americans always seem to feel smarter because of the way we invent and use technology, and yet we see how other countries are moving past us in the learning and test scores of our students. This is the story of how this trend can be reversed. Let's hope, though, that these efforts can be supported and accelerated--maybe even by companies who used to care about our schools and now are ready to refocus on where improved teaching integrated with effective technology can start to take us. Perhaps there can be a bigger-picture effort to promote these efforts and get people working together to adopt the habits and devices our kids are using already and to make education relevant and definitely "worth it" again.

This is a short book (112 pages) but does exactly what it sets out to do. There is a clear explanation of what flipped learning is, its advantages and the nitty-gritty of how to do it. There is a strong sense of "been there, done that" from the authors. Every teacher should give this approach a trial run at least. It is very compatible with William Glasser's Quality School approach and would probably benefit from treating grades lower than a "B" as "not ready yet". Great book!

I have been trying to work out how to engage my students in higher order thinking skills for for longer in lessons for some time. I came across the flipped classroom and Peer Instruction a while ago but was not sure how it worked. This book concisely puts the pieces of the jigsaw in place. It will not turn you into a flipped jedi immediately but give you the start point and foundations. Recommend this book for practitoners wishing to challenge their students more.

A great and open/ honest insight to different approaches to learning. There is no pressure or dictatorship- freedom to grow and learn together.Russell Learmont

I bought this book as i was undertaking a research project involving flipping my classroom for my PGCE qualification. While it does offer much discussion of the flipped classroom, it doesn't really offer up much in terms of practical advice. Additionally the actual benefits for learners, in terms of results, that Bergman and Sams results do not work out as positive as one might think. It really well written and, for a teaching book, fun to read with warmth and humour. Definitely worth checking out.

A lot of hype surrounds this and I have been a sceptic but this is a nice simple book which gives a good context for the ideas and some clear ways to adapt it for your approach and situation.