Even the most seasoned educator occasionally falls into a rut with their curriculum. If the old syllabus isn’t hitting new district goals, or if you’re just looking to make teaching interesting again, flipping your class might be the solution.

Sara Gill is an AP® Chemistry teacher with over 20 years of experience. Over the last year, she has been experimenting and refining a flipped classroom experience. We asked her to share some of her best tips for making the switch.

Whether you’re a first year teacher or a skilled classroom-flipper, we’re going to walk through best practices of flipping your classroom with the help of the Albert platform.

As you probably know, a flipped classroom is a teaching strategy that presents traditional in-class elements, such as lectures and videos, outside of the classroom. As a result, students work on projects and assignments in class rather than at home.

In flipped classrooms, teachers often present the material to students in the form of a video. Similar to in-class lectures, students are introduced to the material, and can utilize their textbooks along with other supplementary resources, like Albert.

The key difference with this strategy is that students access these materials at home.

A large benefit of this is that students have freedom from the standardized learning pipeline of traditional class lectures. Learning at home allows students to:

• Learn at their own pace by rewinding and re-watching lecture videos
• Access materials at home that are more suitable to their learning style, such as YouTube
• Practice self-directed research with the internet

In traditional classes, the teacher needs to halt the lecture to answer student questions. In a flipped classroom these issues can be discussed with the instructor online, and students can come to class the next day prepared to apply the material to assignments.

As a result, class time is used for group work and applied learning, which have many benefits:

• Instructors are not limited by a fixed class period when presenting information
• Instructors utilize class time to provide student-focused instruction on specific problems
• Instructors have better insight into common mistakes and misunderstandings
• Students discuss concepts in depth after acquiring a better understanding at home
• Greater student motivation with the material

In a 2012 survey conducted by Flipped Learning Network, 71% of classes improved aggregate grades after using a flipped classroom model, and 80% of teachers reported improved student attitudes.

Data also showed that 99% of the teachers in the study would flip their classrooms again the following year.

These are promising results. It must be noted, however, that flipped classroom pedagogy is not suitable for every situation.

Flipped classrooms work if:

• Students are mature enough to be self-directed
• Students have sufficient learning environments and tools available at home
• Instructors have time and resources to facilitate the model
• The subject matter is learnable without the instructor being present

If any of these conditions are not met, it may be wise to think twice about employing a flipped classroom. However, there are tips for most of these obstacles. Let’s take a look at them one by one.

Overcoming the Obstacles of a Flipped Classroom

The students are not mature enough to work alone at home

If a student is simply not disciplined enough to study on their own they will come to class without a sufficient understanding of the material and fail to leverage the time for application in class.

There are ways to motivate students in a flipped classroom and building good incentive structures can be critical in making this model successful.

Sara mainly flips her 11th and 12th-grade classrooms since she feels they have matured enough to do the work independently. She finds that her 9th and 10th-grade classes are not as receptive to flipped classes.

Students come to realize that if they don’t watch the videos and learn the information at home, they quickly fall behind. If that is the case, Sara instructs them to watch the videos in class and come back after school to complete the labs. This gives students more accountability and a “punitive” factor.

Sara pointed out that students love everything technology. She notices her students become more motivated when they use tablets or computers in class.

Assessing students’ understanding of the material before the application portion of the lesson plan is a good idea. Tools like Albert’s Assignments allow instructors to quickly create a set of graded or ungraded questions that students can answer online at home. Insights gives teachers data on how well students are learning the material.

Students do not have adequate resources at home

This is a tricky problem, but not insurmountable. When this happens it is up to the school or teacher to facilitate the needed resources in class. The teacher should first administer a survey to gauge accessibility to smartphones, tablets, and computers.

For students who don’t have access, the teacher should work with their school to allow students to take home computers or tablets. If lack of Internet access is the problem, schools can purchase portable routers and loan them out to students.

Alternatively, the teacher can organize office or library hours to facilitate these students. This is also a helpful option for students who have home environments that are not conducive to studying.

If all else fails an instructor can always go the old fashioned route and use printouts. That way the students are responsible for learning the material and are not limited by technology.

The instructor does not have the resources or time to overhaul their lesson plans.

Most teachers are already overwhelmed. On top of regular teaching duties, completely redesigning a curriculum to fit the flipped classroom model may seem like an impossible task.

If you make good use of existing resources, however, you may find that designing a flipped classroom is easier than you thought.

Firstly, don’t be afraid to take advantage of publicly available videos and publications on the subject. Of course, asking permission for private material is encouraged as well.

Large libraries of content like YouTube can be used, as well as more content-specific archives like Bozeman Science. You don’t need to record each of your lectures right from the start.

On that note, feel free to start off small. This was one of Sara’s key suggestions for teachers new to flipped classrooms.

“My advice to anyone trying anything new in education is to take baby steps. Flipping may sound awesome, but it takes a lot of work to get it off the ground. Try flipping one lecture and see what happens.”

Albert includes a whole suite of tools that can save a lot of time when planning for flipped lessons.

Albert has an ever-expanding library of rigorous and engaging questions to choose from, allowing teachers to quickly create assessment tests and in-class projects.

Albert Insights allows teachers to instantly receive the results of those assessments. Teachers then use that data to quickly identify learning gaps and common mistakes in thinking. They can apply this information the very next day to create a student-focused lesson plan.

The material is too complicated to be learned alone

For very complex subjects, it is useful for the instructor to be present so that students can overcome learning blocks quickly.

One way to be more present is through Remind 101, which allows teachers to be available to students for personalized help over Albert’s platform.

Students send questions to their instructor as they encounter them and can include screenshots and links for clarification This gives the instructor the chance to answer anytime, from anywhere.

Sara is available from 7 am–7 pm on Remind 101. If her students are confused, they have a larger window of time to contact her there and ask for help.

One other solution is to simply not flip that specific lesson. If a topic is notorious for being misunderstood, the better option may be to go over the ideas in class.

Advice from a Flipped Classroom Instructor

Sara encountered many hurdles, including those related to student accountability, lesson planning, and creating materials for a flipped classroom. Sara was kind enough to share the insight she gleaned from her experience with Albert’s staff.

Tips for Making Videos

Videos are probably the hardest part about getting started with a flipped classroom. Sara’s plan for making them was a simple one and easily adaptable to any subject.

“In my initial videos, I was taking the PowerPoint I created and turned it into a video. Very basic. So the majority of the content planning came from previous years. As AP® has undergone a curriculum change, I am working to modify my PowerPoints, lectures, and videos. This year I am going to work on creating smaller video segments from my larger videos.”

Knowing what goes into a video is the easiest step. Next you’ll have to actually record them and put them somewhere accessible to students. Sara uses a SmartBoard to record videos and initially used YouTube to house and share them. Recently however, she learned about EdPuzzle. At last year’s NSTA conference. And now she uploads her videos to there because it allows her to “crop, embed questions, and monitor student progress.”

How Sara Uses Albert in Her Flipped Classroom

Using Insights, Sara sees which problems students are missing. With that data, she can target these learning gaps the following day in class. Besides making class time much more efficient, students also become more motivated when she is addressing problems that they had trouble with the night before.

To make a more student-focused curriculum, Sara wants to implement a “mastery learning” pedagogy. She can set Assignments on Albert with deadlines. Students work at their own pace and complete the tests and assignments when they feel they are ready. This allows the lessons to be individually focused and allows students to spend more time on interesting labs or areas of difficulty.

Sara also uses Albert’s free response questions for assessment and engagement:

“I also create free response questions that I can later review. All of this gives me data on what direction I need to take my classes. It has really helped me to avoid re-hashing material that my students already understand and instead focus on the areas of struggle.” 

Tips for using Albert and Free Response Questions to Boost Motivation

Sara says that her students love to work in teams on challenging questions. When interviewed, she said, “They know [Albert questions] are the hardest and they want to take advantage of the chance to learn from each other… Albert is more challenging than textbooks, so you have to build up to that.”

Sara’s advice for Albert’s FRQ is to write the question on the board. “Students love to work in groups in order to teach each other and learn from each other. They often have small group debates over Albert questions.”

Final Advice on Albert and the Flipped Classroom Model

Flipped classrooms are not for everyone. Sara understands that not every student can access these resources at home. That’s why she is trying to transition to a 1:1 technology classroom. “For the future, I am trying to become a 1:1 technology classroom, so that I can make even greater use of Albert during the course of the day.”

Sara also makes students reflect on their own learning regularly. When answering FRQ on Albert, students are also required to briefly write down their problem-solving steps in a notebook. These notes include what they learned, where they had misunderstandings, and their thought process when answering the questions.

“You aren’t just teaching the info but you use it to teach them how to study, and hopefully they will take that into college. Knowing that they have learned how to study, use resources, and reach out to classmates will pay them great dividends in college.”

Sara’s advice is that if you buy Albert, you should commit to using it. By learning to get the best out of the platform’s tools, her class answered 20,000 questions this year while the other chemistry teacher’s class answered only 2,000.

As Sara mentioned, it’s never a bad idea to start off small and scale up.

If you want to see what options are available for starting your own flipped classroom, you can start off small by requesting a free demo with Albert.