Reflections from a workshop on the flipped classroom (#1355)

Topics/tags: Teaching

Last week, I participated in my fourth faculty/staff workshop of the summer. This workshop was on flipped clases [1]. For those of you not hep to the higher-ed lingo, flipped classes are those that flip the traditional model of higher education. Rather than introducing students to material through classroom lectures and then asking them to apply that knowledge on assignments outside of class, in flipped classes, students attempt to learn the material in advance (e.g., through textbooks or video) and then spend class time applying the material to problems.

I’m a proponent of flipped classes; I’ve been teaching them since I came to Grinnell in 1997. When I started, we called them workshop-style classes, since they were inspired (indirectly) by Dickenson’s workshop-style Physics course [2].

I liked many aspects of the workshop, particularly the opportunity to interact with a bunch of early-career faculty in Mathematics and Statistics, who made up about half of the workshop population [3]. The workshop leaders, Jenny Kenkel (math) and Nate Wells (stats) did a nice job of structuring the workshop: They included experiential time (e.g., a flipped exercise), small-group discussion time, large-group discussion time, and time to reflect on and share how we might flip our own classes.

However, as I read our textbook for the workshop, Robert Talbert’s Flipped Learning, I found myself challenging his description of the traditional model.

The class meeting is used primarily for introducing students to new material for the first time and disseminating further, related material (often through the form of lecture).

Higher-level work on that material—work that focuses on application, synthesis, evaluation, and creativity—is done following the class meeting, by students individually. [4]

I’m not sure about your college experience with pre-class work, but mine was that we were usually expected to do some reading before class. We might not be expected to understand it all (hence the lecture part), but we were supposed to give it our best try. And class time? Even when it involved lecture, it was more than that.

Certainly, much of my grappling with materials in my humanities and social studies classes in college and graduate school [5] came from seminar-style learning situations. That’s not to say that I didn’t have lectures in Greek Thought and Literature or Science, Culture, and Society. Rather, the assumption was that we had multiple kinds of class situations, perhaps one large lecture and two discussion-oriented seminars per week. My memory is such that, forty years later, I can’t be completely sure. But I recall regular small group discussions led by graduate students or young faculty as part of my learning. And in some disciplines, such as foreign language or film, all of my learning was in small, conversational classrooms.

In addition, in my experience (and in how I sometimes teach), even lecture-style classes are an opportunity to apply higher-order thinking skills. While I rarely had a course as extreme as those we see in The Paper Chase, there was often the possibility that a faculty member would ask us to consider and respond to challenging questions.

Perhaps the pure lecture is more of a characteristic of STEM [6] classes. Maybe pure lecture is wrong, because Talbert acknowledges that science lectures often involve demonstrations and more. Perhaps primarily transmissive. But even that doesn’t match my experience; I recall my first math class at Chicago, Paul Sally’s Analysis in R^n. Prof. Sally would regularly ask difficult questions, give us a moment to consider them, and then ask for answers. I recall that good answers to particularly difficult problems would earn us a prize, perhaps a silver dollar. Strangely, I can visualize the room where I took Physics, and I can even recall some demonstrations, such as the spinning bike wheel and the stool, but not the form of the lectures themselves. In any case, even if those Physics lectures were mostly lecture-style, there was also the assumption that we’d further our understanding in laboratory experiments. Yes, we’d have homework assignments where we’d have to play with the ideas, but our in-class learning wasn’t all transmissive [8].

In my experience, the best lectures challenged my higher-order thinking almost as much as homework assignments did; they gave me the opportunity (or required me) to play with ideas. They also gave me the chance to ask questions, to hear others’ questions, and even to challenge ideas.

If I believe that lectures can be excellent tools for learning, why do I flip my classes? Or why do I say that I flip my classes? Primarily because I believe that the best learning happens when students are thinking actively and collaborating with others. In CSI find we can get more of the active thinking and collaboration when students are working on programming problems, particularly when students are learning programming constructs. My students know that I’ll also move to a collaborative lecture for certain topics. In addition, in most cases, I find it easier to design a flipped class than to design an appropriately interactive lecture. In the end, it’s not so much flipped learning that I care about; it’s active learning. I don’t care what we call it.

But that’s not all that frustrated me about Flipped Learning. There’s a weird interplay between one of the main goals of flipped learning, that students get to be better at learning by themselves, and Talbert’s apparent insistence that we carefully plan every aspect of our classes, including pre-class activities. Should self-learners be prepared to deal with messy materials? I tend to think of active learning in terms of the aphorism, a guide on the side not a sage on the stage. Talbert seems to have introduced model that I’d like to call master manipulator, but that I suppose the rhyming scheme suggests should be a careful designer is so much finer or some such.

I also worry that Talbert’s insistence on careful preparation of both in-class time and pre-class time could intimidate or discourage some faculty. I know it would have scared me. Hence, I encouraged some colleagues to engage in a lower-cost flipping: Make sure that students know that they have to do the pre-class reading (e.g., by having them answer a few questions before class) and then move the first few problems from your homework assignment to in-class time. Play with a few models (e.g., the poorly-named and multiply-interpreted jigsaw technique [10]).

Particularly as we work to build higher-level skills, I wonder whether it’s sometimes better just to throw students in the deep end, as it were. Certainly, that’s what our in-class example was like (a combinatorics problem, of sorts). The Moore Method [11,12] also encourages such an approach. But Moore required individual work; I much prefer a Modified Moore Method with more collaboration (and, perhaps, some instructor intervention).

I’m also enough of a Constructionist that I believe that the best learning comes from students identifying problems of interest (related to the topic at hand) and then gathering resources to solve those problems with some advice from the instructor. Having the instructor and classmates nearby to help find and interpret resources is, to me, an ideal part of a flipped classroom.

Returning to my frustrations with Talbert, I found myself surprised by how easily he dismissed the issue that students might have concerns, such as the legendary If my instructor’s not lecturing, she’s not teaching. [14] I understand that if students raise such issues with us directly, we can explain about the kinds of work we do to prepare for flipped classes. The problem? Most students don’t raise the problems with their faculty; rather, they ding them on end-of-course evaluations. And, since comments are optional on EOCEs, there’s no way of knowing whether such thing have happened.

So, what did I take away from the workshop?

• I realized that I’ve been teaching in flipped or flipped-adjacent classes for so long that I’m not even sure what a lecture-style class is anymore.
• I discovered that I have some very different views on teaching than others (or at least than Talbert). Perhaps I didn’t discover that. Perhaps it’s just that the idea was reinforced. I must admit that I probably embrace improvisation (or at least embrace the moment) more than most; having to come up with new ideas and approaches on the fly is one of my favorite parts of teaching.
• I probably led the young faculty to believe that I’m a curmudgeon. That’s okay; evidence suggests that I am.
• I had fun spending time talking about education with a variety of people, including not just the young Mathematics and Statistics faculty, but also folks from the Academic Success Center, the Writing, Reading, and Speaking Center, and a variety of other academic departments.

Since it’s my fourth workshop, I don’t get paid for it. That’s okay; the pleasures of learning, working with colleagues, and complaining are enough. Thanks so much to Jenny and Nate for leading it, to all the participants for, well, participating, and to the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (particularly Karla) for arranging it!

Postscript: I also find myself wondering about the potential role of LLMs in all of this. Should I perhaps permit my students to use LLMs to ask questions about the pre-class readings? Should I limit the kinds of questions they ask? Do I want them to struggle through the material a bit? Do I worry that LLMs will give subtly misleading answers? Those are issues I must consider, although perhaps not in this workshop.

[1] The first one was on advising, particularly on advising a job-anxious student body. The second and third were on generative AI; one general, one focused on GenAI and writing.

[2] Or perhaps Dickenson’s Workshop CS. I should check with Henry.

[3] The workshop was led by faculty from Mathematics and Statistics, which may have explained the distribution of participants.

[4] Talbert, Robert (2017). What is Flipped Learning, and Why Use It? Chapter 1 of Flipped Learning. Locations 425–432 in Kindle edition.

[5] Yes, I took humanities classes in graduate school. If I recall correctly, they included a few film classes as well as The Little Red Schoolhouse (aka Graduate and Professional Writing). I believe I also took The Detective in Film and Literature.

[6] Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Interpretations of the four-letter acronym sometimes include Economics. Perhaps that should be STEEM or STEME [7].

[7] In contrast, STEAM (perhaps pronounced the same as STEEM and STEME) is often used for Science, Technology, Enginering, Arts, and Mathematics. That acronym is definitely fodder for another musing.

[8] Physics was also responsible for two other important things in my undergraduate career. Most importantly, it taught me about note-taking. We were allowed to bring a sheet of notes to exams; I quickly learned that I didn’t use the sheets but realized that writing the sheets made a difference. Having the sheet of notes also gave us confidence. On a less positive note [9], I slept through my midterm in the second quarter of Physics. I earned an A in the first quarter. I earned an A in the third quarter. I earned a C in the second quarter. I didn’t think my teacher was overly harsh; policies were policies. Nonetheless, I’ve tried to design my policies to make such events less significant.

[9] No pun intended.

[10] Jigsaw typically involves breaking a topic up into parts, having different students learn the different parts, and then bringing the students together to teach each other. The Jigsaw technique I was taught suggests that the partial-topic learning is also done in groups. So, for example, students A, B, C, and D would learn one part; students E, F, G, and H would learn another part; students I, J, K, and L would learn another part; and student M, N, O, and P would learn yet another part. Then students A, E, I, and M would partner up to explain the parts to each other, as would B, F, J, and N, and so on and so forth. That’s not a jigsaw to me. I’d prefer to call this criss-cross or something similar.

Others use Jigsaw to mean that the students do the first round individually, perhaps outside of class. That’s a bit more jigsaw-like, in that they have to put pieces together. I suppose it also depends on what they are supposed to do as a group. For example, should they just share with each other or should they use what they’ve learned to collaboratively solve a more complex problem, sharing as they go?

[11] No, not Tom and Emily.

[12] The Moore Method involves giving students the basics (e.g., definitions, lemmata, perhaps even some theorems) and asking them to work out the rest (e.g., the proofs of the theorems; analyses of why the theorem can’t be stated more generally).

[14] The gendered pronoun seemed appropriate here.

Version 1.0 released 2025-07-07.

Version 1.0.1 of 2025-07-08.