I’ve just read a thought provoking paper about flipped learning that Jon Baggaley has newly published. In his reflection piece, Baggaley criticises flipped learning proponents’ claims that they have developed a novel educational philosophy, approach, or whatever they want to call it. One of the issues raised by Baggaley is that, in his opinion, what people are referring to as “flipping” is by no means a new idea. Rather, it is a repackaging (at best) of ideas and practices that have been floating around in distance and higher education circles for decades. Baggaley is, of course, right. As he clearly demonstrates, neither the “flipped” terminology nor the various components of what is being referred to as “flipping” are new. However, Baggaley does seem to overlook the significance of the relatively recent rapid rise in interest in flipping in education.
Baggaley starts out by defining flipping thus:
“When multimedia materials and face-to-face instruction are combined, and the students are provided with online material to study at home for discussion with the teacher subsequently…”
Then he goes on to ask, “Doesn’t blended learning also do that?” Well, yes, it probably does. But, I don’t think it’s because flipped and blended learning are equivalent, but rather because Baggaley defines blended learning and then calls it flipped learning. And he can do this because the definition of flipped learning is, admittedly, still gelling. Nevertheless, Baggaley’s definition of flipped learning that I’ve quoted above doesn’t jibe with any definition that I have encountered and actually avoids what is at least theoretically, if not in practice, the central point of flipping. That is that flipping is intended to create flexibility for instructors to do more productive and engaging (and, I might add, theoretically sound) things with their learners in their face-to-face environment than the questionable practice of unidirectionally “teaching-at”.
One of the problems with the recent fervor surrounding flipped learning is a bandwagon effect that I think Baggaley, himself, demonstrates to a certain extent. I have often heard from teachers, “Oh, that flipping thing. I’ve been doing that for years.” When asked what specifically they have been doing, a common response is, “Recording my lectures.” That immediately raises flags. Someone who is really consciously and strategically flipping their classroom would be more likely to start off with something about how they’re using the opportunities that they’ve created for their learners by shifting direct instruction (i.e. lectures, teaching-at, etc.) outside of the valuable group-time/space. That is the essence of flipping; again, at least theoretically, if not in practice.
There’s something else that I think Baggaley overlooks that is no less important. Sure, we may break the flipping fad into its components and see a lot of things that we recognize. However, the current configuration of these components, that we refer to as flipping, is changing the discourse about education. I would call it “reframing”, a well known and effective strategy for producing change. And, the fact is that flipping is generating excitement about innovating in education with technology the likes of which we haven’t seen since the advent of the writing slate. Not only are the tech savvy finding long-sought acceptance, but even the tech skeptics are coming to the realization that using technology is not a choice anymore, nor is it a threat. It’s an opportunity. And it’s hinting at a much more interesting future for education than we’ve seen for a long time.
