The inaugural cohort of the CTL Fellows for Innovative Teaching focused on “Flipping the Classroom”. The activities for this program began in December 2014 and concluded in December 2015. Goals, Program Activities and Attributes, and other details can be found below.
Goals
The goals of the 2015 CTL Fellows for Innovative Teaching included the following:
- To provide faculty who teach challenging and/or high-demand courses with support and collaboration to institute robust “flipped” pedagogical approaches in their courses;
- To provide faculty with opportunities for the sharing of ideas with other dedicared, highly-motivated, and innovative teachers from a variety of disciplines who have similar interests and who face similar teaching challenges;
- To provide funding for a “flipped” instructional project designed to strengthen courses and teaching methods in each participant’s academic department;
- To further integrate what research tells us about how people learn into key courses at the University; and
- To reinforce an instructional environment that honors and recognizes dedicated teaching scholars and promotes a learning-community spirit on a large campus.
Best Practices and Lessons Learned
Following the implementation semester of the Fellows for Innovative Teaching program, faculty members shared their experiences and offered the lessons they learned from flipping their courses.
Scroll to the bottom of the page to read the Fellows’ best practices and lessons learned. In addition, visit Flipping the Classroom to learn more about flipping.
Program Activities and Attributes
The following activities comprise the program:
- The CTL Fellows for Innovative Teaching program occurs during the calendar year. Activities for the “Flipping the Classroom” cohort began in December 2014 and concluded in December 2015.
- A half-day, morning retreat was held on Reading Day, December 10, 2014, from 8:00 a.m. to Noon (breakfast and registration began at 7:30 a.m.). This event highlighted the core instructional challenges presented by “flipping the classroom.” Dr. Peter Doolittle, Assistant Provost for Teaching and Learning and Professor of Educational Psychology at Virginia Tech, was the keynote speaker at this event. He is likely best known for his viral TED Talk regarding working memory, but his recent research and focus has been on flipping the classroom. The video recording of this keynote is available in the Teaching Library.
- The fellows met as a cohort once a month throughout the calendar year in a large group workshop setting. Meetings were conducted as a combination of round table discussions and workshop activities and included outside speakers. Core topics included pre-class activities and delivery methods, motivating students to engage before class, and active learning approaches during class time. Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences was used as a workshop textbook. To accommodate schedules of such a large group, each of these monthly meetings was offered twice. Below is the spring 2015 meeting schedule:
2015 CTL Fellows for Innovative Teaching
- Norris Armstrong, Genetics
- Nicholas Berente, Management Information Systems (co-participant with Mark Huber)
- Charles Byrd, Germanic and Slavic Studies
- Joel Caughran, Chemistry
- Kara A. Dyckman, Psychology
- Janet Frick, Psychology
- Connie Marie Frigo, Music
- April K. Galyardt, Educational Psychology
- Andreas Handel, Epidemiology & Biostatistics
- Mark Huber, Management Information Systems (co-participant with Nicholas Berente)
- Rodney Mauricio, Genetics
- Cory Momany, Pharmacy
- Julie M. Moore, Infectious Diseases
- Patricia Moore, Entomology
- Diann Moorman, FHCE
- Michele A. Monteil, GRU-UGA Medical Partnership
- Gregg Thomas Nagle, Cellular Biology
- Maria Navarro, Agriculture Leadership (ALEC)
- Siddharth Savadatti, Engineering
- Scott A. Shamp, New Media Institute/Journalism
- Ajay Sharma, Veterinary Biosciences
- Bjorn F. Stillon Southard, Communication Studies
- Martina Sumner, Chemistry
- Kacy Welsh, Psychology
- Anne Marie Zimeri, Environmental Health
Best Practices and Lessons Learned – 2015 CTL Fellows for Innovative Teaching
During the 2015 calendar year, 24 faculty engaged in a process of exploration, course design, and course delivery that focused on flipping the classroom. At the end of the year, the Fellows gathered to share their thoughts on the experience. What follows are highlights from their experiences, highlighting the successes, best practices, challenges and solutions, and final take aways from their respective experiences.
Successes:
This program was designed to provide faculty with support and resources to experiment with flipping the classroom structures and strategies. In general, the CTL Fellows found that flipping pushed students to engage in higher-level thinking and deeper processing than traditional, more lecture-based, models. They found that flipping the classroom:
- Created “[a] culture of collaboration in the classroom – students felt supported in their learning.” – Trish Moore, Entomology
- “[Broke] ingrained patterns of student thinking, such as the belief that mathematics is a set of procedures and facts.” – April Galyardt, Educational Psychology
- “Provided a good framework to use “eLC quizzing and dropbox grading with rubric. Both tools worked well.” – Cory Momany, Pharmacy
Strategies for ensuring learning improves as intended include the following:
- Make sure that learning goals, assessments, and learning activities are integrated (see Fink).
- Allow for some degree of recovery for students who perform poorly on summative evaluations.
- Perform frequent, low-stakes, formative evaluations of student learning to check on learning before high stakes tests. Re-teach material that students are not understanding as indicated by formative assessments.
Class size impacts approaches to flipping:
- “With large classes, scaling is a factor, especially in terms of grading and data management.” – Janet Frick, Psychology
- “Assigned groups with assigned seats make group work doable with 300 students. And notecards double as group icebreaker and accountability tool.” – Kacy Welsh, Psychology
- “Solutions include peer grading, eLC rubrics, lower stakes [formative] assessments made management of student work in large enrollment classes more feasible.” – Julie Moore, Infectious Diseases
Final Take Aways:
Ultimately, the elements that comprise successful flipping are also the elements of good teaching: it is about using class time for active learning, which should happen in any class regardless of size and which some Fellows have been doing all along.
- “Frequent quizzing and incorporating active learning are valuable regardless of whether a class is flipped or not.” – Janet Frick, Psychology
- “Students still expect exams to be fact-based, recall questions, but continual assessment appeared to lead to good performances on exams.” – Trish Moore, Entomology
- “Flipping is more than having students read/watch material outside of class. Going slow and bit by bit is ok.” – Andreas Handel, Epidemiology & Biostatistics
