Flickr: Jeremy Wilburn

The flipped classroom model generated a lot of excitement initially, but more recently some educators — even those who were initial advocates — have expressed disillusionment with the idea of assigning students to watch instructional videos at home and work on problem solving and practice in class. Biggest criticisms: watching videos of lectures wasn’t all that revolutionary, that it perpetuated bad teaching and raised questions about equal access to digital technology.

Now flipped classroom may have reached equilibrium, neither loved nor hated, just another potential tool for teachers — if done well. “You never want to get stuck in a rut and keep doing the same thing over and over,” said Aaron Sams, a former high school chemistry teacher turned consultant who helped pioneer flipped classroom learning in an edWeb webinar. “The flipped classroom is not about the video,” said Jonathan Bergmann, Sams’ fellow teacher who helped fine tune and improve a flipped classroom strategy. “It’s about the active engaged stuff you can do in your class.”

The two teachers admit when they started flipping their classrooms they put everything into video form. Now, they’ve taken a step back and realized some things shouldn’t be in lecture form, and therefore shouldn’t be videos either. Instead, the two teachers have embraced what they call mastery learning, with an emphasis on students taking control of their own learning. Instructional videos are an optional part of a bigger move towards asynchronous learning.

“The best use of class time is to meet the individual needs of each learner, not driving the class with predetermined curriculum,” Sams said. So he and Bergmann decided to make watching the video lectures optional. The videos are available, but if students felt they could learn it better in some other way, they’re encouraged to do what works best for them.

[RELATED READING: Can TED Talks Really Work in the Classroom?]

“One of the most important skills that any student can learn is where to go for information and resources,” Sams said. Instead of following a rigid curriculum, the two teachers decided on the key learning objectives of the class — the things they felt their students really needed to know –and structured the class around those. Then they offered students a menu of resources that included instructional video, some sort of practice and links to the corresponding section of a textbook. The teachers became resources and helped provide benchmarks to keep students on track.

The educators say this method is working for them because they’ve decided to make their classrooms mastery based, whereby “a student gets to the end of some learning unit and must pass whatever kind of assessment you have before he can move on,” Sams said — very much like competency-based learning. “There is no place for them to hide. They had to converse with me and tell me when they were ready to be assessed on something,” Sams said. When he taught in a more traditional way, Sams admitted there were students he hardly knew.

WHAT’S IT LOOK LIKE?

Working with a mastery-based model means students are not all learning the same thing at the same time. Bergmann said the first five minutes of class are essential to setting the class into productive motion by quickly assessing where students are and directing them to various stations around the room. ”Your class looks like organized chaos,” Bergmann said. “It’s very powerful.”

Students are scattered around the room learning a topic in their own way and teachers are walking around talking to students, answering questions and checking in on their progress. There’s no assigned homework, unless a student feels he needs to do some extra work to understand a concept. “The kids who are going to get most of my time are the kids who need it,” said Sams. “It’s the kids who are struggling or the kids who need me hovering over their shoulder.”

Sams and Bergmann soon realized that effective flipped classrooms didn’t include videos of science demonstrations. That’s the most exciting part of science and kids should get to see it up close. Since students were moving at different paces, Sams and Bergmann had to demonstrate the same thing multiple times. “We did demos for just a handful of students,” said Sams. “It was a far more intimate environment so we could converse with kids about what was going on.”

Disciplinary issues also diminished significantly. “When I was the guy up front, all the attention was supposed to be on me and it was really easy for a disruptive kid to pull the attention to himself,” said Sams. With everyone working on their own projects, one kid has much less power to disrupt.

ASSESSING WITH MASTERY MODEL

One of the most challenging parts of a messy, asynchronous classroom is that kids aren’t all ready to be assessed at the same time, and when they do take a test, they might not pass. Sams’ and Bergmann’s chemistry classes have formative assessments, constant checking in and talking about work with students on a daily basis.

The two teachers also spent two years building up a store of test questions in Moodle, a free learning management system that randomly generates tests. Those who fail the test can take another to prove mastery.

It took a lot of work to build up the system that now works smoothly and the process revealed challenges in the mastery model. “One of the dark sides of mastery is the demoralizing effect,” Bergmann said. He had students that he knew understood the material because of his daily work with them, but who couldn’t pass the tests. That’s a frustrating and demotivating experience for a student.

Sams and Bergmann turned to the Universal Design for Learning, a set of curriculum principles that maintains students need more than one way to learn information and more than one way to demonstrate knowledge. Following the second principle, the two teachers allowed their students to show they understood the material any way they wanted. Sams said he received songs, welding projects and even hand-drawn graphic novels. He admits those didn’t help the students take standardized tests, but they showed chemistry understanding, his main goal.

If this all sounds messy, it is. Sams and Bergmann are the first to admit that there are challenges, especially around grading. But, they’ve discovered a way to take flipped learning to another level, offering it as one option in a smorgasbord of instructional materials and letting students have the autonomy to choose what works best for them. Kids got behind, but the teachers checked their progress along the way and structured the course so that the most necessary information was in the first four sections, with nice-to-know material in the fifth section.

“We would rather our kids actually know 80 percent of the content, instead of being exposed to 100 percent of the content,” said Bergmann.

Lenny Gonzales

By Katrina Schwartz

As the blended learning movement grows in the U.S., schools will need to experiment with what works best in different types of settings. There’s still a lot to learn about different types of blended learning models, and a new nonprofit called Silicon Schools will raise and invest $25 million toward that effort.

With partial grants from the Bay Area’s Fisher family (owners of Gap), and the advice of board members Michael Horn from the Innosight Institute and Salman Khan of the Khan Academy, the nonprofit, which has raised $12 million so far, aims to fund new and innovative approaches in existing blended learning programs with grants to each school.

The effort is led by Brian Greenberg, who chronicled the successes and challenges of piloting the Khan Academy in Oakland’s Envision Schools on the Blend My Learning blog. During that process Greenberg and his staff were very open about the pros and cons of integrating technology into the classroom, and other educators added their perspectives to what worked and didn’t work on the blog. Greenberg points to the parts of the program that worked well, namely letting the technology do some of the heavy lifting in terms of grading, lesson planning and collecting analytics that free up teacher time to focus on students.

Giving students more responsibility for the learning process was also a significant outcome of the Envision pilot program. “What we’re finding is that if you make the steps clear and make them accountable, the more you put them in charge of the process the more they amaze,” Greenberg said, referring to students. The pilot program also helped move the class toward “proficiency-based learning,” in which a student is responsible for an intended outcome, but not penalized every step along the way.

Greenberg intends to apply one important lesson he learned from the program to the schools funded by the Silicon Valley Fund: Technology in no way replaces the teacher. At some point the usefulness of technology runs out and the educator’s role is crucial. He also says that technology doesn’t preclude the need for a good classroom management systems and positive school culture. Kids can get off track or “fake” work on sophisticated software just as easily as they could in a traditional classroom.

And lastly, Greenberg says it’s hard for schools to navigate the many tools that populate the ed-tech space, especially when each is tailored to a different subject and use. He says the whole field needs to become more integrated, almost like an app store for ed-tech, and one that works across platforms. Schools don’t have access to endless money and as a result, ed-tech entrepreneurs and businesses need to design more precisely with the client in mind.

What’s interesting about the fund’s goal is that very little is proscriptive. Greenberg was clear to recognize that this movement is in its infancy. There is no blended-learning canon that can be taught to teachers. Rather Greenberg says the educators need to write the playbook. They need to be at the table and in the laboratories of innovation. And if all goes according to plan, in five years the various Silicon Schools will be networking with one another, sharing ideas with schools from around the world and thinking about how to scale up and replicate best practices.

The fund sees itself as the infusion of cash that schools need to get these expensive and technology-heavy programs off the ground, but they have no intention of funding them forever. “The schools that we fund, all eventually balance on California public dollars,” Greenberg said. “The hope would be that by finding new models and new ways to meet the needs of each kid that we can still make excellent schools work on California funding rates.”

Greenberg says the fund will focus on schools in Silicon Valley to try and build an “innovation hub” in an area already known for taking risks. The idea is to connect educators interested in integrating technology into the classroom with tech entrepreneurs who can create the software, apps and tools that will be most useful to teachers. “This combination of world class entrepreneurship with front line educational expertise is extremely promising. And if we can’t make that intersection happen here, at the heart of Silicon Valley, then we don’t think it will be easy to make it happen anywhere,” Greenberg said.

HOW IT WILL WORK

Greenberg says the fund is willing to give up to $700,000 to about 25 schools if they can demonstrate a unique idea or way to implement blended learning that pushes the conversation forward. Grantees also must have strong leadership teams, a track record of success and a financially sustainable model. The fund expects schools to be able to offer their innovations on the same budget as a traditional California public school.

The fund isn’t pushing any particular model of blended learning like Rocketship, Khan Academy or the flipped classroom. Rather, they want teachers to evaluate what works and what doesn’t from those “1.0 models” and then collaborate with ed-tech entrepreneurs to develop new tools for the areas that have been neglected or don’t work well. “You start to mix those things together in a real school, with really good educators and really good kids who are bought into this vision and that’s when it starts to get exciting,” said Greenberg.

Blended learning is a relatively new concept with a mixed track record. Integrating certain types of technology into the classroom gives teachers and students real-time feedback so that each student can work at his or her own pace, and can give teachers accurate information that can help them better group students according to comprehension levels on a specific subjects. But educators point out that too often ed-tech focuses on improving test scores rather than on building creative thinking and a passion for learning in students and that schools still need passionate, innovative and dedicated teachers, no matter how kids absorb the content.

Greenberg agrees that it’s too early to expect schools across the country to buy into a blended learning model. But he does hope that some of the strategies that are piloted in schools funded by the Silicon Schools Fund will inspire other teachers and administrators to take elements back to their own schools.

“We see creating new schools that are essentially laboratories of innovation, that are trying many different approaches, all with the idea of making education more powerful for each student and each teacher,” explained Greenberg. In five years, he envisions that the Bay Area will have somewhere close to 25 examples of how blended learning could be done. Some of those schools could be charter schools, others public, some built from the ground up and others a transformed existing schools. He wants to see it all so that lots of new ideas and ways of doing things can be tested.

By Ben Stern, EdSurge

The enemy of innovation and growth is routine. These auspicious weeks before the school year commences are the perfect time to create a new routine that will ensure innovation in your instruction and growth as an instructor. Here are some idea for those who want to take advantage of these next few weeks to guarantee the best year they’ve ever had.

1. MOVE BEYOND THE TEXTBOOK

Textbooks are by nature restrictive. The chapter order is an imposition; the information within the book is only as current as the publication date. If you can, liberate yourself from the book! If you don’t have the luxury of foregoing textbooks altogether, you can still supplement them.

The first step is to choose a destination for the resources. If your school doesn’t already use a Learning Management System like Moodle or Blackboard, there are some excellent, free resources. Edmodo looks and feels a bit like Facebook but with education-friendly features like assignment postings, quizzes, due dates, and more. If you’d prefer more customizability and care less about the aesthetics of your destination you could build a wiki with your students on Wikispaces.

Once you set up your destination, you can begin to aggregate content and resources. Put a few resources up for the beginning of the year, but then invite students to contribute much of the material thereafter–an excellent strategy for enriching students’ learning. For instance, you might have students find interesting websites that relate to the themes of each chapter of the text. Students can then guide the class with their discoveries. You could have students rewrite sections of the textbook based on these resources and collect the best submissions in a wiki that becomes a sort of “living” textbook for your particular class. You can even invite students to discuss subject-related Youtube videos in an Edmodo discussion board, then pick up the discussion in class the next morning as a warm-up. Now is the best time to work out the kinks in these platforms (of which there are only a very few) and develop unit plans that make full use of them. You’ll thank yourself later (as will the students)!

2. BECOME AN EXPERT IN ONE TOOL

There are at least half a dozen apps and software for every job. Should you use Diigo, Delicious, eduClipper, Pinterest, or BagTheWeb to collect links? Is Photoshop, GIMP, Pixlr, or FotoFlexer the right photo-editing software? It’s overwhelming, and there really is no single right answer. (For the record, though, Diigo is great because of its iOS app and GIMP works well because it’s both free and powerful.) So pick one class of tools and become a ninja in how to use one of the leading tools in that class. Skills from one platform are transferable to the others. You will benefit from learning everything about whatever tool you choose.

3. READ ABOUT ALL THINGS EDUCATION

In the middle of the school year, a good novel sounds much more compelling than a book on education. But books on pedagogical theory can influence your instruction in meaningful and enduring ways even if they are short on immediate, practical advice. Reading books about math pedagogy have helped educators teach more linear, logical concepts like cause and effect analysis using timelines or even Roman battle strategies. Here are some favorite books from a summer reading list:

Scaling Up Success
Education Nation
The Students Are Watching
Reinventing Project-Based Learning

4. REVISIT YOUR HOMEWORK STRATEGY

Flipping is not just for math. The essential justification for flipping – that is, utilizing technology to redistribute tasks between homework and classwork to make both more meaningful – can benefit any class. Are there individual activities that you could turn into homework in order to devote more attention to students in class? Is there a tangential class discussion that you want to continue but can’t justify doing during precious class time?

To flip your lectures, you’ll need some kind of software. Camtasia is the crème de la crème of flipping software, but it’s expensive. An alternative is to film your lecture with your phone, edit it with Windows Live Movie Maker or iMovie, and post it to Youtube as an unlisted video, and use the discussion board to allow your students to ask and answer questions.

But you don’t necessarily need to post a lecture on-line to flip your class. Any aspect of your class can be flipped. An English teacher asked her students to conduct discussions of each reading assignment on her Edmodo page. Some students were responsible for posting a discussion question, others for being first responders, and others for posting follow-ups. Then, every student had to respond to another discussion thread also. The roles rotated and were staggered over a few days so that timing issues were minimized. We found that the students retained the reading better when they had to engage with their classmates immediately. In class, they would apply their understanding of the reading in some creative endeavor like a skit and discuss the essential meaning of the text at the very end of class. The extra time afforded to the students by the meaningful work they did the night before allowed them to access the core of the text much more effectively.

5. MAKE A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SCHEDULE

A formal principal used to tell the kids: “Ask for it and you just might get it!” The same sentiment applies to teachers. Funds are limited in every school and they become increasingly scarce as the school year progresses. Get your requests in now. Look for major conferences in your nearest city and peruse the blogs, Twitter, and EdSurge for other educators’ assessments of previous year’s events. To demonstrate your genuine commitment to regular PD, also “attend” some free webinars such as these from ASCD or these from EdWeek. Watch TED talks about education and peruse Teaching Channel for lesson plan inspiration. Your administrators will be more inclined to encourage your continued learning, and you will get that much-needed “shot in the arm” on a regular basis.

Your teaching is only as good as your learning. During the madness of a school year, it’s very difficult to begin any new endeavor that doesn’t relate directly to your class. So use these final dog days of summer to set yourself up to be a learner for the rest of the year.

This piece was reprinted from EdSurge-Instruct, a weekly newsletter for educators on education technology products and great practices.

Ben Stern writes the “Because You Asked” column for EdSurge. He is also the Technology Integrationist for a middle school in New York City. Earlier in his career, he revamped his curriculum using computers and the Internet, replacing textbooks with scholarly sources and leveraging the connectivity afforded by the Internet to contextualize content. Since then, Ben has found a passion in the evolution of education through technology and works to help teachers enhance their curriculum wherever possible. You can follow him on Twitter at @EdTechBSt

Sarah Butrymowicz

Jasmine Redeaux (left) and Nakesha Wilkerson team up to finish a worksheet in a "flipped" chemistry class at their Macon, Ga., high school, while other classmates work on a lab.

By Sarah Butrymowicz

When Portland, Ore., elementary school teacher Sacha Luria decided last fall to try out a new education strategy called “flipping the classroom,” she faced a big obstacle.

Flipped classrooms use technology—online video instruction, laptops, DVDs of lessons—to reverse what students have traditionally done in class and at home to learn. Listening to lectures becomes the homework assignment so teachers can provide more one-on-one attention in class and students can work at their own pace or with other students.

But Luria realized that none of her students had computers at home, and she had just one in the classroom. So she used her own money to buy a second computer and begged everyone she knew for donations, finally bringing the total to six for her 23 fourth-graders at Rigler School. In her classroom, students now alternate between working on the computers and working with her.

So far, the strategy is showing signs of success. She uses class time to tailor instruction to students who started the school year behind their classmates in reading and math, and she has seen rapid improvement. By the end of the school year, she said, her students have averaged two years’ worth of progress in math, for example.

“It’s powerful stuff,” she said, noting that this year was her most successful in a decade of teaching. “I’m really able to meet students where they are as opposed to where the curriculum says they should be.”

Other teachers in high-poverty schools like Rigler also report very strong results after flipping classrooms. Greg Green, principal of Clintondale High School in Clinton Township, Mich., thinks the flipped classroom—and the unprecedented amount of one-on-one time it provides students—could even be enough to close the achievement gap between low-income, minority students and their more affluent white peers. Clintondale has reduced the percentage of Fs given out from about 40 percent to around 10 percent.

Yet anecdotal evidence suggests that flipping classrooms is a more popular practice in wealthier suburban communities where nearly all students have Internet access at home and schools are more likely to have computers in classrooms. Some skeptics say flipped classrooms still rely heavily on lectures by teachers, which they argue are not as effective as hands-on learning. Still others worry that the new practice—so dependent on technology—could end up leaving low-income students behind and widening the achievement gap.

“It’s an obstacle,” said Karen Cator, director of the Office of Educational Technology in the U.S. Department of Education. “We do need to figure out ways that students, regardless of Zip code, regardless of their parents’ income level, have access” to technology inside and outside of schools.

The flipped classroom can be traced to a 2008 experiment by Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann, teachers in Woodland Park, Colo., who were quick to take advantage of the ability to post videos online. The concept is one small and simple way that technology can transform the way students learn. Research on the effectiveness of flipped classrooms is in the early stages, and it’s not known how widespread the practice is.

Praised by advocates for letting students work at their own pace, flipped classrooms also allow teachers to tailor their instruction to individual students. At home, for example, students can watch online video lectures—recordings of their own teachers explaining concepts, say, or videos produced by other teachers or textbook companies—while classroom time can be spent working one-on-one with teachers, tackling worksheets or problem sets once given as homework, or collaborating with other students on projects.

These are the tenets that Sams and Bergmann, whose book Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day is due out this month, will try to spread with the Flipped Learning Network, a nonprofit organization launched this spring to train teachers from schools across the socioeconomic spectrum in the strategy. Sams and Bergmann, who are chemistry teachers, had learned, for example, that they could solve their technology access issues by making DVDs of the videos for students without reliable Internet access at home.

At Luria’s school in Oregon, she said other teachers were interested in the strategy but were unlikely to emulate her. “The reality is that I have more computers than anyone else does,” Luria said. “Unless they’re able to ask and get laptops from other people, there’s just not the capacity.”

At Westside High School in Macon, Ga., more than 85 percent of students are minorities and 78 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Chemistry teacher Jennifer Douglass estimated that about half are so transient they don’t have a guaranteed place to sleep each night. Members of feuding gangs are placed into classes alongside pregnant teenagers, she said, and parent involvement is rare.

With the help of a federal grant that provided netbooks for all students, a handful of teachers in different disciplines at Westside flipped their classrooms and reported that doing so improved students’ grades—and their level of engagement.

Douglass has seen a modest increase on her regular chemistry class’s final exam scores since flipping. Social studies teacher Sydney Elkin said her students’ scores on the Georgia state end-of-course exams increased, particularly for her special-education students. The semester before she flipped her classroom, about 30 percent of all students passed. In her first semester with a flipped class, she said, nearly three-quarters passed, including nine out of 10 special-education students.

Knewton/Column 5 Media

An infographic explaining the "flipped classroom." Click to see the entire image.

NOT A PANACEA

Flipping does not solve all problems, though, Elkin said. Some students must still be constantly needled to do their work. And despite second and third chances on tests that act as gateways to the next level, some students still fall behind.

“I would love to say this was a better fit for everyone. There’s no panacea,” Elkin said. Outside factors “have an impact on what these kids do just as much as the way content is delivered.”

The students at Westside are disadvantaged from the start, she said, coming from homes where parents might work two or three jobs to get by and children aren’t exposed to as many opportunities to learn as their more affluent peers. By the time they get to high school, many are far behind and haven’t developed a work ethic for school.

Sams, the Colorado chemistry teacher known as one of the fathers of flipping, acknowledged that about 9 percent of his students have received Fs every year he has taught—both before and after he started delivering lectures through video in his school district.

“Some students, they choose not to learn, not to participate,” he said. “A lot of people ask, ‘What do you do with the unmotivated kid?’ I wish I had a good answer to that.”

But Bergmann, his former colleague who is now a lead technology facilitator for a school in Illinois, said students were learning more and performing at higher levels, on average. He said the change also created time for him to talk to every student every day to monitor his or her progress.

Some students at Westside, in Macon, Ga., said they were no longer bored in class, where they can work with classmates, ask for help and enjoy more face-time with their teachers.

“It’s like having a private tutor,” junior Marvin Wesley explained.

“That you don’t have to pay for,” his classmate Sarah Walker chimed in.

Douglass’s chemistry class looked like an exercise in organized chaos on a weekday in March, with some students working on a lab in the back of the classroom as others, wearing headphones, danced in their seats while filling out a worksheet.

Periodically, as those with their netbooks hit the play button on a video Douglass had made, the faint strains of a Rihanna parody, “Only Mole (in the World),” could be heard. Two girls new to the school had teamed up to finish a worksheet while Douglas darted around the classroom, wearing her signature white lab coat, answering questions.

“I used to get tired because I had to stand up [and lecture], and I felt like a circus performer,” she said. “Now I’m running all around the room. I don’t sit down all day long.”

Students said they spend different amounts of time on her instructional videos, although all must fill out a “note-taker” sheet as they watch. One might spend just 10 minutes, while another might pause and rewind, listening over and over to certain sections for nearly half an hour. Some watch the videos at home; others prefer to listen in class.

“It’s wherever, whatever, whenever; that’s the whole point,” said Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, who writes widely about technology and is studying how it’s transforming education. “The flipped classroom allows you to present content and the kids then consume it in their own location at their own pace.”

Flipped classrooms are a start, but don’t take the concept of individualized learning as far as it can go, said Michael Horn, executive director of education at the Innosight Institute in Mountain View, Calif., which works to introduce innovation into education.

“It’s a first step on the way to a promising use of technology, but I don’t think people should see it as an end-all, be-all,” Horn said. “It’s sort of a low hanging fruit of innovation.”

For Douglass, though, such uses of technology are nothing short of revolutionary. She said she still has the occasional student who’ll put his head down or surf the Internet instead of working, but giving students some control over the pace of their learning improves their desire to learn.

Misbehavior all but disappeared after she flipped the classroom, Douglass said, and students who hadn’t passed anything in years began proudly displaying their grades.

“They were getting to choose to push the play button,” Douglass said. “They were very, very excited about accepting that responsibility. They actually like having the power to make decisions. That’s the biggest impact I’ve seen in my classroom—the ownership has gone from teacher to student.”

This article originally appeared on the Hechinger Report.

Chris Davis, Powerful Learning Practice LLC

By Shelley Wright

I think the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy is wrong.

I know this statement sounds heretical in the realms of education, but I think this is something we should rethink, especially since it is so widely taught to pre-service teachers. I agree that the taxonomy accurately classifies various types of cognitive thinking skills. It certainly identifies the different levels of complexity. But its organizing framework is dead wrong. Here’s why.

Conceived in 1956 by a group of educators chaired by Benjamin Bloom, the taxonomy classifies skills from least to most complex. The presentation of the Taxonomy (in boththe original and revised versions) as a pyramid suggests that one cannot effectively begin to address higher levels of thinking until those below them have been thoroughly addressed. Consequently (at least in the view of many teachers who learned the taxonomy as part of their college training) Blooms becomes a “step pyramid” that one must arduously try to climb with your learners. Only the most academically adept are likely to reach the pinnacle. That’s the way I was taught it.

Many teachers in many classrooms spend the majority of their time in the basement of the taxonomy, never really addressing or developing the higher order thinking skills that kids need to develop. We end up with rote and boring classrooms. Rote and boring curriculum. Much of today’s standardized testing rigorously tests the basement, further anchoring the focus of learning at the bottom steps, which is not beneficial for our students.

The pyramid creates the impression that there is a scarcity of creativity — only those who can traverse the bottom levels and reach the summit can be creative. And while this may be how it plays out in many schools, it’s not due to any shortage of creative potential on the part of our students.

I think the narrowing pyramid also posits that our students need a lot more focus on factual knowledge than creativity, or analyzing, or evaluating and applying what they’ve learned. And in a Google-world, it’s just not true.

I think the narrowing pyramid also posits that our students need a lot more focus on factual knowledge than creativity, or analyzing, or evaluating and applying what they’ve learned. And in a Google-world, it’s just not true.

Here’s what I propose: we flip Bloom’s taxonomy. Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it.

Creating at the Forefront

In media studies we often look at the creation of print and digital advertisements. Traditionally, students learn many of the foundational principles for creating a layout through a lecture or text book reading, and then eventually create their own.

What if we started with creativity rather than principles? My students start with the standard elements of an advertisement (product photo, copy, logo etc.)  and create a mockup. Then students evaluate their mock-up by comparing their ads to a few professional examples and  discuss what they did right and wrong in comparison to what they’ve seen.

As students are pointing out design elements that work, we begin to analyze for similarities and divide them accordingly into groups. Most will likely fall into the four design principles of contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. At this point, students compile their findings as a class, and only then are the four design principles formally introduced.

Now students can apply what they’ve learned as they return to their own mock-up and fix elements based on the design principles they’ve begun to absorb.

Finally, students research the four design principles to flesh out their understanding where needed, and possibly correct any misconceptions. From this research, students create their own graphic organizer of the four design principles for future reference and to help them remember.  We started with creativity and ended with the knowledge my students have curated. They’ve been engaged with the entire process from start to finish, and my students have make some significant decisions about the essential knowledge they need.

But Will it Work for Science?

Not only does flipping Blooms work for classes like media studies,  it also blends beautifully with my inquiry-based Chemistry class.

As we study science, I’ve come to realize that it’s very important for my students to encounter a concept before fully understanding what’s going on. It makes their brain try to fill in the gaps, and the more churn a brain experiences, the more likely it’s going to retain information.

When we study ionic compounds, we start with a lab. My students begin by creating conductivity testers out of tin foil, batteries, and mini Christmas lights. Students then create their own lab and test 10-12 different substances, from salt water, to HCL, to sugar water, to check which substances conduct electricity. Usually, about half of the solutions provided do.

I have them compare their findings to how scientists usually categorize these solutions. Sometimes, solutions that are supposed to conduct electricity, don’t.  So providing the results of experts helps them to have more confidence in their own results.

However, it’s not enough to discover which substances conduct electricity. I want them to try to figure out why. With the results my students have obtained, they analyze their findings. By dividing the solutions into appropriate categories, students often discern that the solutions that conduct electricity are made up of two elements and the elements combined are found on opposite sides of the periodic table, such as NaCl. They also realize that solutions that don’t conduct, such as sugar, are usually made of elements found on the same side of the table.

Once they begin to analyze each solution’s makeup more closely, they tend to realize that conductive solutions are, for the most part, made up of a metal and non-metal, whereas solutions that don’t conduct usually don’t contain any metals. Once they’ve exhausted this activity, I introduce the concepts of ionic and covalent bonds to label each category.

Then students re-evaluate their own findings and apply their learning by fixing elements in their categorization system.

At this point, my students research ionic and covalent bonds, either through cooperative research, or by using the flipped classroom model, to fill out their findings with information about the characteristics of each type of bond, such as malleability, boiling and melting points, etc. They’re essentially creating their own notes.

How About English?

Flipping Blooms — putting Creating, Evaluating, Analyzing and Applying first — also works in English.  From what I can tell, it’s likely the easiest route to creating a flipped English classroom. In the past, I’ve struggled to teach my students concepts such as grammar rules and abstract ideas like voice. Flipping Blooms makes this much easier.

I begin with having my students write a paragraph, either in response to a prompt or their own free writing. Next, students, working in small groups or pairs, evaluate several master texts for the criteria we’re working on. How does the writer use punctuation or voice in a particular text? What similarities are there between texts? Students then compare their own writing with each text. What did they do correctly or well? How does their writing differ and to what effect?

As a class, or in their groups, we analyze the pieces for similarities and differences and group them accordingly. Only then do I introduce the concept of run-on sentences, comma splices, and fragments. Essentially, through this process, my students identify the criteria for good writing. From this, we’re able to co-construct criteria and rubrics for summative assessments.

Students then apply what they’ve learned by returning to their own writing. They change elements based on the ideas they’ve encountered.

Students further their understanding by either listening to a podcast, or engaging in their own research of grammar rules. Finally, as the knowledge piece, students create a graphic organizer/infographic or a screencast that identifies the language rules they’ve learned.

I think the best flipped classrooms work because they spend most of their time creating, evaluating and analyzing. In a sense we’re creating the churn, the friction for the brain, rather than solely focusing on acquiring rote knowledge. The flipped classroom approach is not about watching videos. It’s about students being actively involved in their own learning and creating content in the structure that is most meaningful for them.

Blooms 21 actively places learning where it should be, in the hands of the learner.

This post originally appeared on Voices from the Learning Revolution. Shelley Wright is a teacher/education blogger living in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in Canada. She teaches high school English, science and technology. Her passion in education is social justice, global education and helping her students make the world a better place. She blogs at Wright’s Room.

Erin Scott

Urban School students work in groups.

By Kyle Palmer

Field trips have always been a staple – some might say the best part of — school. But those trips are typically special occasions and happen only a few times a year, if budgets and schedules allow for them.

At the Urban School, an independent high school in San Francisco, off-site learning is going to be a core part of a few of the classes next year.  For students who take statistics and elections  the classes will incorporate a chunk of time spent at companies and organizations that are relevant to the class topic.

For example, in the statistics class, Urban School staff is looking to partner with companies and organizations that have data they’d be willing to open up to classes to analyze. For the elections class, students would ideally work in local field offices.

Time spent in the field would be part of a broader, comprehensive curriculum that includes time spent in class, project work with other schools – perhaps even in other cities and countries that will eventually become part of a larger network, guest lectures and speakers, group work, and online work done at home.

Taken all together, it’s a combination of “flipped,” “blended,” “experiential,” “authentic,” and some of the other buzz words we hear in education circles. This experiment for Urban is what some educators envision would exemplify the future school day: learning that happens outside of fixed boundaries, in fluid environments, applying real-world applications to concepts and theories.

“Imagine a kid in a math class working on a project,” said David Bill, the Director of Educational Technology. “Several times a week, they don’t have to be in class, but they can go out and work with a company to get data sets for a unit. It’s a more real-world experience.”

IN THE DNA

This kind of experimentation is not unusual for a school like Urban, which has long had a forward-thinking reputation. The school opened in 1966 and quickly gained notoriety for its progressive pedagogy, which focused on rigorous academics and service learning. The school pioneered the use of block scheduling in the 1970s, and until recently, students were not shown their grades.

Erin Scott

Art class incorporates tactile and digital techniques.

Urban introduced its one-to-one laptop program a little more than a decade ago. “We’re trying to find the sweet spot between traditional school methods that have a face-to-face community and making space for this rich learning content that can be accessed digitally,” said Dean of Faculty Jonathan Howland.

Head of School Mark Salkind explained that Urban officials wanted to go beyond the traditional computer lab approach.

“In real life, you don’t have to schedule in time to use your computer,” he said. “Our goal was to have the laptops disappear – that is, become so integrated into what we do that they were not seen as anything special.”

The nearly 400 students at Urban currently use MacBook Air laptops and pay for them in yearly installments that’s included in their annual tuition fees, which can top $35,000.

Senior Brett Klapper said he uses his laptop in nearly every class. “I think it introduces us to the way of life we’ll be leading in college and as adults,” he said.

Junior Tanisha Rai said that having a laptop for schoolwork makes her more organized but admitted that she sometimes feels over-reliant on her computer.

“All my assignments, all my homework, my calendar: they’re all on my laptop,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to survive a day here without my computer.”

Several students as well as teachers noted how much freedom the Urban School allows students in their use of technology.

“With technology, we start with ‘yes’ and then put boundaries on it, instead of starting with ‘no’ and having censorship,” said Charlotte Worsley, the Assistant Head of School for Student Life.

Erin Scott

Every student at Urban gets a Macbook Air laptop.

Klapper, who will graduate in June and plans to attend Wesleyan University in the fall, said he appreciates the “trust” implicit in Urban’s approach — not just in the use of technology, but to the curriculum in general.

“As a student, you feel so respected here,” he said. “Not all schools would trust kids to let us do some of the things we do in our classes.”

Klapper led an HIV-testing drive at the school as part of a service learning class called “Projects.” He said he got some guidance from teachers but was allowed to do most of the work on his own.

“What we want to do is make education ‘asynchronous,’ not where everybody is asked to do the same thing all at once,” Howland said.

The school is pushing teachers to use technology in ways that enhance project-based learning and inquiry. “In the future, we could have teachers put a lot of their basic content online for kids to review at home,” he said. “And actual class time is used for the extension of that basic knowledge or for field trips or service projects.”

At Urban, perhaps the future is here.

Clarification: The current post reflects that, as of now, only the statistics and elections classes at Urban will be working with off-site organizations.