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Olivier Chabot's avatar

This is awesome thank you. The time on task is definitely a huge confounding variable. Another point that is often missed with flipped classrooms is that most teachers like to teach. If two methods give comparable learning outcomes, most teachers will opt for the one that makes them feel alive and useful.

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Marjorie Hewitt's avatar

This article makes me wonder how each of us defines "teaching". To some, teaching means lecturing...the transfer of knowledge from a teacher's mind to a student's mind. But teaching can also be defined as something much more interactive, responsive and reciprocal than that...and I would say that teaching in elementary and secondary schools is rarely in lecture format.

I also think about my area of teaching, which is ESL. Many ELLs would struggle to understand a "cold read" of an informative document or video, without significant pre-teaching of the content. I often find that, while many of us can learn by reading something with new content and then understand it, an ELL might need to understand the concept before being able to understand the reading....kind of an opposite way to learn.

I think if I wanted to flip my classroom, I'd rather assign a minds-on activity ahead of time...maybe students look at an image and think about what they see and what they think is happening, or maybe ask a question about it.

Good food for thought, in any case!

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