Flipping Your Class

Traditionally, we spend a lot of time teaching new knowledge and having students do the review after class. Gradually we find out this might not be an effective way of teaching since students sometimes complain that they often forget what they have learnt in class when doing review. Thus we want to introduce a new way of teaching called Flipping Your Classroom.

In this method, students will need to learn the new knowledge by themselves before the class. They can watch instructional videos or other materials shared by the teacher. Thus allows students to have the basic background knowledge. When they come to the classroom, they are assigned with different kinds of activities relating to the content they learned ahead. By directly involving into discussions with peers, students can get to the problem solving effectively. At the same time, the teachers still play the role of leader, however instead standing in the front of the classroom, they stand beside the students getting ready to offer instructions to a smaller scale of groups. Another important procedure within this method is the giving feedback to students, which is to help students see their own performance and improve the drawbacks. The three main stages of the whole process are well connected as a cycle in the following picture.

There are many advantages introducing this method into classroom. First of all, it makes teaching more effective. It is time consuming to teach totally new content in classroom. This method push students to do the learning before the class and discuss deeply during it. Second, this method improves students' learning ability as well as critical thinking ability since it leaves more space for discussion. Last, using videos, especially the existing ones, as learning resources provides students with a native language environment. 

As for the selection of videos, we can find many educational videos on YouTube, TeacherTube or TED-Ed. If you are more interested in creating your own videos, you can find the tools you might need in this article 5 Free Screencasting Apps for Creating Video Tutorials.