Archive for the ‘Reverse instruction’ Category
Reverse Instruction – The Vod Couple
“It made us rethink: What do they need us to be physically present for?” Bergmann says. “They need us to be physically present to help them when they’re struggling. We were finding that kids would go home and they’d be looking back at their notes, and even though they frantically wrote down everything we wrote on the board, they didn’t know how we got from Point A to Point B. That’s when we decided to switch things around.”
Flip your classroom through reverse instruction
Sams and Bergman were the first people, to my knowledge, to suggest the idea of “reverse instruction.” Together they began to record their lectures and post them on iTunes. The students downloaded them to their computers and mobile devices and watched them at home, at their convenience. When in the classroom Sams and Bergsma spent their time interacting with the students individually on “homework” assignments. When a student got stuck, they were there to help. They flipped the classroom to make it more flexible and dynamic, matching it with the needs of the students.
Last year I began implementing reverse instruction into my high school Anatomy & Physiology class. It was the third time I had taught the class and I knew that I spent a lot of time lecturing. For most of my lectures I had already created PowerPoint presentations. I began the labor intensive process of putting them on the web for students to view. For some of them I created screencasts with voice narration. Others were simply Google Docs presentations shared on my classroom wiki. For each unit I provided a lecture note outline that I required students to fill out.
Reverse Instruction: Dan Pink and Karl’s “Fisch Flip”
I first learned of the term, reverse instruction, right here at Connected Principals, in a comment John Sowash provided on my blog post about Khan Academy. (I appreciate John’s teaching me greatly, and I am so happy the way Connected Principals is providing me so much learning!) John then went on, after his comment on my post, to write a very fine piece on Reverse instruction on his own blog.
If kids can get the lectures, can get the content delivery and skill modeling as well (or often better) by computer lecture than in person, why do we have use precious class-time for this purpose? Why do we, in the status quo, replicate in person in our classrooms what is easily available elsewhere, the content delivery/skill modeling, and then have kids apply their learning to difficult problems at home, without us there to help?
