To accommodate some of the challenges of COVID-19 teaching, I flipped my composition course. Now, two semesters in, a study of my students’ reactions indicates that COVID-19 might have introduced me to my best teaching self, at least for EN100.
My research indicates that it’s not unusual for a professor’s lecture tangents could eat into active learning time. I can relate! Now my pithy, pre-recorded videos introduce new material, and we spend class time on deepening activities.
When flipping a class, I learned to make sure every assessment and activity align with the Student Learning Outcomes. I based my approach to the flipped classroom on Talbert’s Flipped Learning and Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design. If you’ve taken the Studio’s Teaching Online course, you have already seen the course design matrix that guided my flipping process.
Fortunately, after all of this effort, my first year students expressed positive feelings about their flipped classroom. Here’s one take on it:
“[It’s] not a bad way of doing things, actually I like it more[.] It makes the work load seem easier. The videos and before class assignments aren’t too long so it usually will get done, and the in class activities are easier [than…] doing it on your own without a professor[‘s] help.”
A small number of students felt that the lure of their personal devices made it hard to focus on video lectures at home. A larger number claimed the opposite, saying that focusing during in-class lectures posed the greater challenge.
Overall, my study found several benefits in the flipped model:
- greater student agency in learning new materials
- more time to mentor student writing
- noticeable student and instructor enjoyment of the course design
My personality fits well with the balance of labor needed to flip a classroom. I prefer front-loading the work of preparing videos, which allows me to focus class time on individual or small-group mentoring. I can see that not every personality will find flipped learning to be a good fit for their instruction.
I write about the process and my students’ opinions on the design in the upcoming collection Go Online! Reconfiguring Writing Courses for the New Virtual World from Peter Lang.
About the Contributor: Tara Moore teaches writing courses and Young Adult literature at Elizabethtown College. Her books include Christmas: The Sacred to Santa and Victorian Christmas in Print.