by – Iris Diamond, PhD

Most material was taught by lecture when I started elementary school, and more of the same continued all the way through my college education in Economics. Not surprisingly, when I decided to become a college teacher I dreamed about lecturing to a classroom full of interested, knowledge-hungry students and to have individual interactions with students outside of class time, mostly during office hours, or a few stolen minutes before or after class.

When I actually became a college teacher, I considered myself foremost a subject-specialist, focusing to stay on top of current research and to deliver this information to my students, of course mixed with a hefty dose of the enthusiasm I hoped to somehow pass on to the classroom. Even though I loved teaching and received good reviews, I did not feel the need to study educational materials on how to teach. In the back of my mind that info was for education majors, and I stuck to reading the latest econ publications.

But I paid close attention to the teacher notes accompanying the material of several text textbooks I used over the years, and implemented some of their suggestions. For example I encouraged my students discuss some end of chapter questions in small groups, and with the right kind of questions some students seemed more active and awake and finally asking questions they had not thought to ask when I lectured. Still, it took me years to realize consciously, that there are other, and better ways for students to learn than watching the sage on stage disperse knowledge into the classroom. Even the most interesting and surprising lecture can not keep student’s attention for an uninterrupted hour and twenty minutes or even half that time.

I love lecturing as much, if not more than most college teachers (as if that were possible), and I believe a lot of my lectures were pretty good ones. The challenge to present beloved concepts in the most interesting way keeps me awake at night, perhaps I should starting with a puzzling question or a situation to grab students’ attention right from the beginning? If I reached that goal and students’ puzzled faces smoothed out at the resolution of the apparent contradiction, or I heard mental ahas echoing through the class room, I considered that a pretty good class.

However, no matter how interesting and exciting my lectures were, when testing time came around, tests still revealed that students retained far less material than I hoped. My next remedy was to coerce students to do regular homework assignments, so they were forced to practice. This left me still discontented with how little students retained, and most disappointingly they were sitting consumer-passively in my classroom, giving off vibes of exhausted octogenarians.

After teaching for several years at ACC, I made contact with FCTL and I am so thankful I did. FCTL seemed all about active and engaged learning, The discussion with other educators invigorated my teaching, not only because we discussed new techniques, but also because these were real flesh and blood teachers at my college, struggling just like me to make their student’s learning experience better. This gave me the courage to take a step back and think about what kind of class room I really wanted to create. How could I create this active and engaged environment into my class room? Oh, and it also gave me the courage to use Google and the library to do research on active and engaged teaching methods that could work for my classroom.

Flipping my classroom brought me closer to my goal

The idea behind a flipped classroom is that students skip the lecture part in class and study the basic material on their own before they come to class. This leaves time in the classroom to practice and/or focus on the harder material. Pre-class, some teachers assign students to watch professionally produced lecture videos, or even make their own. I asked my students to do online homework assignments in MyEconLab on which they get immediate feedback, and to read the book to learn the material. Occasionally, I point them to supplementary YouTube videos. My students have to complete the homework before the first class on the chapter.

And all this new-gained free-time in the classroom? The advantage of a flipped classroom is that we teachers can focus on doing what we do best: teach. My students and I now had time to interact one-on-one or in small groups. We don’t have to go over all the material in class, but can focus on the challenging or discussion-worthy parts. The best part is we have time to introduce Active Learning Activities, which in most cases take more time than lecture. We also have time to practice in the classroom, and I am available to answer questions right there and then for each student, which is not the case when students do homework assignments alone at home. So I was very pleasantly surprised that the flipped classroom allowed me to build a much closer relationship with each individual student, even if they never showed up for my office hours. As a side effect my students were building a much closer relationship with each other, which has a positive effect on student retention as well.

Initially teaching a flipped class felt uncomfortable to me. In my first flipped class period, I did not give a single lecture. My students left the class room excited, and from the energy in the room it seemed a great class, but as a teacher I still felt like I had not done my job somehow. Was I getting paid for this? It was a strange feeling to say the least. Did students learn much at all? Test results proved they did, when they took the first exam. My students often get to hear me say “s/he who works learns, and s/he who teaches learns best.” It was confirmed by several students after the first test, when they made comments that they did well on a specific section of the test because their group was presenting it to the class and they understood it really well as a result.

While I still lecture at times, I found that I consider myself more a facilitator of active learning in the classroom these days. The sage on stage has stepped more and more into the background.