Flipping the Narrative; The Future of Teaching

Today many teachers are using completely new ways to change how teaching is done online. One change is instead of the old fashioned way of teaching a course using a reference textbook, now teachers are using OER, or Open Educational Resources.

Another way teachers are dramatically changing the way teaching is done is instead of teaching “at” students – simply reciting the reading from said required reference book, the teacher actually asks the students to participate how they want to learn. If you’re thinking “Huh?? What are you talking about, that’s not how I was taught in school!” Well, you’re not alone, neither was I or the vast majority of folks who are in the professional working world.

This new way of teaching is called Flipped Learning Network, or FLN, and it’s defined as an alternative to the old lecture-centered model. Today, digital technologies allows the new world teacher to go far beyond the old school model of teaching.

Still not sure what I’m talking about? I’ll make it easy -this is what I would do as a 2020 college professor teaching a course on Cooking with Vegetables. I know, I know – Ewww – Veggies!! Stay with me now: This is Dr. Vinay Singh’s “Mastering the Vegetable” course at ABC High School:

In week 1 of my 24 student enrolled course, I would pair them up in 12 teams. In each lesson during my 12 week course, I would include curated content video using myself explaining and teaching about a vegetable food “family” – such as Leafy Greens. I would use my education and experience of course, but also present open educational material in my video using other experts content and such.

Then I would involve my students into the assignment to prepare a response for the regularly scheduled online classroom time. I would give them the freedom to use their creativity but to stay in the guidelines of the instructions, in this case, “Prepare A Nutritious Leafy Green Recipe” and they would be free to use any online related content to produce their response.

This allows for building a collaborative class culture, even though it is online. The students have someone they work with regularly so the isolation effect of old online methods is removed, and the wide spread use of video conferencing also alleviates this.

Lastly, after each scheduled online class, each student is asked to contribute one way that the week’s lesson could have been done differently and that they feel would have improved their online experience of the lesson so future students can have a better experience. This allows students to feel fully engaged not just at the peer to peer level but also a level where the teacher and the student are working together for improvement, and as peers too.

This is what a Flipped classroom looks like. Maybe they will even leave the course liking vegetables too! Ok…that might be a bit much 😉