Flipped Classroom and Peer Instruction Pre-Session

Welcome to the pre-session materials for the May 31st workshop on the flipped classroom and peer instruction at the Consortium on STEM Higher Education Panama.  I’m Derek Bruff, director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, and I’ll be your workshop facilitator. You can read my bio here.

To prepare for the workshop, please take some time to watch the videos below, read the two articles listed below, and respond to the questions at the bottom of the page.  Please note that the videos were created for an online course titled “Advancing Learning through Evidence-Based STEM Teaching.”  As such, they include references to discussion boards and a few other videos.  You can safely ignore those references.

Videos

In the first video, I share a framework for the “flipped classroom,” in which students gain a first exposure to a new topic before class, then spend class time engaged in the kind of practice and feedback that’s critical to learning.  I argue that the flipped classroom motivates an important question about teaching: How can we make the most of the relatively limited time we have with students during class?

In the next series of videos, I address several questions about the flipped classroom that faculty often ask, including: Does the flipped classroom work? How do you make sure students come to class prepared? What role should lectures play in learning?

In the final video, I share my experience teaching a more traditionally structured mathematics course, after years of using the flipped approach in my teaching. This experience of “unflipping” his course highlighted some of the benefits of using the flipped approach.

Articles

For a slightly different take on the flipped classroom, please read “Flipping the Classroom,” a teaching guide authored by my Center for Teaching colleague Cynthia Brame.  That article introduces the teaching strategy known as peer instruction, which will be a focus of our workshop.  It’s an effective and broadly applicable strategy for making good use of class time in a flipped course.  To see why peer instruction is effective, please read “Why Peer Discussion Improves Student Performance on In-Class Concept Questions,” an article by Michelle Smith and colleagues, appearing in a January 2009 issue of Science.  We will discuss the Smith article during the workshop.

Questions

Please take some time to thoughtfully respond to the following questions. Your responses will help me tailor the workshop to your needs and interests.