42. Flipping the classroom

Flipping the classroom is one way to dedicate class time to active learning. In theory it sounds great, but how do you flip a classroom without flopping? In this episode, Dr. Dominick Casadonte, a Chemistry Professor at Texas Tech University, joins us to discuss research and best practices related to flipped classrooms.

Show Notes

  • Camtasia
  • Mediasite
  • Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2014). Flipped learning: Gateway to student engagement. International Society for Technology in Education.
  • Sams, A., & Bergmann, J. (2013). Flip your students’ learning. Educational leadership, 70(6), 16-20.
  • Bowen, J. A. (2011). Rethinking technology outside the classroom. Journal of Music History Pedagogy, 2(1), 43-59.
  • Bowen, J. A. (2014). The Teaching Naked Cycle: Technology Is a Tool, but Psychology Is the New Pedagogy. Liberal Education, 100(2), n2.
  • Bowen, J. (2012). Teaching naked: How moving technology out of your classroom will improve student learning (ed.). Jossey-Bass
  • Belford, R. E., Stoltzfus, M., & Houseknecht, J. B. (2015). ConfChem Conference on Flipped Classroom: Spring 2014 ConfChem Virtual Poster Session. Journal of Chemical Education, 92(9), 1582-1583.
  • Stoltzfus, J. R., & Libarkin, J. (2016). Does the room matter? Active learning in traditional and enhanced lecture spaces. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 15(4), ar68.
  • Stoltzfus, Matthew (2016). Engaging Students in the Flipped Classroom (video)
  • Coats, H. J. (2016). A study on the effect of lecture length in the flipped classroom (Doctoral dissertation).
  • Casadonte, D. J. (2016). “The Effectiveness of Course Flipping in General Chemistry – Does It Work?” ACS Symposium Series, “The Flipped Classroom”, December 2016 (Book Chapter) The Flipped Classroom Volume 2: Results from Practice, Chapter 2, pp 19–37, Chapter DOI: 10.1021/bk-2016-1228.ch002, ACS Symposium Series, Vol. 1228, ISBN13:9780841231627eISBN:9780841231610,
  • POGIL.org

Transcript

Rebecca: Flipping the classroom is one way to dedicate class time to active learning. In theory it sounds great, but how do you flip a classroom without flopping? In this episode we discuss research and best practices.

[Music]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[Music]

John: Our guest today is dr. Dominick Casadonte, a chemistry professor at Texas Tech University. Dr. Casadonte is recognized as a global leader in flipped learning by the Flipped Learning Global Initiative.
Welcome.

Dominick: Thank you very much.

Rebecca: Today our teas are:

Dominick: Well, my usual afternoon beverage is an iced green tea with three pumps of raspberry, but since I’m getting over a cold, today I’m drinking a hot green tea with vanilla, lavender, and honey.

Rebecca: That sounds really nice. Finally, a tea drinker.

[LAUGHTER]

John: I’m drinking Irish Breakfast tea.

Rebecca: …and I’m drinking chai today.

John: You’re recognized as a an expert on flipping the classroom, and you’ve been doing it for a while. Could you tell us a little bit about what a flipped classroom is?

Dominick: Sure. The usual paradigm, if you think about it with regard to teaching, is lecture, homework, lecture, homework, lecture, homework, tests, lecture, homework, lecture, homework, and so on… and the problem with that format is that it’s not conducive to deep learning… with the exception of maybe very bright students or very bright asynchronous learners. Trying to keep up with a lecturer is often difficult. A student, for example, may not have gotten down everything that they wanted to write down… they may not have gotten it down correctly… or it might be fragmented… or perhaps they just didn’t understand well enough to write it down in a meaningful way, or a way that’s meaningful for them. Then they try to go home and they try to do homework, but since they didn’t really understand the lecture in the first place, the homework is again difficult and they might only be able to work part of it. So then, the very next day, there’s a new lecture and a new topic. The normal sort of didactic approach to education often leads to what I’ll call fragmented learning, in the sense that there isn’t enough time in class to practice many of the active learning strategies that work so well because faculty are so concerned with getting the lecture done. In the flipped model, on the other hand, we flip the homework-lecture-homework paradigm so that the students’ homework is to watch a lecture online. Now it can either be PowerPoint or a video and different people use different techniques. It can be done on Camtasia, it can be done through Mediasite, it can be done through a variety of different platforms. It could be done on YouTube for example. So, they’ll watch usually a video or a lecture online before they come to class, and then they may or may not do online homework prior to coming to class as a part of the pre-class experience. Then, once in class, time can be spent, for example, checking the students knowledge… clearing up muddy points or any misconceptions they might have… working advanced problems. But now, in this particular case, class becomes more of a discussion and you can use a lot of the active learning strategies that really engage the students in learning the material. By flipping the classroom, we freed up time to really engage and interact with our students and it helps with their learning in significant ways which I can talk about later.

John: So, in a traditional class, you tell students what the content is in class, and they come in with very different backgrounds and some of them are able to pick it up, others get lost along the way, and then they’re sent out to do homework… where students seem to have the most difficulty on homework or tests… and we’re pretty much leaving them alone to do that. But, here in the classroom, you’re able to work with them and help them through some of the issues.

Dominick: Right… and so, for example, in the classroom with homework, now they have a mentor who can help them work through the more difficult problems to help guide them along. There are models of the flipped classroom where there are peer mentors in the class who can help and walk around and mill around as well. So, there are opportunities for group work. There are opportunities for group discussion. You can engage the topics in a much deeper way than you can by just simply lecturing at students. So, it’s a very very non-passive way of teaching.

Rebecca: What prompted you to get into a flipped classroom model?

Dominick: Desperation, I would say. [LAUGHTER] I first started teaching an online class in the fall of 2007 as part of a multidisciplinary science master’s program of which I was a part here at Texas Tech… and getting everyone on the same platform at the same time, my thinking was that lecturing to them live online was a waste of time, basically. The question that motivated me was the same one that motivated John Bergmann and Aaron Sams around the same time at the high school level up in Colorado. Namely, what could I do to use my classroom time more effectively? What could I do to use my online time more effectively? …and I thought, “Well, let’s take the lecture out of the classroom.” So, I pre-recorded my lectures. I had the students watch the lectures before we got together in the online environment, and then we spent the majority of our time having discussion and working problems…. and these were teachers at the time and they were very very enthusiastic about the ability to actually discuss the material that they were trying to learn… and so then I thought “Well, hmm, if that works really well on an online format why don’t I try it face to face?” …and so then, starting in 2008, I adopted this to my general chemistry class. The following summer, a high school teacher that I had as part of a workshop said “Oh, I see you’re flipping your class” and I said “Flipping, what’s that?” ‘Cause at the time, there were a lot of different terms for flipping. It was called: time-shifted instruction, reverse instruction, blended instruction, all sorts of things. Flipping is a term that’s really sort of stuck.

So, I started out of a sense again of “How can I engage my students more effectively in the classroom?” and once I realized that it worked swimmingly in the online environment and then I said “Well, okay, will this work in the face-to-face?” …and it worked even better there. By that point, there are pockets of people around the country who are doing this, and they used all sorts of interesting terms. Jose Bowen at SMU, who’s an art professor, used the term “naked teaching” because it can be unsettling when you walk into a classroom and not have the comfort of your lecture notes to be able to project or read to the students. So, very often I will walk into the classroom and say “What are we going to talk about today? or “What would you like to talk about today?” You can’t do that unless you feel comfortable about the subject material and you have some expertise, but it’s a great way, in the long run, to really, really impact students.

Rebecca: You mentioned both doing this in an online environment and also in the classroom. Is there a difference between your experience in both?

Dominick: Yes, it’s so much easier face-to-face. To be able to walk around to gauge what’s going on in the classroom, their level of understanding, and how learning is happening. The power of direct peer-to-peer contact should never be underestimated, I think. Now, in the online format, my focus was more on the development of a learning community working on a particular topic, rather than in peer-to-peer mentoring and things like that. So, they’re very different approaches, but you do develop a sense of community in both, I think.

John: Now, with your online classes are they synchronous or asynchronous?

Dominick: My online classes are synchronous, in the sense that everybody meets in one place at one time. We have various software programs that allow us all to be in the same place. Yeah, so they’re all together at one point, and that’s kind of interesting because I have people from all over the country who are taking these classes. They’ve never actually physically met, at least for the first class that I teach. It’s interesting trying to, in the discussions, get a sense of the personalities of the people who were providing discussion.

John: Are they participating in video formats or is it just audio or text?

Dominick: I’ve done both. I’ve done video and audio and depending on the bandwidth and the number of students in the class both can work well.

John: How large are your classes?

Dominick: Well, my online class had 24 students in it. So, a fairly large, I think, from an online perspective class. It wasn’t one of these very very large classes like you might see at MIT, for example, but 24 is a good class in terms of bandwidth… trying to get everybody in the same room at the same time… and my face-to-face classes… they’ve ranged anywhere from a low of 25 to a high of 150.

Rebecca: You mentioned two different techniques that you use both in online versus in person. So, online you mentioned community formation and then in person you mentioned peer to peer. Can you expand upon each of those?

Dominick: Yeah, my first adage for teaching is know your audience, and in the face-to-face environment I was working largely with in-service teachers who were trying to develop a more significant content knowledge of chemistry, and so there the idea was the development of a supportive community where these teachers could bring their ideas to the table in terms of not only the content that I was teaching them, but also how they could then apply that content in their own classroom settings… and in that regard they were able to help teach each other techniques that they could use in the classrooms based on what they were learning in terms of the content. There really was a community focus, sharing knowledge as opposed to just gaining knowledge. In the face-to-face classroom, it’s more a sense of the students trying to understand the content at a deep level. There I found that it is true that when you teach something you really hopefully really understand it and so peer-to-peer mentoring is much more effective there. So, we tend to work in groups… we tend to work with dyads… two people working next to each other… and then sometimes I will just have people go to the board… but once again it was in that context of community because I think it’s very important, if you’re going to do flipping, and do it well, that it’s an active, encouraging, engaging classroom experience. If my students go to the board, whether they get the problem right or wrong, the class gets into a habit very very quickly of applauding the student for their attempt… whether or not it’s right or wrong… and then we debrief. We talk about what works… what doesn’t work… So, it really is both peer to peer and community building there as well. But, the emphasis is more on the individual in the face-to-face classroom, I think.

Rebecca: It sounds to me a little bit like the choices that you’re making online and in-person aren’t necessarily because of the medium, but rather who’s in those particular classes. Am I hearing that correctly?

Dominick: That’s right, and one of the nice things about flipping is that it is such a rich environment in which to work. As I mentioned earlier, the pre-class videos can be video lectures, they can be audio lectures (if that’s appropriate), they can be PowerPoint presentations, they can be any number of things. In the in-class experience, it’s an active learning environment. so you tailor it to the people in the classroom. For example, if you’re trying to teach in a flipped environment of the class of 24, there you can do all sorts of things that promote individual learning in ways that it’s a little bit more difficult to do in a class of 300, for example. But, I have a good friend, Matt Stoltzfus at Ohio State, for example, who routinely flips like general chemistry class of 600 students, and he’s able to give them as close to a personal learning experience as one can, I think. The point that I’m trying to make is that the flipped environment is a very rich one and it allows you to tailor the learning experience to your class specifically.

John: Do you create your own videos or do you use ones created by other people?

Dominick: I actually create my own videos. I have my own recording studio in my office… I have a Mediasite setup…. I have a video camera… I have a document camera… and I have a wonderful microphone…. and so every couple of years or so I re-record all of my videos. Now, I do use a mixture of other formats. So, for example I do have post-video homework that the students have to do online before they show up to class… and that’s done using an online learning platform that we have here at Texas Tech through a national distributor. The advanced problems that we work in class come both from the textbook that we use and also from problems that I develop. So, it’s sort of a hybrid. But, the pre-lecture videos I actually produce…… and one of the things that studies have shown is that students develop a certain sense of identity with regard to the person teaching the class. Some people, when they’re starting to flip, might want to just use Khan Academy videos, for example, or things like that. But the studies show that the class wants to see folks on the videos (or your voiceovers if you’re using PowerPoint with voiceover)… they want to see the professor who’s teaching the class, because that’s their professor… and so they develop ownership, if you will. Plus if you’re using other media, for example a Khan Academy, they may not be teaching it exactly the same way that you want to teach it, and so then you have to either reteach or undo. There’s a quality control issue there. So, it’s just easier, if you’re gonna do flipping, to make your own videos… and there are so many different ways of doing that now that there’s really no excuse.

Rebecca: That had been my experience as well when I’ve done videos in my classes. The students really liked the quirkiness or knowing that it’s the same person that they had in their classroom and if you try to slip in something else occasionally they really didn’t like it.

Dominick: …and a lot of people have a perfectionist tendency and really want their videos to be really super perfect. Well, once again, studies have shown that that’s not really what students want. They want to see the foibles. They want to see you as you are. If they know that you’re going to say “um” or “uh” in the classroom then if you don’t say “um” or “uh” in your videos, then they’re gonna say “Is that a robot teaching the class that looks like my professor?” So, it’s okay to be human when you’re doing the pre-lecture videos. But, I think one of the things that often hangs up people when they’re starting to do flipping is this notion that it has to be perfect, and it really doesn’t.

Rebecca: I think they really appreciate when you make mistakes and things, too. I know that my students did when I do like a coding mistake, I’m like “Whoops, I made a mistake..” and go back and fix it and explain what I did and why it was wrong. We all make those kinds of slips and errors and things and we would do it live. So, it’s kind of nice to do it in videos, too.

John: It makes you seem more human by doing that.

Dominick: One of the nice things about them seeing you make mistakes is that it gives them permission to make mistakes. They don’t have to be perfect. I’ve had experience with students in classrooms where they come in and they’re intimidated… they’re shy… they’re just afraid that they can’t master the materials. So, seeing somebody make a mistake who is an expert gives them permission to make mistakes… and one of the things that that really does is it empowers them to learn, because at the end of the day when somebody’s trying to learn they’re going to make mistakes and I give my class permission to make mistakes. In fact, I tell them you have permission to make mistakes while you’re learning. After you’ve learned something, that’s a little different. If you’re an engineer, for example, and you’re building a bridge, I don’t want you making mistakes. But while you’re learning… absolutely, make mistakes. Part of education is this movement from novice to expert and in that process one makes mistakes. So, I told my class “You have the right to make mistakes” and I use an example. So, let’s say you’re a five-year-old and you’re trying to learn how to ice-skate you fall down, what does a five-year-old do? They laugh, they brush themselves off, they might giggle a little bit, they get up and then they just skate some more. Now, imagine you’re an eighteen year old and you’re learning to ice skate and you fall down. Most of the time, people stand up and say “Did anybody see me?” and they worry about what people are gonna think, instead of just getting up, laughing, and moving on. So, what often happens is the 18-year old never learns to ice skate, whereas the five year old, who’s willing to make mistakes, learns. So, I tell them it’s okay to make mistakes while they’re trying to learn… and also it’s about empowering students to be able to have confidence in themselves… and we talk about this a lot. We did a study of what motivates students in the flipped environment, and part of it is the confidence… the autonomy… that they develop in the flipped environment. When they really think they’ve got and they really understand, there’s a certain level of “Geez, I understand this. I can understand the next thing…” and so on and so forth. That sense of confidence really improves their educational experience.

John: How long are your videos? Do you tend to have very long ones or do you chunk them up into smaller chunks? and what would you recommend in terms of video length?

Dominick: We did a study a few years ago on the optimum length for flip videos, and it came about because our book dealers: McGraw-Hill, Prentice-Hall, Cengage… those are the top three that we have here at Texas Tech… were telling us that they were creating videos and they’re creating these five to seven-minute videos… and I said why are you making five to seven-minute videos?” and they said “Well, everybody knows that the Millennial generation has a five- to seven-minute attention span and so they want five to seven minute videos.” I said: “But, what is best for learning and improving learning outcomes? I don’t care what their preference is. What’s best for them to learn?” He said “Well, we don’t know.” I said “Well, do you have any data or evidence that shows the five- to seven-minute videos are really great for learning?” and they said “No, but we would be interested if someone would do a study and tell us.” So, I had a graduate student who embarked on a study of lecture video length. We set up essentially short video people… those are people to watch five to seven-minute videos… and we did this with master videos, so each video was probably 40 minutes to an hour long. We put stop signs in the video and when they hit a stop sign they would stop. They would work some online homework and then they could pick up again… or they could go off and do something else. but the short videos were five to seven minutes and then we had a long view group, as it were. We allowed them to decide which videos they wanted to do and not surprisingly, 62% decided to do short videos. So, I have no problem with the book dealers’ notion that Millennials prefer shorter videos. But, then we let the semester go on and we didn’t force them to stay into one group or the other. We let them move and we watched their video habits. We weren’t video stalking them, but we could watch their lecture habits using the Mediasite analytics down to the millisecond.

What we found was that 60% of that short video group switched to the long video length, which is very surprising to us, and we did also a variety of assessments. We looked at online homework grades. We looked at quiz grades. We looked at exam grades. We looked at final exam grades. We looked at the American Chemical Society standardized tests that we give as a pre-post and what we found was that there was a subgroup of the long-view group that watched the video as a long video, but then they stopped at specific points to either have a snack with a friend, go to the bathroom, whatever they needed to do… and we called them the long pause people. It turned out that in every assessment that required global understanding… so final exams, ACS exam individual exams… the long-pause viewers actually scored one standard deviation higher than the short viewers. In fact, the short viewers had the worst learning outcomes of all three groups. Then we gave them Likert scale questionnaires, and we also gave them open-ended questions, and we said “Why did you make the switch? What do you find?” and they said “Well, it just got too fragmented to look at these short videos and we couldn’t take what we saw in video A and connect it to video B and so on and so forth, especially if several hours had gone by, because we then had to go back and watch video A again to remember what we forgot. But, if we did the long videos we were able to just put it all together.” Also in that we found that the best optimum video time. So, what constitutes a short video versus a long video for Millennials is 20 minutes or less is short, 30 minutes or more is long. So, 20 to 30 minutes is the sweet spot for video length. That’s what the study showed us and we’ve just submitted that for publication.

Rebecca: Have you adjusted how you’re teaching based on that information?

Dominick: Yes, my videos are roughly in the range of 30 to 40 minutes, but I tell my students “Take the time you need. Take breaks. It’s going to help your learning outcomes.” I also share with them the results of our studies, because I think if you’re going to, in my case if you’re gonna be a scientist, you should be data-driven. So we want our students to know that we’re not just telling them this because it’s something anecdotal, but rather it comes from data that we’ve collected.

John: Have you thought about controlling for self selection and randomly putting students in groups? Because one concern I’d have with that is that it could be the case that those students who select the short videos might have done less well no matter which group they were in or vice versa… although you do have switchers in there.

Dominick: Yeah, I’ve actually been very lucky in my studies that I teach our honors general chemistry sections… and so I look at the SAT scores… I look at their previous class performance… and it’s a very very, as much one can have, a homogeneous group. So there’s really not much of a selection bias, I think, as far as the study goes.

Rebecca: You’ve also done some research on the flipped classroom approach in general, not just the video length. Can you share some of your findings?

Dominick: Sure. We found out a lot about the flipped environment over the past 10 years or so. As I mentioned a minute ago, I’ve been very lucky in that I tend to teach very bright students. I did a five-year longitudinal study on the effect of flipping which has been published in American Chemical Society monograph and we found that the average exam grade increased by 9.2 percent over that five-year period, and that the largest gains in learning came during summative assessments (for example during final exams and externally developed independently normed exams like our ACS exam). We also have done work on what motivates students to do well in the flipped classroom and we just recently presented at the biennial conference on chemistry education regarding the effectiveness of peer mentoring during the flipped classroom. The results there were very astounding to me. It shouldn’t have been because peer-led team learning has been around for more than 15 years, but nonetheless, in trying to tweak the classroom, the addition of the peer mentor took what was already much better than had been before and improved it dramatically. I’ll give you an example. On the American Chemical Society end-of-term exam, without the peer mentor present… So, I give my students incentives if they score above the 95th percentile on that exam, and it’s a challenging exam, they get an automatic “A” in my class. They don’t have to take the final because this exam is normed against thousands of students around the country in a variety of different university settings. Pre-flipping, I had zero to one student scoring above the 95th percentile; post-flipping the average was roughly nine. So, it increased tremendously. With the presence of the peer mentor, the number went from 9 to 34 and so almost a six-fold increase in the number of students scoring above the 95th percentile. The only difference being, since I used to run the discussion sections that I subsequently allowed the peer mentor to do, that was really the only difference in the environment as far as I could see in terms of controlling for the different factors, except for the obvious one of different students. But she did this in the fall of 2016 and the fall of 2017 and there were 34 in one in the fall of 2017, 33 in the fall of 2016. The percentages of the class actually increased. This is kind of reproducible, if you will. So, we’ve looked at a variety of different things, and with regard to motivation we looked at that from self-determinacy theory and found essentially three things that really sort of motivate people: one is autonomy, second is pace, and the third is responsibility.

In the flipped environment, this sense of autonomy… the sense that “Oh yeah, I am really learning something” is very important to the students. The pace, the fact that they could watch the videos in their pajamas, for example, was very important to the students as a motivating factor… and responsibility, the fact that they had to take responsibility for their own education as opposed to being sort of spoon fed in a lecture format was something that motivated them as well. That student just graduated in December, so we’re now preparing that for publication. So, we looked at a variety of different aspects of flipping.

Rebecca: Can you clarify about your peer mentor model? The students are watching videos outside of class, and then they’re coming to a class with you, and then also recitation session with another student?

Dominick: They watch a pre-lecture video. They do online homework. We have a class discussion… work problems… and then there’s a separate recitation section… and historically I have done all of that. I had a very bright student who really wanted some teaching experience and she said “Would you let me run your recitation?” and I, like many faculty perhaps, don’t really want to give up control of my classroom environment. So, it took a lot of cajoling on her part to get me to do that…. and I said “Well, let’s look at it and see what happens.” She took over the recitations and… talk about a motivated young lady… she would provide review sheets for them… she would do all sorts of things that I would do, but the way she would do it, I think, spoke to the students so much more effectively than I was able to do. I think that’s one of the real reasons why their scores went up.

Rebecca: She knew how to meet them where they were at in a way that, as we become more of an expert in our field, we lose touch with that.

Dominick: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So, one of the things that I’ll be interested in following is that there was a recent study that Prentice-Hall published about the Millennials versus the Gen Z students… and one of the things they noticed is that, while there was about a sixty or so percent “like” amongst the Millennials for using computers and computerization and video and things like that, that number was almost half for the gen Z population. It’s almost as though it’s such a normal part of their life, the gen Z population, that there’s nothing special… there’s nothing unique about it… there’s no value-added to doing videos… it’s the sort of normal expectation. So, I’ll be very curious to see how this sort of flipped environment works over the next 10 to 15 years when the expectation is that they’ll be seeing videos at some point either prior or post classroom experience.

Rebecca: …definitely an interesting question.

John: You’ve organized several symposium on flipped classrooms. What are some of the biggest takeaways from those symposia when you bring people from many different disciplines together? Are the results pretty similar across disciplines or do they vary substantially?

Dominick: Well, I think the first thing that struck me with regard to these symposia is how diverse the flipped environment really can be. Since active learning occurs during the classroom time, there’s almost as many different active learning strategies as there are teachers, and so no two flipped classrooms are the same… and that’s the first thing that I learned. The other thing that I learned is that you have to be committed to flip. You can’t do it half-baked. If you try to do flipping, there was one example of a professor who said “Well, all this is is what we’ve always done. You tell the students to read the material before they come to class and then we have a discussion.” So, he said “Okay, I’m going to ‘flip my classroom’ and just have them read the textbook before they come to class and then we’ll have a discussion.” He found very quickly that the students weren’t reading the textbook, so there was very little discussion going on, which frustrated the professor and frustrated the classroom and set up more of an adversarial relationship.. and it was the worst teaching experience he ever had and he said “I’m never going to flip my classroom again.” So, one of the takeaway messages, and this was reported at one of the symposia, is that if you’re really going to flip your classroom, you’re in for a dime, you’re in for a dollar. You do it as well as you can and be very concerned about what you’re putting in and what you’re expecting to get out or it can be a very very bad experience. Now, I will say this, that almost everybody when they get up on board the flipped bandwagon, especially if you’re using technology prior to classroom, it’s hard at first. That’s the other real take-home message. It takes a lot of time to flip your class the first time. But, once you do it, it actually is much more enjoyable. It’s actually easier, I think, than the regular didactic approach. Those are some of the take-home messages.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit more about some of the other challenges faculty might face if they’re doing it for the first time?

Dominick: Sure, yeah. The first and biggest challenge that people have is time. Don’t decide you’re gonna flip your classroom two weeks before the start of a semester. It can be the most horrible experience you’ve ever had as a teacher, because students have an expectation that each lecture is going to be there for them. As we all have various things come up or university requirements… meetings… things like that… and you may find yourself at 3 o’clock in the morning trying to record a video for dispersal at 8 o’clock in the morning. So, don’t wait till the last minute. That’s the biggest sort of thing. That’s one of the reasons why people are sometimes a little bit risk-averse with regard to flipping their classroom.

Other things that have come up: saying “Oh, I can just use Khan Academy videos or videos that are on the web” …and they haven’t previewed them, for example, and then they find that the students have a very different concept of the material than the professor has and then you end up spending a lot of time: “Well, which one do we believe? Do we believe the video that you showed us? or do we believe what you’re telling us?” and so it can create an environment which doesn’t propagate trust in the learning experience. Other issues are: online homework versus homework that you put together for the students… what are you gonna do during class time? how are you gonna fill that time. If you’re not familiar with active learning strategies, that can be very daunting. For example, you walk into a classroom and the students have already watched a video… they’ve done some homework… So, what’s your value added? If you’re not used to active learning strategies, that can be very difficult the first time that you’re doing it…. and then do I need to change my assessment strategy based on the fact that now I’m using a different kind of pedagogy? So, there are a lot of different moving parts and I think putting all those moving parts together can somewhat be inhibitory for people who are trying to flip for the first time.

John: What types of active learning strategies do you use? You’ve mentioned some group work on problems, but could you give a few examples of types of activities you use during the class sections?

Dominick: Sure, there’s group work first of all. I send students to the board. I’ll pass out file cards, for example, and ask the students to put down one thing that was unclear in the video or something that they really would like to learn about in addition to the video. So, it’s not just muddy points, but it’s also how do we expand and extend. Because in my case it’s an honors class and I want to give them a little bit more than the normal amount of material and experience, and so those are some of the things that we do. We have to make molecules and structures and do all sorts of things, and so I use human atoms. I have volunteers come up to the front of the class and they have to then make molecules. They have to develop particular structures. They have to show how they bond, how they vibrate, how they move. What they do. So, they have to actually sort of insert themselves into the molecular dynamic, if you will. They’re trying to understand that, as an atom won’t understand its environment. The first couple of times, students aren’t used to that level of kinesthetic learning, but once they get it, then I usually have a fair number of students who are willing to volunteer and come up. Because, while they’re doing that, we’re also discussing, and I’m asking the class: “Okay, so why is it that this particular atom won’t bond here? What’s wrong with this?” and so it’s a real discussion… but now using human beings as the models rather than just making stick figures or things like that.

So, I try to move students through a variety of different learning environments that engage them not only visually, auditorily, but also tactilely. and kinesthetically, and that’s somewhat unusual, I think, in chemistry classes. Because, once again, most people don’t think of chemistry as a visceral activity in many cases.

Rebecca: Actually, it sounds like a lot of fun.

Dominick: Well, and it is, and I’ll tell you I walk into my class the very first day and they’re all very respectful, because Texas students typically are very respectful and they’re honors students. So, they really want to make a good impression. I usually start my class laughing, telling them this is the last time this class will be quiet. A noisy class is a learning class, a quiet class can be a sleeping class, I don’t know. So, yeah, my class is always very, very engaging, I hope.

Rebecca: Have you ever had the moment when you’ve asked your students “What do you want to talk about today?” and then not have anything they want to talk about?

Dominick: Yes, I think every faculty member has that “Oh, my gosh” moment. I always come prepared with questions, so if they don’t have anything to talk about, then I’ll ask them “Well, what did you think about this particular part of the video?” or “Did you really understand this?” or “Let’s take this concept and move it farther” because one of the things I never do in my classroom is just do a rehash of my video. I figure they’ve watched the video. So, I might say “Well, okay, you saw this but how could we apply this in this other setting?” …and then if they really didn’t understand it, then I’ll be able to tell in a heartbeat whether or not there are real questions because they really don’t have a good sense of understanding… and then I can go back and say “Okay, at what point is this breaking down for you? How did this not work?” Silence kind of tells me that there is usually a breakdown somewhere… and so I try to address what that breakdown is and try to correct it. So, that’s what I meant earlier when I say one of the things I do during my class is try to clear up misconceptions… try to address muddy points… and just make sure that they really understand the lecture part as well. That can take anywhere from five minutes to 45 minutes. My classes are an hour and a half long. Depending on how difficult a lecture was… on what their level of understanding is… So, I want them to have deep understanding of the content and so if they’re coming in silent then I worry that that depth is not there.

John: When they see the videos, you have them take tests. Are the tests the same for each student? or do you vary the questions? Is there some randomization there?

Dominick: Well, no. So, we give departmental exams, so the exams are the same for every student, basically. I know many universities have a format and they can vary the numbers that are put in, for example, but no, my students really… they’re fairly separated when it comes to the exam, so I don’t really feel the need to give each one a separate numerical set of calculations.

John: …and it sounds like many of your students are honor students where that might be less of an issue.

Dominick: Right, and we have an honors code through the Honors College, and I tell them the first lecture if you’re cheating you’re out of here. If you’re cheating you’re out of the University… and I’ve had the unfortunate occasion to have students suspended from universities… not at Texas Tech, but at other places I’ve been… and so they understand that I’m very serious about that.

John: On those tests, do they have multiple attempts or just a single take on the test?

Dominick: Well, my tests are usually set up so that they’re half multiple choice, half free response. Because at the end of the day, I tell my students “Qe don’t live in a multiple-choice world… A. agree, B disagree… you know, we don’t… and so I need to know how you’re thinking. While multiple choice exams are expedient in terms of grading, they don’t let me know what you know. So, I give them both because some students like multiple choice exams. They think they’re really good at them. Some students really want the free response. So, it’s a mixture of both. I try to give them a rich assessment environment as much as possible.

Rebecca: So, to follow up on what John was asking, are your homework assignments kind of a multiple attempt to help learning? or is it a one attempt kind of thing?

Dominick: It’s a one attempt. Yeah. Now, what I do allow them to do after they’ve provided their answer, is that I’ll allow the question to be open so they can go back and review it, especially if the answer is wrong…. and I allow them to do that to help them review for the exams as well.

John: So, they can go back and retake it, but only the first attempt counts towards their grade?

Dominick: Right. So, they have to think about what they’re putting in there before they put it in. Because in some cases, I’ve heard stories of students who put a wrong answer in purposefully and then the online learning environment gives them hints or tells them how to work a problem just like that… and then they go back and they have another problem with just different numbers but they’ve already been coached essentially in terms of how to answer the problem. Once again, perhaps it’s because I think you have to do things right eventually at the end of the day, I really want them to get it right… and these are… once again… they’re relatively straightforward pre-class questions. Their designed as just-in-time or warm-up questions. They’re not multifaceted. The questions we’re getting in the class are really challenging problems. They’re challenging problems using an honors book. So, hopefully they differentiate between those.

John: Are they graded on the problems they do in class as well?

Dominick: They’re not. Because part of that environment, once again, is to have groups… have community… have a mentoring process… and so, the ultimate goal in that whole process is the solution of the problem. So, I’ve already tested them in the online learning environment. I’ll test them on the exams. I’ll test them on quizzes. But, in the class I want the process of how to solve the problem come forth and not the grade be the most important thing.

Rebecca: So, we always end or wrap up our podcast with the question: what are you gonna work on next?

Dominick: Well, I have a pretty active and diverse chemical education research group and with regard to flipping, specifically, I mentioned that I had a recent PhD who looked at motivation in the classroom and what we found there were there were basically three reasons that motivates students to want to do well: autonomy, pace, and responsibility. Through the flipped environment they learn how to develop confidence in their ability to learn, and secondly they liked that the class is largely self-paced and they get to watch the videos in their pajamas if they want to, for example… and finally they really appreciate the fact that they are responsible for their own learning. So, we’re going to be looking at the role of metacognitive intervention as an autonomy motivator in the flipped classroom. That is to say, if we help them think about how they’re thinking during the early parts of the flipped classroom, do they proceed to confidence in their ability to learn that much faster… and we’ll also be looking at how the flipped classroom, especially with community building activities and community building learning strategies can improve the learning outcomes among historically underrepresented communities in the sciences… though especially communities where the notion of family and community is so important in their lives… that are not necessarily in the classroom. So, those are the two areas that we’re going to be moving into with regard to flipping… and I have a number of other projects that are not related to flipping as well. So, it’s a very diverse group of questions that we’re trying to answer, but once again I think that the flipped environment is a very value-added environment for both the students and the faculty… and so I think it’s a mature pedagogy in the sense that we talk about process oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL) being mature and peer led team learning activities (PLTL) as mature pedagogy. Service learning is another mature pedagogy that has matured over the last 20 years or so… and I think it’s now safe to say that flipping is a mature pedagogy. In fact, at the biennial conference on chemistry education, there was a wonderful paper doing a meta-analysis on flipping and the presenter showed that in terms of looking.. I think he looked at 18 or 19 different papers on the flipped environment… and he found that, in general, there’s about a 30% improvement in student learning outcomes and it’s even better in organic chemistry than general chemistry (which was surprising to me). But, nonetheless it really does improve learning for students and that, in the final analysis, is what we’re trying to do.

Rebecca: It sounds like some really interesting projects. We’ll be looking forward to finding out what you find out.

Dominick: Thank you.

John: Well, thank you. this has been fascinating.

Rebecca: Yeah, thanks so much for spending some time with us today.

Dominick: Thanks, I’m gonna have another sip of tea. Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts, and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.