Melani Spath

Co-Curricular #1
I went to see an honors thesis on the topic of flipped classrooms. Ben Wood,
a fellow math major and classmate, was the presenter. His presentation focused on
how the flipped classroom style could be used in a high school calculus class. He
created lesson plans for derivatives, integrals, the fundamental theorem of calculus,
and extrema. The idea behind a flipped classroom is that the assignments that are
typically considered to be homework are worked on in class. The part that is
typically the in-class lecture is created or found in a short video, less than 20
minutes, that is assigned for homework for the students to watch the night before
class.
The advantages of this type of classroom is that it gives students the chance
to work on problems in class so they can ask questions and work with classmates. It
also works well because students will spend less time watching the videos outside
of class then they would spend doing worksheets. Studies have found that having
the video at home really helps students who might be having a hard time
understanding because they can pause the video and re-watch parts that are
confusing. A lot of teachers who use the flipped classroom style either require
students to comment on the video with a question or statement about what they
learned in order to hold students accountable. This works well because then if
students are having a hard time understating the video then they can post any
questions on the site that way they wont forget these questions when they go to
class the next day.

Some of the downsides of having flipped classroom is that a lot of students

may choose not to watch the videos since they are lectures or if students dont have
enough time they will quickly fall behind. This classroom technique only works if all
of the students have seen the video lecture before the class. If students arent
watching the lecture before class, then they spend the first 20 minutes of class
watching it and end up wasting half of the class when they are supposed to be
doing the activities.
This technique would work well for math because most of the time students
can understand and follow what the teacher is doing on the board but have a hard
time actually being able to do the problems on their own once they leave the
classroom. Ben showed how this technique could be used to teach a calculus class.
I, however, do not plan on teaching calculus, so I would be hesitant to utilize this
method for the whole year. I would be very likely to set up a flipped classroom unit
for either solving equations or factoring. I feel like both of these topic dont take
long to teach, but it is important to do lots of examples so that students can master
these topics through repetition. Overall I really enjoyed Bens honor thesis since it
gave me lots of great ideas for how I could possibly incorporate the flipped
classroom in my future classroom.