flipping classroom: some experiments with university and k-12 classes

FLIPPING CLASSROOM: SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH UNIVERSITY AND K-12 CLASSES Alessandra Giglio1 1

National Research Council of Italy – Institute for Educational Technologies (ITALY) [email protected]

Abstract The Net, Web 2.0 and the new technologies and tools allow us to be constantly online, suggesting new paradigms that involve aspect of sociology and communication; in fact, learning methodology, as well, is affected by this wind of change. Flipped classroom methodology (Bergmann & Sams, 2012a) is currently riding the wave of success in Higher Education and Distance Learning: it consists in a sort of an “upside down” way of teaching, comparing to the “traditional” one, where the student is personally involved into the learning process by giving him/her the responsibility of researching, comparing, contrasting concepts and ideas. The student takes an active role during the lesson in class and at home, when s/he prepares some material that can be useful for the lesson time (Maglioni & Biscaro, 2014). Moreover, the method promotes an extreme individualization of the learning process since the student is able to choose his/her personal rhythm of learning and his/her style of knowledge acquisition, pointing the accent on the well-known (and sometimes abused) Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory (Gardner, 1983). In this contribution, an experimental session of language lessons will be presented. Since the “flipped classroom” method seems to fit the way of teaching and learning a second language, we will present the structure, methodology, technical tools and initial results of two different educational contexts: a university, online context of Italian for foreigner courses at beginner and false beginner levels, and a K12, absolute beginner, Italian for foreigner course. Such results will endorse a deeper reflection on how the method can be applied in K12 and Higher Education and will suggest some future developments. Keywords: flipped learning, K-12 education, technology enhanced learning

1

INTRODUCTION

The Net, Web 2.0 and the new technologies and tools allow us to be constantly online, suggesting new paradigms that involve aspect of sociology and communication; in fact, learning methodology, as well, is affected by this wind of change. In 2007, in a Colorado High School, two chemistry teachers decided to use this technological wind of change at their (and their students) advantage: by recording lessons and spreading them among students, they found a fruitful way of gaining presential time with students, helping them and scaffolding their learning process. The flipped classroom was born. Is it possible to apply this sort of method to the whole set of academic disciplines that are taught at K12 and university levels? Is a foreign language class a possible candidate for applying such a methodology? How this new way of teaching can cope with the communicative approach that is usually used in foreign language teaching? In this contribution we will try to answer to these research questions and will try to outline a possible way of flipping a traditional, Italian for Beginners course in K-12 and university contexts.

2 2.1

FLIPPING THE CLASSROOM A Definition

According to the annual NMC Horizon Report on Higher Education, in 2012 a new model of teaching was about to arise in K-12 education: Traditional lectures and subsequent testing are still dominant learning vehicles in schools. In order for students to get a well-rounded education with real world experience, they must also engage in more informal in-class activities as well as learning to learn outside the classroom. Most schools are not encouraging students to do any of this, nor to experiment and take risks with their learning — but a new model, called the “flipped classroom,” is opening the door to new approaches. The flipped classroom uses the abundance of videos on the Internet to allow students to learn new concepts and material outside of school, thus preserving class time for discussions, collaborations with classmates, problem solving, and experimentation (Johnson, Adams Becker & Cummins, 2012). Indeed, in the following two-year NMC Horizon Report on Higher Education, in 2013 (Johnson et al., 2013) and 2014 (Johnson, Adams Becker, Estrada & Freeman, 2014), flipped learning gains a considerable role in the developing-list of key emerging technologies and digital strategies. The NMC Horizon Report on Higher Education 2013 (Johnson et al., 2013) also gives a precise 1 definition of what a flipped classroom model is: it implies an inquiry-based learning approach, as well as some blended learning strategies that allow students to be both physically present in the classroom, and still autonomous in their learning path. A good attempt in defining this new methodology is also been made by the Flipped Learning Network (Flipped Learning Network, 2014): Flipped Learning is a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter.

Fig. 1: A graphical definition of flipped classroom (by http://www.slu.edu/)

1

A good graphic definition of flipped classroom is in Fig. 1, while a incisive infographic can be found at http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/

The Flipped Learning Network also underlines that, even if it is a common practice to use the expressions flipped learning and flipped classroom as pure synonyms, effectively they are not: to flip a classroom does not always lead to flip the entire process of learning -- even if flipping classroom could actually be the first step in that direction.

2.2

A Brief History

The first, documented experiment of a flipped classroom took place in 2007 in a High School in Colorado: professors Bergmann and Sams (Bergmann & Sams, 2012) converted their PowerPoint, chemistry lessons to some PowerPoint + video recordings files, using a screen capture software. This way, Bergmann and Sams were finally able to deal with the large number of students of their institution: they had the time to (digitally) teaching them the content of the course and they could also spend time to help them individually, to tutor them and to scaffold their progresses through the learning process. The Bergmann and Sams (2012b) teaching method was born in 2007; in the same era, another flipped classroom key-technology was arising: in October 2006, Google Inc. bought a brand new platform, created in 2005 by three PayPal employees, whose name was YouTube. This revolutionary way of communicating video information contributed significantly to the powerful spread of democracy that the Web represents. More than that, YouTube contributed crucially to Bergmann and Sams’ teaching success: students could attend lessons even if abroad or ill, their interest in the classes arose and increased, students started cooperating and working together, and Bergmann and Sams became more active coaches rather than detached lectures. Around the same time, another phenomenon was about to become a crucial milestone of the technological and global network teaching era: Salman Amin Khan, a Bangladeshi American educator, 2 founded the Khan Academy , an online free platform where teachers from all over the planet can record and upload their video lessons on every subject and topic. Khan’s aim was to spread knowledge and give access to it to anyone and anywhere in the world. Khan’s ambitious project is currently one of the most used video lessons repository by students all over the world, and even by teachers and educators who use these sources as resources for their flipped classrooms.

2.3

A Teaching Method

Such a teaching method is grounded on the discovery-based learning (Bruner, 1961) and the inquirybased model (Banchi, 2008), according to which students discover their own way to solve an initial input problem and develop their own strategy to disentangle it. In such a teaching/learning panorama, students place themselves at the very centre of their learning process: flipped learning is a concrete methodology for developing a student-centric didactic, that is not always possible to be developed with traditional environments, actors, tools. An interesting, surplus value of this kind of methodology is the developing of a more sensible Open Source awareness that is arising among educators and teachers. The amount of resources needed to “flip a classroom” is not negligible: in order to design and prepare a proper, flipped classroom, a lot of effort by educators is needed. A teacher should prepare some videos and extra material for his/her students to be used in preparation to the presential classroom. This sort of material can be directly produced and developed by the single teacher, or s/he can use some Open Educational Resources (OER) that are available online. In such a panorama, entities like the Khan Academy are slightly important, since they represent a friendly, accessible, easy-to-use repository in which it is possible to find the proper resources needed. Another important side effect of the flipped learning methodology is the development of students’ own technical and personal skills: in order for students to complete the assignments and to acquire notions and concepts, they need to develop some strategies and tactics that demand cooperation, collaboration and digital literacy progression. Therefore, this sort of teaching methodology, wellaligned with Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom, 1956) as well, seems to well respond, in some ways, to the European Qualification Framework for Lifelong Learning (European Commission, 2008) that measures students’ learning outcome considering knowledge, skills and competence that a student achieves. 2

https://it.khanacademy.org/

Nonetheless, it is important to remember that the flipped learning method is by far a new way of teaching: as Maglioni and Biscaro (2014) underline, and as also De Mauro (2014) points out in his preface of the book, flipped classroom looks like a revolution of the teaching tradition, but in fact it is not. Maria Montessori, almost a century ago, questioned the ex cathedra teaching model that is not directly linked to the ways in which we naturally learn in everyday life; also Vico, in the XVIII century, or even Socrates, almost 2500 years ago, shook the conventional, notional knowledge advocating for a more conscious, critic awareness (De Mauro, 2014).

3

FLIPPING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

3.1

Teaching Foreign Languages Nowadays

In this contribution we intend to present a “flipped way” of conducting a foreign language course both from a university and from a K-12 perspective. However, it seems necessary to outline and describe a traditional foreign language course in order to disentagle the pros and cons of this particular methodology applied to foreign language teaching. In 1972 the ethnolinguist Dell Hymes (1972) posed a milestone of foreign language teaching methodology by defining a new competence of linguistic communication; he claimed that, instead of just teaching language structures, “there are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless” (Hymes, 1972, p. 278). The communicative approach was officially born. From 1970s the communicative approach in teaching a foreign language has spread all over the world and, nowadays, it is one of the most common used method for teaching a foreign language. The communicative approach tends to underline the importance of teaching a foreign language in real contexts: therefore, crucial elements are a) the situation in which communication takes place; b) the participants to the interaction; c) the aim of the interaction; d) the content of communication; e) the way of communicating the message (Serra Borneto, 1998, p. 141). Using such an approach implies to define certain teaching strategies that can be summed up into a course syllabus that usually includes a) contextualized, authentic inputs; b) activities that need students to be personally engaged to develop their communicative strategies (focusing on the learning process itself, rather than on the outcome of it); c) students’ personal engagement in interaction where the target foreign language is used as a medium. Furthermore, the linguistic aspect of a foreign idiom is not the only perspective to consider when teaching a language: culture gains a consistently important role, since it influences the social-communicative aspects of interacting and is deeply tied up to the language itself. Under such a communicative approach, two “flipped” courses of Italian for Beginners have been developed in two slightly different context: in a K-12, International Middle and High School background and in an online university environment.

3.2 3.2.1

Teaching Italian for Beginners Courses The Course Syllabus

In both of the two educational situations, the courses are addressed to foreign students that had no, or little, experience and knowledge of the Italian language. The Italian for (Absolute and False) Beginners course was intended to cover all the communicative aspects of A1 and A2 levels of the European Common Framework of Reference for Language Teaching (Council of Europe, 2011). The course is divided into two parts (Level 1 and Level 2) and each part consists of 15 units (named weeks). The division of the course in such a way is determined by two different aspects: both the university and the international school divide their academic year into two terms; moreover, the adopted reference book(s) is divided as well into two volumes, that could easily fit into the two terms above mentioned. For the same reason, the 15 slots of content for each part of the course, followed both the calendar division of the terms, and the chapter organization of the reference book. The Italian for Beginners Course is divided into 15 units: each unit follows a pre-determined pattern that takes into account the communicative approach. Each unit starts with an audio-video-textual input, followed by some lexicon and comprehension activities, and then some linguistic and morphosyntactic exercises are presented, with additional extra materials for in-depth analysis.

3.2.2

The Flipped Classroom Approach

In both of the two educational scenarios, the Italian for Beginners course began to be “flipped” in 2013: the traditional, online program of the university course was adapted to be based on social, collaborative and inquiry approach. The same occurred, a couple of months later, to the K-12 presential course at Deledda International School. Each unit of the course maintained the same, basic structure (Fig. 2), though it has been re-designed and implemented with some additional digital resources, recorded by the teacher (in case of some 3 explanatory grammar videos , Fig. 3, named grammar pills) or obtained from the Web OER (in case of additional exercises). The most evident adaptation of the course units deals with the flipped nature of the course: the entire process of analyzing a given realia input, comprehending it and then reflecting on the elements it presents – a process that is usually carried on at the beginning of a class session, as the communicative approach suggests – has been reverted and students try to do hypotheses on the input stimulus on their own and at their own pace. Furthermore, students have to complete some exercises in preparation to the synchronous lesson. The lesson is used to analyze their hypotheses and to draw conclusions on them, practicing students’ production skills and also stimulating the comprehension ones.

Fig. 3: An explanatory video of the first part of the Italian for Beginners flipped course Fig. 2: Example of a unit structure of the second part of Italian for Beginners flipped course

3.3

Some Data Evidence: the Cases of Deledda International School and Dalarna University

The Italian for Beginners flipped course has been offered during the fall and spring terms of 2013, and 4 in the 2014 spring term, at the online Dalarna University (Sweden ) and, with some adjustments, it has also been tested in a K-12 context at the Deledda International Middle and High School in Genova, 5 Italy , in the academic year 2013-2014. We propose a brief analysis of the preliminary results deriving from these experimentations.

3

The grammar pills consist in some PowerPoint presentations integrated with audio and video animation of the teacher, who explains the language topic of the unit. In order to recorded the audio/video track, a screen cast online software (Present.me, http://present.me/) has been used. 4

http://www.du.se/

5

http://www.genoaschool.eu/

3.3.1

Dalarna University: An Online University Experience

The Italian department of the online Dalarna University (Sweden) is a quite old, well-established one: it counts several years of experience in delivering Italian for foreigners, online courses. The Italienska Nybörjarkurs I & II (Italian for Beginners) courses were previously organized in a sort of blended learning methodology where students were asked to come to the lesson with a prior knowledge of the topic of the lesson itself: this way, students could follow the lesson properly, without being overcome by the massive Italian language input they were exposed to. Consequently, flipping the classroom has not been a big issue: more prior material have been proposed to the students and some video material had to be prepared and recorded. The most significant variation is represented by 6 the way “presential” (i.e., synchronous ) lessons are led: instead of being a frontal lesson in which some linguistic and morphosyntactic contents are presented, the flipped approach provides students of a laboratory space in which they can confront themselves, solving issues with the topic previously studied and practicing the target language in a real communicative contexts. The flipped Italian for Beginner course has been delivered during two academic terms and counts 56 active students. In this sort of learning context, unfortunately, it has not been possible to compare the results and outcome of the course with another similar, non-flipped course.

3.3.2

Deledda International School: A K-12 Experience

Deledda International School is a relatively young institution in Genoa, Italy. It was established in 1999 7 and affiliated with the International Baccalaureate Organization ; nowadays, it counts more than 200 students and about the 10% of them is a foreign language speaking student. Despite being immerged in a full-immersion context, the need of having a formal, Italian for foreigner education arose quite soon (Giglio, 2012): since 2006, regular courses of Italian for foreigners have been offered to the international community of students that attend the school. In this panorama, an Italian for Beginners course became slightly necessary in the 2013-2014 8 academic year: such a course has been split in two small groups of students , and this particular situation made it possible to experiment the flipped classroom methodology with an equivalent control group aside. Conversely, the number of students involved in such a course is slightly scarce, with 4 students attending it.

3.3.3

First results

The experimentation of both the university and the K-12 courses are to be concluded yet; however, it is possible to analyze some first results deriving from the mid tests of the course(s). Considering the case of the Dalarna University groups of students, composed by 56 students between 19 and 65 years, it was possible to recollect only some survey on students satisfaction with the course itself; as a matter of fact, since the control group was not possible to be implemented in such an experimentation, it is not possible to compare the results of the summative tests at the end of the course with another, equivalent element. In terms of satisfaction with the course, the Italienska Nybörjarkurs I & II students show great enthusiasm in the way the course is developed and structured: students find it useful to have detailed unit schemas to follow and they appreciate the chance of having pre-recoded video to watch several times (and PowerPoint presentations to download at the end). Moreover, students really enjoyed the fact of having pre-recorded videos to watch at home, because it saves time during the lesson in order to have more chances to speak among each other in the target language and to communicate more in a real-life interaction. The only technical difficulty they encountered was connected to the use of Adobe Connect, the university synchronous communication tool; this element is quite interesting in a flipped classroom results analysis, since it shows that the eventual technology gap among students seems not to be a big issue to considerate when preparing a similar course.

6

In such lessons, students and teacher connect to a common platform of communication (Adobe Connect, http://www.adobe.com/it/products/adobeconnect.html) which allow participants to establish a video/audio connection and to share documents among each other. 7

http://www.ibo.org/

8

This sort of division was necessary due to incompatible time schedule of different classes.

Considering the Deledda International School course of Italian for Beginners, it was possible to collect data not only from the mid course satisfaction questionnaires, but also from the mid course summative tests, that can be compared with the control group tests results. However, it is important to underline that, given the small size of the sample – the students participating in the course are 4, divided into a group of 2 students who attended the flipped course and 2 that are part of the equivalent group control –, the deriving results are by no means to be intended as exhaustive nor complete. The results deriving from the satisfaction questionnaires show that K-12 students are pretty enthusiastic by the course, even if more enthusiasm was shown by the university group; students appreciated the way in which the course is structured (with flipped classroom contents and extra material) because students have more freedom on studying and can progress in the course at their own pace (“I like the ability to study as little or as much as necessary before the lesson”, D. D., 16 years old, US student; “It gives us more time to focus on things that we don’t understand“, P. N., 15 years old, Russian student) and, when the lesson takes place, they can ask for more focused questions or clarifications since they have already studied the topic of the lesson (“I like the ability to already know the information before, so I can ask questions when I have a teacher there with me” P. N.). However, students also pinpoint some negative elements of the flipped method in their Italian for foreigners classes. They think it takes more time to be well prepared for the lesson and, in case they are not able to finish the preparation for the class, they have to deal with the sense of conscious under preparation. Moreover, sometimes the structure of the course could be confusing and leave them a bit lost on the learning path to follow; at last, they find it hard to “balance the flipped method class with my other traditional method classes” (D. D.). The last point is quite interesting, since it underlines the difficulties in introducing such a methodology in K-12 education (which, so far, was the main audience 9 to which the methodology was addressed and created ): the language course itself is far from being autonomous and independent. On the contrary, it has to be inserted in a more general learning design that takes into account the multidisciplinary peculiarity of K-12 education and should be collectively discussed and implemented by the entire school in order to have full success. In terms of the analysis of summative results deriving from the mid test of the course, students from the “flipped group” and from the control group show a similar outcome: their written and oral comprehension skills seem to be developed at the same level, as well as their production skills. However, their grammar and morphosyntactic competences seem to have little dissimilarities in favor of the “flipped group”: such results can be read under the lens of a more extensive use of the recorded grammar explanations that have been watched several times. Such a result indicates that the final outcome of “flipped students” is similar to the one obtained by the traditional methodology applied in the control group. Nonetheless, “flipped students” are able to develop other soft skills and competences that, otherwise, they would find it difficult to grow. The 10 outcome results cited in the above-mentioned Knewton infographic , which show a considerable increase in passing successfully university exams by flipping the class, seems quite optimistic to us; still, even with our equal results in summative tests, the flipped classroom method seems advantageous over a traditional one since it allows the development of skills and competences otherwise rarely encouraged.

4

CONCLUSIONS

Our teaching experiments with flipped learning methodology are far from being exhaustive and completed. Further results will come out at the end of the current academic year, and possibly some other elements will bring to unexpected insights and future adaptations. However, it seems possible to question on some interesting points that arose from these first results. The flipped learning methodology applied to the Italian for Beginner course seems to give similar learning outcomes comparing to traditional methods of teaching; however, it presents interesting surplus values such as the development of collaborative and social skills, more motivation on students and technology competences, that are key for the new millennium, lifelong learning panorama. Students seem to enjoy this sort of method, since it gives them more freedom to study at their own rhythm and according to their style of knowledge acquisition, as also Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences 9

Even if our partial results seem to suggest that university students appreciated more the method than K-12 ones.

10

http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/

Theory (Gardner, 1983) suggested. Moreover, such a methodology allows the real, in-contexts and situational use of the target language, that also the communicative approach has been promoting for decades. In conclusions, basing on these first results, it seems that the flipped learning method has a lot to do with the improvement of the foreign language teaching and other investigations in this field should be carried on.

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