Flipped Schooling

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

In the past five years, I’ve helped several educators in schools and colleges re-think how they design their course and how they teach in class. Over the past year I also joined a team that created state-of-the-art learning experiences for engineers at SAP where I work, which we transitioned to virtual successfully, learning from how episodic television crafts attention and articulated general principles we feel apply to all of learning.

Based on these experiences, I believe that the current situation of distance learning has within it the seeds of a different style of learning which has been in classrooms for several years now: the flipped classroom. Along with this, the idea that today, power is decentralized while purpose is centralized gives us the key to reimagine what learning might look like a few years down the line.

In no particular order, here are the key principles to a flipped school, the evolution and scale version of the flipped classroom, where learners have the authority, agency and support to learn for themselves:

1. It’s not about distance-learning, its about flipped-learning and making it possible to follow your curiosity. We know flipped classrooms work. This is the next step in empowering learning to take charge of their own education by changing the setting of the learning.
2. You are dealing with crafting human attention and creating embodied experiences of learning, away from the classroom, and situated in real-life. This is a good thing.
3. It’s possible to simplify and re-think learning away from the classroom but it needs educators who know the art of creating engaging experiences in the classroom to do it.
4. The foundational engines of flipped-learning are purposeful projects, inquiry-based learning and learning in groups.
5. The foundational belief is learners are capable of learning by themselves and that educators need to structure the learning experience, curate resources for learning, and raise the level of inquiry rather than “teach”.
6. The foundational constraints are learning must be a social experience across learning levels and learning be demonstrated through performance rather than testing.
7. The foundational mindset for both the learner and educators is emphasis on process rather than the outcome. i.e. a growth mindset
8. The foundational view of competition in learning is that competitors bring out the best in us. Our goal is to raise our own level not beat the other and we cannot do this in absence of a worthy competitor
9. The foundational view of the classroom is a stage for learning. Learning is best done close to the stage, where the action is. Visiting JPL or SpaceX via zoom to see what’s going on and then learning about rocket propulsion is better than reading a textbook on rocket theory.
10. The foundational view of learning is doing and embodied intelligence. All learning is done through doing in different forms: making, performing, exhibiting, critiquing, debating as a way to understand concepts
11. The foundational view of fields of knowledge is interconnected-ness. The deeper you go into any particular field, the more interconnected it is with other fields. Cooking is connected to biology, chemistry, art, and performance; every field can be connected to a cluster of fields it touches.
12. The foundational view of testing is defending your thesis against your peers. The doctoral style of assessment is valid even in the early years.

Do you agree or disagree with these? Do you have an alternative point of view of what education should look like in these times? Mail me, or comment and let’s talk.