Derek Wong

ETEC 511 – Scholarly Essay: Utilization of a Flipped Classroom Model

As technology advances with us learners as a society, we shift our pedagogical approach

and paradigms to better serve our community of educators, students and researchers. Amongst a

new popular methodology in classroom learning, we bring ourselves to the flipped classroom

model which is known as a type of blended learning (Abeysekera and Dawson 2015). Blended

learning encompasses a mixed-style of online resources with a facilitated classroom conducted

by a mentor (teacher) through practical activities and discussion. Although in its infancy, we

seek to describe the pedagogy, purpose and effectiveness in a flipped classroom to further

enhance the learning experience for all learners in regards to effectiveness and accessibility. As a

general descriptor of the flipped classroom, “students are required to engage in or complete some

form of preliminary learning online in preparation for a structurally aligned learning activity on

campus with their instructors and peers.” (Reidsema, Hadgraft, & Kavanagh, 2017) The

objective of the flipped classroom is to apply prior knowledge to a practical activity to bridge a

gap in understanding from the material content being taught. The focus of the new methodology

is to increase the effective usage of class time and to increase the higher-level learning in

students by successful use of technology available. While we are working with constantly new

growth and understanding of the flipped method, we can begin the foundation of our research

through current case studies, a wide array of technological resources and the idea of varying our

learning from aged traditions. For example, at the University of Queensland, “in ENGG1200,

flipping first exposure to content out of face to face time allows engineering students to get

hands-on practice with machines and tools, physically experience materials, tackle complex

authentic problems individually and in teams, and deal with significant inter- and intra-personal
challenges.” (Reidsema et al., 2017) Students will now no longer only demonstrate academic

progression but work through student-centered problems in a collaborative effort to further their

self-efficacy and self-reflective practice in a flipped classroom model. In addition to the increase

in critical skills, the University of Queensland also states that “Flipping the classroom allows us

to be able to cover both the theory and the practice of engineering rather than having to settle

with only covering the content and leave the rest to industry.” (Reidsema et al., 2017) With that

said, the introduction of a new methodology or pedagogy will always be met with resistance.

This resistance can stem from ignorance, skepticism or stagnation of growth as an educator.

However, we will be looking deeper into this program as a conversation into progression the best

practices as a professional and to match current advancements in education. As Reidesema

states, “There are some inescapable trends. Support for online learning is becoming ubiquitous:

Wikipedia, the Khan Academy, Udacity, Codecademy, Lynda.com, Skillsoft and thousands of

other sites.” (Reidsema et al., 2017) As these resources are active and present, the focus shifts

into their application into our practices, and in this case, within a high school classroom context.

The idea behind a flipped classroom stems from the assortment of products and services

widely available to the average student. However, what we fail to mention ins the theoretical

framework behind all of these digital commodities. Learning takes place in all facets of a

students’ life, whether it be on the playground, in the classroom or at home. Placing a flipped

classroom model in our high schools plays on the Social Cognitive Theory of “triadic

reciprocality model of causality indicates the interplay between three

factors: behaviour, environment, and personal.” (Bandura, 2011, p.12). by Albert Bandura to

which he defines “people are not just shaped by the environment, but by those around them and
by their own moral agency which is self-developing, self-reflecting, and proactive.” (Bandura,

2011, p.14) Students are in consistent need of challenges which require new ways to learn.

Although we look into challenges of the flipped classroom model at a later time, it is to note that

the method itself plays on the theories of Bandura. Lecturers provide pre-recorded material,

access to notes, videos and software online for students to begin their learning at their own pace

in the comfort of their homes before applying these practices within the walls of the classroom.

The stimuli of digital content, practical activities and personal discussions creates several nodes

of learning to maximize the efficiency and utilizaiton of a learners’ capabilities. As one of the

most famous educational philosophers, Lev Vygotsky, have brought up - the flipped classroom

in this sense of social cognitive theory also works to promote the Zone of Proximal Development

(John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996) The ZPD is defined as “the difference between what a learner can

do without help and what he or she can do with help” (Chaiklin, 2003) In this instance, the

students having begun their learning prior to classroom time allows them to pace their own

learning to a place between their zone of comfort and their zone of challenge. In a progression

point of view, students with advanced knowledge or better understanding of content can further

challenge themselves by continuing on the pre-recorded material or researching the subject

content until they find a point to where it becomes a challenge. Students with a decreased level

of learning can keep a self-pace within the beginning of the pre-recorded content. During class

time, this allows the facilitator (teacher) to appropriately scaffold for each student and bring

them to their Zone of Proximal Development and further challenge them as students for

subsequent lessons. Furthermore, the practicality of class time activities supplements the idea of

social and cultural learning which has implications for students in the future for the success of

their studies and careers. Kavanagh, Reidsema, McCredden and Smith indicate that “Activity-
based learning enables more open-ended and self-paced learning. Increasingly, students will use

an e-portfolio to document their learning achievements and to plan their next steps from both a

career and learning perspective. Students will come together to work on projects in multi-age

settings, working with mentors, often from industry.” (Kavanagh, Reidsema, McCredden &

Smith, 2017) The framework of methodology in this case immediately transfers to a students’

professional practice as a learner and an educator.

Our approach to a flipped classroom model, especially in a classroom, will require a

major shift in ideologies. The idea of “Moving from the role of lecturer (‘Sage on the stage’) to

facilitator (‘Guide on the side’) requires not only that we also become learners, but that we

explicitly define learning as mutually constructed meaning.” (Baxter Magolda, 2012) is difficult

for many teachers but is quintessential to the success of this metholodgy. Although the teacher is

the more knowledgeable being in the sense that they can access a students ZPD and provide the

necessary scaffolding, they must open themselves to a comfortability to reciprocate this learning

as well. In research, the multiple principles of a flipped classroom include a “third principle,

drawing on learners’ experience, requires attention to well-

established curriculum design principles for effective learning which include con-

siderations of scaffolding as well as constructive alignment (Biggs 1999) to ensure that new

knowledge is meaningfully and appropriately connected to old knowledge.” (Kavanagh et al.,

2017) The beginning of a successful flipped model starts with not only the commitment of the

teacher to allow this progression, but to appropriately design their curriculum to give access to

this model to succeed. There is the idea in research that the teacher has to create a narrative to

which it becomes story that “can be further defined as a representational structure consisting of a
mix of meaningful and interrelated elements threaded together in sequence.” (Eng, Bracewell &

Clarkson, 2008) In essence, the lesson content can be better seen as a story to be told with

organized elements from both digital content, practical activity and discussion to facilitate a

well-rounded education for the audience to intrinsically motivate themselves to complete.

As with most others in education, we have to design with a purpose in mind. The flipped

classroom model can be argued to be extremely effective or ineffective with the assistance of

context. However, in modern North American education, we look to serve the students as a

whole. Laurillard and Puentedura explain it best in the statement of: “The administrative

affordances enable efficiencies in areas such as information dissem-

ination and class management. The pedagogical affordances of technology can foster “a new

means of intellectual expression and creativity” (Laurillard 2009, p. 289) and create

opportunities for learning “previously inconceivable.” (Puentedura 2006) In a sense, our purpose

has become to create a method of learning that serves multi-level purpose and work towards the

appreciation of technology in support of a new method of approaching students of all levels. The

flipped classroom affords to treate advanced students with the ability to further their own

learning through self-paced online resources while there still remains a focus on under-achieving

students to succeed in a certain subject area. As a teacher, the research that states “A

considerable number of high-school students belong to the category of low achievers. Thus, it is

necessary to develop teaching methods to help low achievers better understand mathematical

concepts.” is a signal for the flipped classrom, for instance. (Bhagat et al., 2016) Conversely, on

the other side of the spectrum lays a present-future approach to which “In a present orientation,

students are motivated by factors within the educational context, whilst in a future orientation
they are considering what the expected qualification will allow them to be or become after the

completion of their formal studies. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivational factors can apply in either

orientation, and reflective and reflexive practices can helpfully connect with these motivations in

each case.” (Greenfield & Hibbert, 2017) In a sense, the low-achieving students have a present

orientation whereas high-achieving students have a future orientation to which both explore their

own extrinsic and intrinsic motivations to apply their learning in the flipped model for success.

Flipped classrooms are trending with the new curriculum. However, they are not to be

left without fault. Although there is the idea that seems like a fantasy where students have access

to an unlimited and immediate display of content, “The common concern by most of the teachers

who consider to adapt this method of teaching is that it is not an easy task to find videos that

perfectlymatch what a teacher wants his or her students to learn, and it is extremely

timeconsuming to create their own instructional videos.” (Chen, 2016) While we have access to

company content such as Khan Academy or Udemy, there is specific learning to be had within

the demographic of your students, school and community to which a teacher is solely responsible

for creating the content necessary for the classroom. It becomes incredibly difficult for the

professional whom already spends countless hours preparing activities, sponsorsing extra-

curriculars and to schedule their own lives around having to now create essentially an

encyclopedia of material for students from the lowest achievers to the highest achievers. If we

ignore the idea that time is limited and assume we have a community of created material, we also

ignore research that states, “In our experience and that of other researchers (Goossens et al.

2008; Kennedy et al. 2010), while the majority of students are “digital natives” there will be a

small percentage that struggle and that may not have had the necessary experience to be able to
navigate your system with ease. (McGrath et al., 2017) YouTube may be a key element to a

digital natives’ daily life, but accountability measures and softwares put in place to support the

success of a flipped classroom may not be as widely understood as the general public may think.

Now, in addition to creating content, the educator has to learn new software such as Moodle, to

produce assessment methods and accountability elements to ensure the students are appropriately

using and understanding the flipped classroom model. The most important piece we have now

lead to, are the students themselves. While it is commonly mentioned that professionals are

adversive to new practices, it is seldmon mentioned the unease students feel with change in the

classroom themseleves. Forsey, Low and Glance mention that “When students are unprepared or

not given adequate upfront explanation, a significant proportion of students can take neutral

positions in relation to whether they want to be involved with, or feel excited about, the uptake

of, flipped classes.” (Forsey, Low & Glance, 2013). Buy-in of the new model will take an

incredible amount of energy from the teacher, and to transfer that energy in selling the product to

the students will take a force of nature. The flipped classroom model will only continue to

succeed hereafter if the student buy-in is full and their intrinsic motivation carries them through

the continued use of their resources.

In support of flipped classroom models, we take a glance at two separate case studies.

The first case study is a “present study used a pretest/posttest quasi-experimental design.

(Bhagat, Cheng-Nan, & Chun, 2016) conducted in a high school math classroom. The second

case study is a “study adopted a concurrent mixed method research approach in order to take

advantage of applying multiple ways to collect both qualitative and quantitative data at the same

time” (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2010)” from a high school health education classroom
perspective. While the details of both studies are stated in research cited, the major outcomes of

both flipped high school classrooms resulted in positive support of the flipped classroom model.

In the first study by Bhagat, Cheng-Nan and Chun, 82 students in either a control or

experimental group were exposed to either the traditional or flipped model of classroom learning

for trigonometry. They were assessed through a pretest and posttest to determine the results of

their learning. The researchers found that as a general trend, the flipped classroom model

produced better overall results for the posttest results in comparison to the pretest. However, the

major factor in deciding the effectiveness of the flipped classroom was that “The findings also

revealed that low achievers in the experimental group performed better than the control group,

but the performance of the high and average achievers remains same.” (Bhagat et al., 2016). In

our study, we see 64 students participating in the research to which they were given a test for 3

chapters in health education. The results came back in support of a flipped classroom with “A

comparison of the test results between the two classes indicated that the test scores of the class

with flipped classrooms were similar in the test for Chapter 7, yet a slightly increase in the tests

for Chapters 8 and 9. (Chen, 2016) Although the results are not outstandingly in favour of a

flipped classroom model in this case study, the reason it is important to take note of all the

features of the classroom is that the “Interview of the students who participated in the flipped

classroom approach indicates that the biggest issue that was found related to students acceptance

of the format. Students were resistant at first to the concept of having to watch videos and do

work at home which were new to them. This issue then caused many students to come to class

unprepared for learning activities which was detrimental to the implementation of such

instructional model and practical

exercises of the knowledge.” (Chen, 2016) While research is still in its beginning, there is an

overwhelming idea that flipped classroom models create positive effects in most situations with

appropriate curricular design and implementation. In addition to these two studies, the reading of

the details of the two approaches and metholodgies to case study designs indicates that students

will learn better in a flipped environment, but to be aware of the external factors that may affect

intrinsic or extrinsic motivation.

Time will tell. With new methods and transitional periods, it is difficult to assess the full

validity of a new approach to education. However, with the current trend and access to new

resources, the flipped classroom model is taking its place in the classroom and eventually take

over. A key takeaway from the research we have today is that “A starting point for deciding on

what to implement in flipped classes (once the initial transitional period finishes) is to identify

the best aspects which students perceive are associated with face-to-face classes in addition to

the features which also make online learning attractive.” (Ng 2014) We are no longer in the

stages of questioning blended, online or flipped learning but slowly acquainting ourselves to the

process and identifying the appropriate measures to introduce the new technique to our our

classrooms today.
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