“Un École,” The Medina of Tunis, Tunicia

Picture taken by Jonathan Acuña (2019)

Active Learning Through the Flipped

Classroom
Making great use of class time

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.

Head of Curriculum Development Senior Language Professor

Academic Department School of English
Centro Cultural Costarricense- Faculty of Social Sciences
Norteamericano Universidad Latina de Costa Rica

Monday, September 7, 2020

Post 373

When teachers think of what the best way to invest class time is, they must
think of active learning. And “active learning refers to a broad range of teaching
strategies which engage students as active participants in their learning during
class time with the instructor” (Univerity of Minnesota, 2020). Nowadays education
does not have to leave an aftertaste of the school as a knowledge factory. Based
on Lewin (2020), schools do not usually promote critical thinking since the
classroom must be a place to understand a topic, and then do something with the
newly-acquired information. Active learning has to be present; the idea is to
involve learners in individual work, reflection outside the classroom, and engaging
tasks in class.

How can active learning be attained? Students in the traditional classroom

are beseeching their teachers mutely not to desert them on their education; the
flipped classroom can be the way, according to Lewin (2020), to maximize,
capitalize, and potentiate F2F interactions with learners with practical tasks in the
schoolrooms. And this change in teaching paradigms is necessary because “flipped
learning is a pedagogical model where traditional instructional goals for what
happens inside and outside of class are reversed and student learning becomes
increasingly active” (Wagoner, Nechodomu, Falldin, & Hoover, 2013). In other
words, learning spaces require to empower students to make decisions in terms
of their own learning that begins outside the classroom. By all the written and
unwritten maxims of active learning, pupils have to be offered with solutions for
the maximization, capitalization, and potentiation of their education.

Taken from Wagoner, Nechodomu, Falldin, & Hoover (2013)

Do teachers want pupils to be at their lowest ebb when it comes to learning

and active participation in the classroom? In the miasma of traditional classroom
teaching, the active learning instructor is ready to break the paradigms. And the
breakthrough begins with putting Bloom’s taxonomy upsidedown (see picture
above). With a radical change like this, as Lewin (2020) states, education must
develop higher order thinking not lower order thinking. Lewin (2020) also insists
on the importance of becoming a facilitator not just a teacher; in this way the
instructor helps learners to comprehend new concepts, guides students to find
their own answers, and observes student development and the building of their
own knowledge that gets to be applied in other contexts when necessary.

What needs to start happening? Active learning facilitators want to get their
learners out of the spot where they are being gagged and blindfolded by traditional
education. By setting students free, they can work on the first two layers of
Bloom’s taxonomy out of class; facilitators can then work with the other three
layers (application, analysis, and synthesis) and the capstone (evaluation) in class.
Now it is the time to, as Lewin (2020) says, to hold interesting experiences. These
tasks will empower students to maximize, capitalize, and potentiate their learning
aided by their teachers because this “allows more time for instructors to interact
with students, and students to interact with each other” (Wagoner, Nechodomu,
Falldin, & Hoover, 2013) efficiently profiting from their time in the classroom
learning by doing.

Perhaps it is tell-tale as some educators uninterested in student learning

have stated before, but education can be fun for pupils as well for instructors when
it comes to flipping and active learning. As described by Lewin (2020), we have to
attain flipped learning a) to promote participation, b) to boost social skills and
student interaction, c) to fix learning in the middle of class action, d) to favor
independent and interdependent learning, e) to facilitate learning at one’s pace, f)
to use time effectively, g) to let students think in and out of class, and h) to let
absent learners advance at home. For very traditional educators, there will be no
elation in their gait to teaching, but “in an active learning approach, students learn
by doing” (Wagoner, Nechodomu, Falldin, & Hoover, 2013), and as asserted by
Lewin (2020), students will learn to swim by swimming; there is no other way.

References
Lewin, L. (2020, Setiembre 1). El Aula Invertida. Escuela para Directivos. Buenos Aires,
Argentina: ABS International.

Univerity of Minnesota. (2020, September 2). Active Learning. Retrieved September 7, 2020, from Center
for Educational Innovation: https://cei.umn.edu/active-
learning#:~:text=Active%20learning%20refers%20to%20a,individual%20work%20and%2For%
20reflection.

Wagoner, T., Nechodomu, T., Falldin, M., & Hoover, S. (2013). CEHD Flipped Learning Guide.
Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA: College of Education. Retrieved Setiembre 7, 2020, from
https://academics.cehd.umn.edu/digital-education/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/CEHD-DEI-
Flipped-Learning-Guide.pdf