Come Si Dice “I did study!”?

By Toni DiMella

In my junior year of my undergrad, I convinced my advisor to let me register for Intermediate Italian II. I know some Italian, but not enough for an upper-level 200 course. However, that’s the one that fit my schedule (online classes were a pipe dream then), I was still attending school during a time where overrides were a tad too easy to get, and I can be persuasive when I need to be. Needless to say, it was a terrible idea. I worked harder in that class than in any other class I took, before or after. I spent hours in the lab listening to those stupid tapes trying to do those activities. My supermodel professor from Milan would ask me things in Italian and I would answer in English. She was not pleased. She probably thought I was just a slacker or trying to annoy her or both. She had no idea how much time and effort I put in to be able to do that!

A lot has changed since I was in that class. Good changes, too! But despite some obvious changes over the past 20 years, like being able to access digital copies of those tapes from your couch, the classroom experience hasn’t changed much. A lot of lectures are delivered, discussions facilitated, traditional tests proctored, and reading assigned. All of this was made more challenging by the abrupt transition to fully online courses in Spring 2020. We have always known that students don’t have equal access to technology and materials at home. Now we had to simultaneously deal with bridging the digital divide and a pedagogical one. Lecturing in person is just not the same in Collaborate. Socratic seminars don’t have the same flow online. “Get in groups of 4” can become a multi-click, breakout group nightmare in a virtual space. Couple all of that with broken mics, barking dogs, and 20-something black boxes in a gallery view, and you’ll quickly realize that the interactive lecture we all know and love just wasn’t going to work in this new space.

Enter the idea of the flipped classroom. It normally begins with students gathering foundational knowledge asynchronously on their own schedule. Faculty record and/or find videos for students to watch, possibly require some reading or discussion forums to participate in, and assign some formative assessments to ensure students do the work and to give the faculty member some insight on student progress. Then students come together in a synchronous meeting, online or face-to-face, to apply and/or expand on what they have learned in some sort of active learning activity. Finally, the process is completed, live or online, with a summative assessment to measure what students have learned, reflect on the learning process, or both. Flipped learning is not a new idea, but it is a time-consuming one. However, when you suddenly feel all alone in a virtual room with 30 people three times a week, recording videos on the weekends becomes an attractive alternative.

You’ll be glad if you do flip. Once those videos are made, they’re there forever. Accessible by all students always. No need to re-record or re-upload…or give that lecture live anymore. Use that freed-up lecture time for team projects, independent discovery, focused practice, practical applications, or anything else you use to wish you had time for. When students apply knowledge in the classroom, they can benefit from your expertise in real-time. They can listen to you talk from anywhere, but they can only get your personalized guidance when you’re in the room with them. Think of all the 2 a.m. emails you’ll no longer get!

And that’s the hidden gem of flipped learning that we often forget about. When you use class time to present material, regardless of how interactive it is, it’s just the beginning of the learning process. Students then go home and make sense of the homework/project/reading alone. They come in to take the exam or hand in the paper, which we grade (often) without any idea of how they bridged the gap between the first learning step and the last. If they do poorly, we assume that they simply did not do what they need to do to be successful.

Faculty who flip will quickly highlight the improved course grades and increased participation, but also how they were able to redirect students during the learning process. The student was working, but something wasn’t quite right and the faculty member was able to get them back on the right track. Had the student been working alone, the redirect may have never happened. With no correction, the student does poorly on the assessment and we wonder why they didn’t “do what they were supposed to do.” Sure, maybe they just didn’t do the work, but maybe they did and they were just a bit “off track”? We don’t know because we weren’t there.

Having taught math and statistics, mostly to non-majors, I’ve graded many assignments in awe and confusion. Where did that number come from? or What are they doing? I would wonder. When I started having them do the labs in the classroom, those questions were answered. I was able to see how hard students were working, how often they would discuss the content with each other, but still sometimes not quite process it correctly. I realized that the assignments that I had previously graded that made no sense were not due to the student not putting in any effort to learn the content; it was that their effort somehow got mixed up by a misunderstanding or a misstep. These missteps became something I could address because they were applying the concepts with me present and able to answer questions.

I sometimes still think about that Italian class. I wonder if my professor could have seen me in the lab maybe she would have been slightly less annoyed. Or maybe, if she was there, she would have been able to help with some tips? I’ll never know. Instead, I just pressed rewind a bit too forcibly, too many times. I ended up with a seemingly unimpressive C+ with A effort.

Ho studiato!

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