Why I Flipped

My teaching philosophy has evolved throughout the years, but the saying by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher who is considered as one of the greatest mentors with many disciples, has remained as the header, guiding my teaching and learning philosophy. Approximately 2,500 years ago, Confucius eloquently phrased what I believe to be the essence of teaching and learning, which describes a teacher as a guide who lights the path to learning, so that the students are able to independently accomplish a successful journey that is full of self-learning experiences. This is aligned with the widely known adage, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” As a teacher, I have always strived to teach my students how to learn as much as what to learn, so as to encourage them to become life-long, expert learners.

A few years ago, I made a huge decision to completely flip my undergraduate course, Sensory Evaluation of Foods, which is required for our undergraduate Food Science students and is typically taken during their junior year. This was a questionable move because flipping the course would involve significant time and effort for a course that already had a successful record of receiving outstanding student ratings. However, I marched forward with the plan and even secured funding supported from the Provost Office to enhance the course. I had taught the course for more than ten years prior and had a desire to transform the course to encourage more student-directed learning. The prior course, comprised of lectures, in-class discussions, microthemes (Schmidt, Parmer, & Javenkoski, 2002), laboratory sessions, a group project, and an oral presentation, was deemed full of active learning opportunities. However, there was a sense of the course being fully orchestrated by the instructor, myself, rather than the students directing their learning. The push for this endeavor stemmed from the belief that flipping the class would enable full implementation of my core teaching philosophy, to make my students great fishermen (expert learners).

The flipped classroom is a form of blended learning (Garrison & Kanuka, 2004), where traditional lecture materials are provided to the student for learning outside of the classroom time, so that the classroom time can be devoted to group work and active discussion for problem-solving activities (Herreid & Schiller, 2013; Tucker, 2012). The structure of my flipped course was based on replacing approximately 1/3 of my lecture materials with in-class group project time. The replaced portions of the lectures were housed online, allowing the students to have flexible, 24/7 access. The online lectures were created by the teaching assistants (TAs) supported by the funds from the Provost Office, which allowed me to have time to focus on reorganizing the entire flow of the course. This was also beneficial for the TAs, as they were immersed in the lecture materials during the summer before the semester they were going to teach, making them very well prepared.

What used to be an outside classroom assignment, the group project, became the focal point of lab sessions and part of in-class lecture time. Students were able to complete their group project within the lab sessions and in-class lecture times, which decreased the issues related to group projects, such as uneven distribution of workload and scheduling. This flipped class model allowed the group projects to become a natural recall exercise embedded directly in the course for enhancing students’ learning. The group projects were specifically designed to have the students apply their learning from lectures. Students were recalling the foundational knowledge learned from the lectures and transforming this knowledge into meaningful and useful knowledge applied to the group project mastering what they have learned (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014).

The instructional team members (instructor and the TAs) were able to guide the students when they were working on their group projects, which was not possible when the group projects were done as an outside-of-the-classroom assignment. This new structure enabled the instructional team to assist the students in their learning of procedural knowledge as they went through the process of solving problems posed by their group project. More time was spent on the students receiving guidance in tackling their group project problems and learning the process of problem solving, which deemphasized the importance of rote memory to gain declarative knowledge given typically through lectures (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010a).

An additional benefit of the flipped class model was the social aspect of student learning being utilized throughout the whole semester in the classroom setting. Inspiring students to learn by enhancing their social and affective goals (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010b) proved to very effective in a group project context within the classroom. The students were engaged and directed their learning by actively participating in accomplishing the group project goals. The student survey administered at the end of the semester revealed that the flipped classroom format was effective in providing an environment for students to be engaged and achieve active learning (Donovan & Lee, 2015). The instructional team reflections also revealed that active student engagement was observed in the flipped class model more so than the previous traditional lecture-based model.

With all the positive student evaluations and reflections, my “questionable” decision to devote a lot of time and energy to completely flip my course has been shown to be a wise investment. In the end, what matters most is how much students have learned and, through the learning, have had a transformative experience. With the course now designed to allow self-directed learning in a group project context, students can be transformed into expert learners with skillset to learn in any learning context they may encounter throughout their lifetime.