What is your Takeaway? Flipping my classroom and in turn flipping the learning for my students. Why do you need it? Over the past 2 years I have really noticed a dip in students’ engagement and excitement when it comes to learning.  I have also had a really honest look at my teaching and I came to the realisation that most of my lessons consisted of me didactically delivering the content while students passively take notes or fall asleep.  Students were not excited about the content and others were so obsessed with writing everything down that my lessons dragged and I was finding the sound of my own voice extremely tedious! Click here to see a video on flipped learning. What is the solution? I decided to trial flipped learning with one of my year 11 Sociology groups.  The way it works is I have created 10-15 minute videos where I teach all the content for the upcoming lesson.  Students watch the video for homework BEFORE the lesson.  They can pause the video, rewind the video and basically spend as much time as they want writing notes and assimilating the new information.  In independent schools this is known as ‘prep’.  When the students arrive in the classroom, they already have all the information which when frees up the hour to really engage with this new learning in creative ways.  We spend class time evaluating and analysing, creating new resources such as videos- expressing new learning through art and drama as well as practising a lot of exam questions.  This has changed how the classroom is set up too.  Now students sit in groups or zones and can choose what they do with their learning.  Part of the flipped learning model is online quizzes and in class quizzes to check understanding and identify gaps in knowledge.  As the teacher, I have become more of a facilitator, helping students when they need it and guiding the different activities.  However, the more autonomy the students are given, the more the start to lead their own learning and I’m there to enrich that.  Class time has gone from being boring and passive to active and exciting where all the students are learning at their own pace, can chart their own progress and collaborate with others in a far more meaningful way. Resources Screen Capture Program (I use SNAGIT by TECHSMITH), a computer or laptop and a microphone to make the flipped learning videos. A free You Tube channel accessible to your students or an equivalent online sharing site. A little time to explore how to make the videos. Outcomes and Evaluation Firstly, students’ engagement sky-rocketed!   They were excited and committed to using the videos to prepare for the lesson.  Most of them also found the videos really useful for their revision.  Here are some of the student voice feedback statements: “We use You Tube for everything from how to shape your eye brows to how to change a fuse in a plug.  It makes so much sense to have all my lessons on You Tube too!  I learn more by watching a screen than I do in a classroom.  It was also really good to have my teacher’s voice explaining the content in the video as I am familiar with how she explains things, so I found this really useful.” “I could go at my own pace.  I could stop, rewind and fast forward the video as many times as I wanted and this meant that I could arrive at the lesson confident that I had grasped the basic content and then I could really engage with the more involved activities in class.” “I liked the control it gave me over my learning.” “Flipped learning improved my achievement as it made me think about Sociology outside of the lesson and being on the internet made it more appealing.   I used it for revision too, because I was able to stop and replay the videos and take my time.” And when asked which subjects they would like to see flipped the answer was almost unanimously “All of them!” All the students achieved higher grades in the end of unit assessment, however as I had only trialled it over one unit it is difficult to be able to accurately and reliably compare results with previous assessments.  I am looking forward to doing this with the current cohort who will be doing a lot more flipped learning! Improvements I still need to make is how to continue making the class time invaluable, interesting, collaborative, independent and fast paced.  And I am still working on getting all the students on board with this as it requires them to do a lot more work!  Rather than me doing all the talking!  It is requiring a lot of students to come out of their comfort zone and this remains a challenge.  I also spent a LONG time trying to use FREEWARE! It is NOT WORTH the effort! I wasted about 16 hours with it before using a free trial of SNAGIT, which I have since been provided with. I want to improve the quality of the videos and continue to build a bank of other sociology videos on You Tube that will further enrich my students’ learning and engagement with sociology. Post submitted by: Abi Tidball