Imagine spending the valuable and limited class time you have with your students, not with teaching them the basics of each area of study, but by delving deeper, engaging in discussion and exploring the depths of concepts. How do we achieve this with a given cohort of students? This is the prevailing theory behind flipped classroom concepts, where students are provided with instructional videos or recorded lectures that teach them the concepts in their base form, allowing the time with a teacher in class to be spent covering the gaps that students were unable to close on their own (Bergmann, 2012; Muir, 2021). While the Covid-19 pandemic brought much of this more distant type of learning to the front, aspects of it can be useful in classrooms today.

The positives of flipped classrooms is in recognizing the most limited educational resource - time with the teacher - and striving to make the best use of this time, rather than being bogged down providing background information. While these approaches are not suited to every classroom, teacher, or education setting, they can offer support and a foundation for students to build their knowledge and make better use of class time. In practices much more reflective of what students experience in tertiary education, these practices will not be foreign to students forever.

Beyond just applying to students learning new content before connecting with teachers over it, these resources that can be viewed time and time again offer students a wealth of resources for revision and an instant tool to provide them with re-explanation. Gone might be the days of getting stuck doing homework at night and having to wait to see the teacher, when instructions are provided and can be reviewed, many of these concerns fall by the wayside.

While an entirely flipped classroom is unlikely to suit many education settings, aspects of these theories can serve to provide resources that help students particularly at crunch times around assessments, or when encountering new material. While this concept seems foreign to a science classroom, it does not differ far from English classes reading the book chapter ahead of time for the class to be focussed on discussion of its meaning.

Are you interested in incorporating flipped classroom concepts into your teaching? Below are some links that share information on flipped classroom concepts, that may serve as building blocks in determining how and where to implement in your classrooms.