An expert lecturing to a group of novices, verbally and visually instructing them, has been a popular form of education since Biblical times and the Ancient Greeks. Tom Davidsmeier, John Hersey High School physics teacher, wonders why students listen passively with limited interaction to a lecture, then work alone on the harder problems at home, only to get stuck. At that point, they must wait to come to class the next day to have their confusion resolved by the teacher or their fellow classmates.
Today's technology and the ubiquity of computers and internet connectivity offer teachers the chance to turn this model on its head. Davidsmeier decided to take advantage of these opportunities and reconstruct his junior Honors Physics class into what is being called, "The Inverted Classroom."
Presentations of new material are recorded ahead of time and posted on the web. Students can view these lectures throughout the day and evening on their computers at home, on school computers in the library or labs, or even on their smart phones, if they like. This way, they have the ability to pause or replay parts they don't quite understand the first time, and even go back and watch them again later as a review. After many of the lectures, there are short online quizzes where students check their understanding.
Junior Madeleine Brown, a student in Davidsmeier's class, likes the new method because it, "allows me to learn at my own pace. Especially early, much of the material was review of material I already knew. It let me focus more on what I didn’t know."
When students arrive to class, they are immediately expected to begin working on activities that involve the new ideas and topics discussed in the online videos. All of the class time is used to make the instructor available to student questions or to help catch common misconceptions and typical mistakes. It also allows students to get help from other students who picked up the new material more quickly or easily.
Davidsmeier states, "Students work on the hard parts of the course when they have direct access to all of the support possible."
Junior Jenna Borrelli, believes, "This really puts the responsibility on us to make sure we are prepared for the next day's class."
Ideas similar to the inverted classroom have been used successfully by a variety of professionals such as Salman Khan, founder of the Kahn Academy, and Harvard University physics professor, Eric Mazur.
Davidsmeier is pleased with the initial success of the program and has already noticed an "increase in the pace of the course, with students able to move on to new material more quickly than with the traditional classroom arrangement."
