Twist And Twirl Learning: Not Just For Fun!

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Sarah was a highly efficient teacher of grade 9 in a school situated in an Industrial town of India. She was keen on making the students highly prepared to appear for the upcoming Olympiad examinations. Even with the efforts are put from both the sides, the output wasn’t as expected. She conducted a test to classify the students into three categories based on the score obtained with an average set of 80 percentile.

• A: Students who are capable of scoring above average
• B: Students who are scoring below average
• C: The set of average students in the class

When handling the class, the pace is either too fast for the ‘C’ group or too slow for the ‘A’ category. When the ‘A’ students are bored, they tend not to concentrate and disturb the whole class. Or if the ‘C’ students couldn’t grasp, they tend to deviate and poke around the neighbours. Such scenarios led to the class getting deviated and hence not achieving their capability levels. Hence as a group, the pupils were failing at what their targets were.

How to overcome such a scenario?

Giving individual attention would solve the problem yet

1. The teacher: student ratio would go down from 1:40 to 1:5 at the max, which would require more teachers leading to an infeasible solution.
2. It wouldn’t be equally split amongst the class
3. Time isn’t efficiently managed
4. While concentrating one person, the other students tend to play around.

In such a case, Sarah came up with a plan.

Instead of handling lessons in the classroom, she started preparing the notes and passing it onto the students, and they were requested to go through them before coming to the class the next day. This would cluster all the redundant activities as part of homework and all those that require a teacher’s attention into classroom sessions. She further classified the class into:

• A group which is strong in basics and hence form a peer group to help out each other
• Set of students who do an individual study

Sarah, now, started going through the entire class and giving them questions matching up to their knowledge in the subject and curiosity to learn more.

“Hence, the classroom has become more interesting to come to, and the students are intrigued to question their skills.”

This though led to newer problems like the inability of Sarah to check if the student has studied the notes, textual form of information not animated enough to keep the students engaged, and so on. Hence, this concluded that Sarah has to gain the help of technology to have the plan completed successfully.

“People who learn together, grow together.”

This can be precisely put as Flipped Classroom System

As we can see, behind the scenes, include the involvement of a platform that not only extends the attention span of the viewer but also that doesn’t need human intervention.
Hence, in the respective living place of each student,

• The videos and lecture notes of the subject are passed on to the students beforehand.
• The assessment tutorials are conducted online, in the middle of the week.
• Assignments are due at the end of each week.
• Online chat rooms to enable clearance of doubts immediately.

In classrooms:

• Students work-out real time problems.
• Also, include discussions in peer groups regarding the subject matter.
• The mentor conducts fortnightly tests.

“Parents-Teachers meetings are made more efficient by having an analysis report prepared for the individual student”.

Such meetings include the lessons taken, test scores, project quality, in-class involvement in discussions, and not to forget, the overall achievement towards the goal. The digital evidence would precisely show the weak areas of the students in a reflected manner so the student and the parents would have a clearer perspective on the topics that need more conscious effort from the student’s side.

Technology need not always be a threat to the mankind, it all depends on how you train it to accompany you all along and if it doesn’t start at the household, where else would it? And in that case, students would no longer consider the developments in the world, an obstruction in the path of the target but the means to the goal.

Flipped classroom is one such. Throughout the world, there are so many countries which have employed this and are seeing a drastic change in the way knowledge is acquired, in all the right ways. India has been lagging for a long time by now so isn’t it a great start already?

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Cheers for the weekend!