Flipping the Non-Flippable Classrooms

This week we were asked to blog about the person we are following on Twitter. Sadly who I am following on Twitter, does not tweet enough so I had to find someone new. I found @coolcatteacher. She tweets regularly and I found her interesting to follow. I came across this one tweet she posted about an article she found on Edutopia. It’s called “Flipped Learning Toolkit: Flipping the Non-Flippable Classes.” Vicki Davis who found this article asked if you think you could flip classes like PE, dance, and elementary education. This article from Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams shows you how.  

After reading this article I was intrigued. You can flip any classroom in any subject. Whether it’s math, PE, science, like the article states it’s a resounding yes. Teachers need to ask this question, What is the best use of my face-to-face time with students? Before reading this article, I thought that Physical Education, Woodworking, dance education, and elementary education were all non-flippable courses. But it turns out that they can be flipped! Which after reading this article I completely agree with that! The subject I found most interesting that you could flip was Physical Education. I would have never thought that you could flip a gym class, but like the video states, the teacher could post a video about how to serve a volleyball the correct way, then the next day in class you can just go right into the lesson and skip over that part, unless one student needs help then you can give your attention to them. I thought this was clever. An example they used in the article was a gym teacher and how he loves using the flipped classroom. He was frustrated with spending too much of his time telling kids how to move their bodies, and now with the flipped classroom his students now spend more time moving their bodies. He is also an athletic coach and he has taken the flipped class into this job as well. His teams benefits from additional time to practice because less practice time is devoted to instruction. Now even coaches are using flip class which is crazy!   

Overall, any course can be flipped even if you don’t believe it can be. This is a great tool to utilize in a classroom! I enjoyed coming across this article and I’m excited to see what other articles @coolcatteacher will post!