Blended and Flipped Learning

focusing activities to engage students

Three Focusing Activities to Engage Students in the First Five Minutes of Class

In the previous two articles, I shared ideas to address student accountability and student preparation in the flipped classroom. Based on your feedback and emails, getting students to come to class prepared is an ongoing challenge for many of us! In this article, I’d like to keep the conversation going by zeroing in on the importance of the first five minutes of class.

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time management flipped classroom

Time Management Strategies for the Flipped Classroom

In a flipped learning model of teaching, students get first contact with new ideas not during class time but in structured independent activities done prior to class time. This frees up class time to be used for more active work, digging more deeply into advanced ideas. This inversion of the use of time is a key difference between the flipped and traditional models of instruction—and when instructors flip, it brings up issues about time management for both instructors and students that require special attention.

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faculty development

Let’s Practice What We Teach: Flipping Faculty Development

Faculty everywhere are flipping their classes, but can we flip faculty development? That’s the question I asked myself when I flipped the pre-conference workshop at the 2016 Teaching Professor Technology Conference. What I discovered is that we can “practice what we teach” and design faculty-centered learning experiences much the same way we design student-centered learning experiences.

In this article, I provide a few recommendations for flipping a faculty development workshop. For further inspiration, the article concludes with a showcase of the work created by the participants in my workshop last fall.

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active learning strategies

Three Active Learning Strategies You Can Do in 10 Minutes or Less

A 2015 survey of Faculty Focus readers found that the number one barrier preventing faculty from implementing the flipped classroom model and other active learning experiences into their courses is TIME. Faculty reported they don’t have time to plan extra learner-centered activities, due to increasing responsibilities, and they don’t have time to implement the activities in class because there’s too much content to cover.

If you feel this way, you’re not alone. But, you can still create engaging learning experiences for students. And you can do it in 10 minutes (or less).

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active learning techniques

Deeper Thinking about Active Learning

I keep worrying that we’re missing the boat with active learning. Here’s why. First, active learning isn’t about activity for the sake of activity. I fear we’ve gotten too fixated on the activity and aren’t as focused as we should be on the learning. We’re still obsessed with collecting teaching techniques—all those strategies, gimmicks, approaches, and things we can do to get students engaged. But what kind of engagement does the activity promote? Does it pique student interest, make them think, result in learning, and cultivate a desire to know more? Or is it more about keeping basically bored students busy?

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