Flipped Classroom, an Innovative Pedagogy.

From the age of Socrates and his peripatetic school to the early decade of the 21st century, lecturing was the only method of teaching. Innovations and experiments lead to the mode of lecturing into new variations. Yet the system remained unchanged. The teacher remained the master of the class and the students were the passive listeners, who were supposed to gulp the taught elements completely either from the classroom or from the home. All other dominions, machinery, living conditions, motor vehicles, etc. have undergone tremendous changes, with the help of technology. Education remained unchanged, where the teacher was lecturing, while the students were silently listening, jotting down notes, mugging up the content from home, and putting them directly into the answer paper. The flipped classroom is a result of the constant educational experiments and innovations undergone through the ages. 

This advanced pedagogical approach has harvested widespread attention for its potential to enhance student engagement, understanding, and academic performance. In this novel method, the classrooms invert the conventional educational model by delivering instructional content outside of the classroom and the in-class time is completely utilized for active learning. By exploiting the internet technology to assist learning in a classroom, a teacher can devote more time to interacting and communicating with students rather than teaching. This is generally done by using videos and other study materials designed by the teacher that students are supposed to be viewed from outside. As we have mentioned earlier, activities are very important in a flipped classroom. In a traditional classroom, learning occurs in the classroom and the students have to do homework from home. Naturally, they may feel doubts at the time of their study. In this inverted classroom method, class takes place in the home and the activities are happening in the classroom. There the students are free to ask doubts about the content and they are availed to achieve knowledge via experiential and participatory methods. These activities are designed to deepen understanding through discussion, problem-solving, and collaborative projects.

Merits of Flipped Classrooms

1. Active Learning and Engagement: Flipped classrooms promote an active learning atmosphere where students are encouraged to participate actively in the knowledge-grabbing process. Students have to be indulged in interactive tasks during class time. This approach boosts their understanding of the material.

2. Personalized Learning: The students are free to learn the material at their own pace. They can pause, rewind, and review the instructional content according to their level of understanding. This leads to a more personalized and effective learning experience.

3. Teacher-Student Interaction: The teacher-learner interaction is more effective and it will enhance their interaction. This enables immediate feedback, addresses individual questions, and facilitates small group discussions. 

4. Higher-Order Thinking Skills: Flipped classrooms are not a platform for lecturing and note-taking, but emphasize critical thinking, problem-solving, and application of knowledge. By engaging in activities involving analysis, synthesis, and evaluation during class, students develop higher-order cognitive skills that are essential for academic and professional success.

Challenges in Flipped Classrooms

1. Involvement of Technology: As the flipped classroom depends on technology, students need access to digital devices and the internet to engage with instructional materials. This may cause disparities if all students do not have equal access to these digital resources.

2. Student Responsibility: The accomplishment of a flipped classroom is highly dependent upon students learning the digitally designed work before class. It is very difficult to ensure every student that has learned the material and it needs a high level of self-discipline and enthusiasm.

3. Teacher Groundwork: It is indeed a challenging part of the teacher that design effective flipped classroom materials and provide effective learning activities. This will surely boost the skill and creative ability of the teacher.

4. Assessment: Unlike the traditional assessment methods, teachers need to develop new assessment strategies that align with the active learning approach, focusing on students' ability to apply knowledge rather than merely mugging up and recalling the data.

Like every new strategy, flipped learning has also faced criticism and condemnation. It is for sure that the teacher has to spend his/her time designing and executing the classroom effectively. Due to the heaviness of the syllabus or some other problems, most of the teachers quit this new intervention abruptly. Undoubtedly, it is proved that if the plan is luminously executed, everything that follows will end up gorgeously…

Bibliography

Ahmed, Hanaa Ouda Khadri. "Flipped Learning as a New Educational Paradigm: An Analytical Critical Study." European Scientific Journal, vol. 12, no. 10, Apr. 2016, pp. 417-444. European Scientific Institute, doi:10.19044/esj.2016.v12n10p417.

Radhika. A, Assistant Professor of English, Al Shifa College of Arts and Science, Keezhattur.