What is "The Flipped Classroom?"

I have been a science teacher for over fifteen years. Every year I feel that my teaching has improved but now I am ready for a new challenge.

For the past few years I have been hearing about something called “The Flipped Classroom” and have let the idea sit at the back of the brain for a while. About a month ago I decided to look into it more. I eventually landed on Dan Spencer’s page.

As Dan mentions, the term “Flipped Classroom” is “just a catchy phrase” that can mean a lot of different things. It can be done poorly, or well, just like many teaching methodologies.

In a "traditional" classroom the students come to school to watch the teacher lecture as they take notes, then they go home to practice what they have learned, as written homework. In contrast, a “flipped” classroom is one in which the students get much of the lecturing/note-taking at home so they can spend even more of their classroom time doing work and activitees under the guidance of the teacher.

I want to do this for my physics classes...
     and... I want to do it well.

I anticipate spending many many hours, especially this first year, to implement this practice. There will be technological difficulties as well as classroom management and teaching challenges. How do I allow ALL students to be successful under this sort of situation? What do I do with those students who refuse to do ANYTHING outside of class time? How do I continue to challenge that other type of student who decides to complete everything so they have "nothing" to do? How will this affect my standardized test scores? What about student failure rates?

After spending a few weeks looking into the possibilities (I will write about those later) I have decided to create this Blog for two main reasons: (1) I want to have a place for myself, to keep track of the hours spent on each of the various aspects of this “project”, also (2) It might be useful to other teachers who may wish to consider implementing some of these ideas into their own curriculum.

This is the very first page of what might well be a year-long blog...