I had never heard of a "flipped" class until I went to a seminar at a different campus in my system called Blended Course Design with speaker, chemist, and all around entertaining guy, Dr. Ike Shibley from Penn State Berks. This seminar wasn't specifically about how to flip a class but instead on how to incorporate more technology into your class to help engage your students, it was the coolest thing that I had ever seen. I watched Dr. Shibley give the most entertaining seminar on a dreary, rainy January day and some part of my brain lit up and said, I could be like him. I want to be a teacher like him. He inspired such a desire to work harder and reach my students on a different level than just as a lecturer. At this seminar I had my first real opportunity to break out of my teaching closet and explore new and different ideas about how to teach and listen to all of the ways that other teachers were already breaking down the lecture-and-take-notes wall. When I went home that day I was buzzing from all of the ideas in my head. I still get excited thinking about it. The next week I sent an email to the head of my department and requested that one of my sections of mythology for Fall 2013 be taught as a hybrid class. As I sit at my desk today excitement isn't really the feeling that dominates when I think about my own flipped class. I think it is much closer to trepidation.
I would like to say that I spent a lot of time preparing how everything was going to work for my hybrid mythology class before the semester started last week, but that would be a lie. I did spend a lot of time thinking and worrying about what my students were going to do in class and how I could keep them interested enough to make the once per week trek to our classroom worth their while. Truth be told, I am still thinking and worrying about that. As a teacher I am inclined to think that all class sessions are of the utmost importance. That thinking follows nicely with the other lie that we tell ourselves that our students are not actual people but automatons who only do work for our class and are not adults that have families, jobs, and other classes.
I have the feeling that this might be even more difficult in my hybrid class where most of the learning takes place outside of the classroom. For any given day of class students have to do the readings, take a quiz, watch the lectures, and write a response the to reading (in that order) before they even set foot into our classroom. How can I impress on them that coming to class and discussing their ideas and doing some small activities are important? Especially when some of them, like me, commute 30 or so minutes to campus for a 75 minute class? I know that talking about the stories and themes in mythology will help cement them into a student's mind and will open them up to whole different world of interpretation than just my interpretation presented in the lectures. My goal is to be able to convince them of this also. Hopefully, I get a better turn out for our second day of class than the 2/3 that showed up to my other section yesterday. It makes me wonder if my class is too hard, if I am intimidating, or if students really just don't care. I am not sure which one would be the better truth.
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