Methodology 7

Flipped Classroom

One of the most popular new approaches to teaching is the flipped classroom. This approach involves a process where the typical lecture that happens in the classroom occurs at home. Students watch lectures on video, and then return to school to engage in the exercises they would traditionally have for homework, and to ask questions based on the lecture they watched on their own at home. When students watch videos at home, they can stop and go and at their own pace, and take notes a their leisure. When they return to school, they can work in groups to discuss what they watched, and/or have their questions answered by the teacher. In this process, students create, collaborate and learn at their own pace, and apply what they have learned at home in the classroom.
In all of these approaches, the most powerful thing to recognize is that they focus explicitly on engaging both the student and the teacher. When teachers are treated like the intelligent professionals that they are, and given the flexibility to engage in approaches to teaching and learning that go beyond archaic models that they are often bound to, students respond differently, and education is improved.


Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Lessons (POGIL)

Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Lessons are part of a learning strategy that has both a constructivist and social component. In other words, it focuses on using the real life experiences of the learner to create knowledge and considers how students relates to the environment where they are taught.

When engaging in POGIL’s, the teacher assigns text to students, and then poses a set of questions that they can only answer by exploring the text that was given. In this process, the teacher has to fight the urge to give students any answers or facts to memorize. Their main role is to pose questions that provoke the students to look more deeply at the text they are given. In a POGIL classroom, students develop conclusions about the text they are interrogating that will increase their knowledge. As students answer questions, teachers “guide the inquiry” by asking supplemental questions that will eventually move the students towards thinking deeply and drawing more complex conclusions. This approach has resulted in increased student interest in the subject being taught and increased mastery of content in the science classes where it is mostly used.