A colleague sent me a link to an interesting post, one that has a number of points (some made almost in passing) to consider:
http://www.brianbennett.org/blog/?p=982
Here was my response: I’m particularly interested in student feedback and may make it an assignment to comment on this blog since few of my students seem to read me routinely lol.
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A number of observations support what he’s talking about even at st. john’s:
a) seniors routinely say they do not check whipple hill (juniors are somewhat better); I have moved two papers this year a week later because though posted on whipple hill well in advance, it was less than a week before they were due that someone noticed–and then complained.
b) in my math classes, I’ve gone to giving a general overview of each topic (but not usually answering the questions I want them to answer or doing “example problems”, which latter just exacerbates the “algorithmic approach” we prize so highly here–and in many math classes) which ten years ago I rarely did–but the size of the classes has doubled.
However, interestingly, I find that most students–even seniors–still do most of their homework for me through spring break, though seniors require more quizzes to keep on task than they do earlier in the year. Part of how much they work is teacher expectation: every spring, when we start talking about their decline in working, seniors tell me that they are more likely to keep working when they respect the teacher and when they see the teacher working hard rather than just sitting at her/his desk or blinding lecturing without connecting to the students…
I’m not sure he quite said it this way, but flipped classrooms presuppose that the students are basically somewhat interested in the material and/or that there are reasonably frequent quizzes. Effectively, many English classes are “flipped classrooms” by design–reading is done outside of school and discussed in class. But students are soooooooooo used to not having to “read the book” in most other classes, that it’s very hard to undo all that training…
And a fair amount of it is habit. My “internet-generation” students in math, for instance, are quite happy to go to the web the night before a quiz to look for help (usually worked problems because they say my explanations are usually better than what’s on the web), but they are one step away from incapable of using the web as an original source. An assignment to find, copy, and explicate a proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, for instance, drove them nuts. As the blog says, when they didn’t understand the first one, they looked at a couple more links and then gave up until I pushed them much harder.
Ironically, I find most students use the web too little rather than too much–or at least, in a very superficial manner, mostly for entertainment or algorithmic instruction, but rarely as a prompter of intellectual curiosity.