Influences on my Badges Program Pt. 2

Students working on their documentary filmmaking badges.

#edtech #edbadges Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams certainly appealed to teachers with the promising subtitle to their 2012 book - Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class, Every Day. What teacher doesn’t wish to reach every student in every class every day? With the recognition that information is easily accessible outside of the classroom, they proposed that the classroom should no longer be the place where knowledge is acquired. Instead, students could be introduced to concepts, lessons, and facts on their own, through video tutorials. Students could watch the videos at home-- as quickly or slowly as they wanted, with as many pauses and replays as necessary. They realized that the part of the learning process that the teacher was most needed for was the part where students began trying to use the knowledge in practice problems or experiments (the authors are high school chemistry teachers).

The classroom, then, could become the place where students analyzed, used, tested, played with, and reacted to the information they had learned. Instead of giving information in the classroom and asking students to practice it outside of class, students could come to class with the basic facts in place, and delve into higher order thinking and processing with their teachers. So, instead of functioning as fact dispensers, teachers and students get to share in the more dynamic aspects of learning, which is a win on both of their parts. Practitioners of this system report enjoying far more interaction with their students, less classroom management issues, more engaged students, and more success in individualizing education. The original authors later implemented a mastery approach to their flipped classroom model, in which students can navigate the flipped classroom model at their own pace. With the flipped model of instruction being so very untraditional, it is sometimes hard to then try and assign traditional letter grades to the learning that is occurring, which is why some have called my badges the perfect assessment tool for the flipped classroom model.