Flipped Classroom | Faculty Technology Fellows

Christie Lewis, Ed.D.
Education

Teaching and Technology for the TikTok Generation in the Midst of a Pandemic

Dr. Christie Lewis used Nearpod to increase student engagement in a flipped classroom.

Project Overview

Child development is a 100 level course that all education majors are required to take. In addition, child development is a general Ed requirement for non-education majors. For this project I created a type of flipped classroom in which students completed independent asynchronous Nearpod‘s for class on Tuesdays and then met in class on Thursdays to complete various activities. Activities include small and whole group class discussions and applying knowledge from the Nearpod into group activities.

Project Planning

This project used the SAMR model of technology integration. Tuesday class time was replaced with an asynchronous Nearpod, which included check for understanding questions and videos to support the audio lecture. Planning for this class was meticulous. Nearpods, which can take hours to create, were prepared well ahead of time. Moreover, in preparing Nearpods, I had to strategically think about what it was that I truly wanted the students to learn about, consider how they would be assessed, and then plan the Nearpod with these specific learning experiences and objectives in mind. I also had to think about how the material from the Nearpods would be applied during in class time on Thursdays.

Nearpods were available for students to complete beginning on Mondays and then had to be completed by class time on Thursday. Otherwise, students would not earn points for Nearpod completion. Earning points for completion also required that students complete the check for understanding questions throughout the Nearpod. This permitted me to check and see if the students understood the material before class on Thursdays. On Thursdays, students would apply the material from the Nearpods via cooperative and collaborative learning experiences. The activities and discussions in class on Thursdays permitted scaffolding to occur with peers. Further, the activities and discussions for the class were supported by Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory and Bandura’s Social Learning Theory.

In preparing, I took it to account the recent Covid pandemic and considered the mental health challenges that students may face as well as the learning that students had taken part in for the past year and a half. In other courses, I observed that students often disclosed mental health challenges and discussed lack of motivation, stress, and feeling overwhelmed. I observed from the fall semester how many students discussed how overwhelmed and stressed they felt. Many students during the fall term also verbalized that most of their learning had been either synchronous or asynchronous for the past year. At the beginning of the spring 2022 term, because Chatham moved to a virtual format, I begin using Nearpods in place of synchronous learning on Tuesdays during the first few weeks of the semester. Once it was announced that the university was permitted to move back to classroom instruction, I created a Zoom poll and asked students if they would prefer asynchronous lectures via Nearpods on Tuesday and meeting in the classroom on Thursdays, or if they would prefer meeting in the classroom on Tuesdays and Thursdays. All but one student voted to continue with asynchronous Nearpods on Tuesdays and then to meet in the classroom on Thursdays. It was important to me that students had a voice in how they would learn as I believe in creating a positive learning community that takes student voice into account.

Using Nearpods created more equity for the course. Nearpods permitted more resources for the students as students could go back and review the lectures and videos in the Nearpod at any point in time. Further, with keeping Mayer’s Multimedia Learning Theory in mind, I created a more effective instructional design in the Nearpod. Mayer’s theory dictates learners learn more deeply from a combination of words and images together than just simply words alone. The Nearpods not only provided a visual slide with major points written out but audio from my voice via lecture for each slide. Then, short videos for the most important learning material were given in the form of short videos found from various sources such as Study.com, YouTube, WQED, and other places. This permitted the learner to be introduced to the material via a visual slide with an auditory lecture, and then for the main learning material to be reinforced with a video that included audio. Many students in my course disclosed that they had ADHD (five students to my knowledge) and one student was EL Learner. This model of learning helped to better support these to return to the material again and again, but it also helped the whole class as anyone could revisit the material at any given point in time. Unlike a traditional lecture, students could not only see the visual aids from the lecture but listen to the lecture again instead of solely relying on notes taken during class.

Project Assessment

For this project, I surveyed the students using during week 12 of class. The results of the survey and questions are below. Most the students enjoyed the Nearpods and felt that it enhanced learning as can be seen in the results below. Further, 12 out of 13 respondents or 92.3% of respondents stated that Nearpods should be used for future courses.

graph showing nearpod should be used in the future.

Project Reflections and Next Steps

For the most part, the flipped classroom using Nearpods worked for most of the students. Based on feedback from the survey, I think I will continue to use this method of teaching child development as it was effective for most learners. However, I feel that I will need to adjust the length of some of the Nearpods as some of the Nearpods were lengthy. Further, I learned that post/current pandemic students from what I refer to as the “TikTok” generation do gravitate towards nontraditional teaching methods in asynchronous settings. The flipped classroom using asynchronous Nearpods not only permitted a deeper learning experience but also provided more school and life balance to students.

Project Overview

My project goal is to redesign a class on the health effects of climate change using a flipped classroom model. I have created a self-directed learning unit that the students will complete before class. The in-class application exercise will use Bubbl.us concept mapping to demonstrate important relationships between the environmental consequences of climate change and human health. Concept mapping is a metacognitive process that involves making decisions about different ways concepts are related to each other and leads to a deeper understanding of the problem.

Planning Process

The class I am targeting is a first semester cohort class of 40 students. I chose topic of climate change and health because it builds understanding of an important national health issue. It also connects the DPT students to sustainability, a foundational part of the Chatham University mission.

For some of the students, the topic of climate change is controversial. In the case of controversy, a simple one-way transmission of facts is sometimes met with resistance. I hope to mitigate students’ ideological resistance by doing two things. First, in allowing students choice from a menu of source of information, I hope to reduce the tendency to categorically reject ideas that are inconsistent with old beliefs. Second, the flipped classroom model will give the students’ time to reflect on the readings and videos before entering into discussion with their peers. Time to reflect on the material should make students more comfortable and confident when engaging in discussion.

I chose learning objectives that fall into the Synthesis level of Blooms taxonomy. One of the fundamental jobs of a health scientists is to evaluate evidence and make informed decision based on scientific analysis. Students will practice critical decision making throughout the DPT curriculum.

Learning objectives:

1. Students will conclude that climate change is a product of human actions and has a deleterious effect on human health.

2. Students will propose relationships between climate change mitigating actions and corresponding impacts on human health.

Implementation

The class described is planned for fall 2017. Students will be given the flipped classroom assignment on a Wednesday and the discussion will follow the next Wednesday.

Pre-class activity

Students will choose from a menu of TED talks, research articles and quality web sites for background information about climate change and health. After completing the learning unit, students will create a concept map illustrating the relationship between climate change and health, using a free program called Bubbl.us.

Sample:

Bubbl.us example 2

In-class activity

The class will be divided into 6 groups and tasked to devise a consensus concept map diagraming the relationships between climate change and health. Students will not have read all of the same material so they bring different perspectives to the discussion. They will compare and combine individual concept maps into a single conceptualization. These group concept maps will be uploaded to the class Moodle site for view and discussion by the class as a whole.

Finally, students will regroup to create a new concept map showing the relationship between potential climate-mitigating actions and health. This activity again draws from the students’ preparation but it is not part of the preparation prompt. Students will have to synthesize and theorize based on their understanding of the videos and reading.

Sample:

Assessment

Before the unit begins I plan to administer a survey that asks students about their beliefs and attitudes about climate change. I have permission from Gallup Polls to use the poll from Politics March 25, 2015 “U.S. Views on Climate Change Stable after Extreme Winter”. This is the most recent Gallup Poll that asks a large diverse sample about climate change beliefs and attitudes. I plan to repeat the survey at the end of the second class to see if there have been any changes in student attitudes or beliefs about climate change and health. I will also compare the cohorts’ responses to those detailed in the national Gallup Poll survey.

Reflections and Next Steps

This project has helped inform my teaching well beyond the class redesign. Becky Borello and Lauren Panton are gifted technology mentors. My fellow Fellows have inspired and mentored me as well. I owe a particular debts to Meigan Robb for helping me understand Bubbl.us and to Mary Beth Mannarino for helping to understand how to “talk across differences” when dealing with climate science.

My next target for redesign is a class on health inequity. I also plan to apply what I learned in the project, flipping the classroom and implementing concept mapping to demonstrate the complex relationships between health and wealth.