During my undergrad, I was privileged to be one of the students who enjoyed the Inverted Classroom Approach. This approach involved watching a 20–30 minute video at our own time, accompanied by in-class lectures that focused on doing practical exercises. This learning style for me was vastly helpful (although it wasn’t the best for everyone). Since then, I have modified this approach and applied it to some of my own teaching shifts.
Since May 2020, I’ve been using a modified version of this approach when teaching grade 8–10 science. Initially this grade 8 science class was presented like an university lecture with PowerPoint slides. However, since the student body were mostly children/preteens, they had issues paying attention and doing the expected homework. I was not surprised at all! It was the summer time out of all possible times. They wanted to just go outside and just have fun. I understood their lack of productivity in my class. I had to come up with a new approach.
In order to balance the realities of youth (who I assumed they have other interests than learning) and the needs of my employer (who expected the students to get at least some form of an education), I created what I call the “Coupled-Lesson-Review” teaching technique.
This teaching style’s first half (the Lesson part) consisted of teaching a very small set of related concepts, with the second half (the Review) followed by an immediate set of quiz questions towards the material just covered. For the first half, I taught one set of concepts with maybe about 1–4 new ideas. I refrained from teaching too many new concepts as this risked overwhelming and confusing the students. For the second half, I gave my students a list of open-ended review questions. As this class was held online (via Zoom), I allowed my students to choose their method of answer my questions. The students were given the option to i) answer orally, or ii) via the public group chat or iii) to message me privately. I allowed them to answer based on their level of social confidence.
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For this approach, I also employed some additional tactics to help students get to the right answer.
Additional Tactic #1: Level grades (D, C, B, A) feedback
Whenever an answer was attempted, I sometimes reply with “that’s a [A/B/C/D/] answer”. My response would then be followed by a more specific quiz question to inform my students of my expectations for them. This provided frequent and quick opportunities for students to receive feedback to reinforce learning.
Additional Tactic #2: Quick Peak at the Material
There are moments where all the students would struggle with providing an answer. When these situations happen, I retaught and showed the students the material with a limited time (usually 10–30 seconds). When students still struggled, I would increase the amount of time or highlight the answer for them. However as a rule to discourage copy/pasting slides directly, I did ask students to rewrite in their own words when answer.
Additional Tactic #3: Fill in the blank & Multiple Choice
Sometimes students do get exhausted or still struggle. In these situations, transform the opened-ended review questions into either a fill in the blank or a multiple choice question.
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Benefit #1 : Ensures students pay attention
When students know they will be immediately tested right, they are much more encouraged to give their full attention. Furthermore, during the review/quiz time, I will sometimes call upon names to ensure students who haven’t participated yet contribute. This applies pressure on student’s who have a weaker attention span.
Benefit #2 : Identify issues right away
During the quiz/review part of my class, there are moments where none of the students would contribute or some of their answers seemed strange. I am able to see how student might wrongly perceive a new concept and fill in the any knowledge gaps they may have.
Benefit #3 : (Potentially) Limited homework
As this was a class where students were pressured by their parents to attend, I believe students would struggle with homework completion. Hence to reduce their burden, I told them the in-class quiz questions will be the homework questions. I then advised that students could do their homework in the class, to reduce their later workload. They can do this by contributing and receiving the answers that was given in the class. This approach significantly increase each student’s attention to the class.
Benefit #4 : Helps with future independent studying
The best way to really understand new ideas doesn’t seem to be listening to a class. I once was told a lecture only provides 5% of the learning. I believe one of best way to learn is actually by doing and participating. Hence the prepared review questions encourage students to participate frequently and to create mock-level testing situations.
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Drawback #1: Requires a small class
This was a class of 4–8 students. The small amount of students in my class ensured I was able to provide a reasonable amount of attention to each. I believe, however, that for a large class, this would not be as effective. I personally participated in Zoom (video) webinars consisting anywhere from 30–150 people. In these webinars, either there was a massive volume of answers that overwhelmed the instructor’s attention or a lot of people didn’t participate due to implicit expectation that someone else would answer or their own answers wouldn’t be noticed.
Drawback #2 : Some kids “dominate” the class
Throughout the semester, the more outgoing and confident students answered quicker than the other students. I estimate that throughout the entire course, the more confident students were responsible for at least 70% of the answers (both correct/incorrect). This discouraged the other students from answering, and hence the students who are more shy learned the least.
Drawback #3 : Time is wasted on waiting for student answer
As mentioned earlier, there are moments where all the students would struggle providing an answer. I sometimes experience major student lag [sometimes even long as 3 minutes] where the class seems to be waiting on the “dominate” kids to answer. When even the “dominate” kids don’t answer, it becomes literally an awkward online room of silence that I have to often break.
Drawback #4: The “dominating” students learn more
This teaching style was minorly effective for a small class. Students yielded marks 60–70% in an end-of-term review (an unannounced pseudo-final exam). For the second end-of-term review, students as a whole propelled themselves to 95–100%. However, this performance was possible due to a few strong student’s effort. As students compete when answering the same questions, students who are frequently defeated in the competition of being first to answer gets partial exposure to the material.
