Reverse instruction, also known as the “Flipped Classroom” is where instruction of skills and content are provided for students to view outside of class as homework. The objective of this is to use class time for the application of the skills to solve real-world problems creatively and collaboratively with teach support.
There are many advantages to this instructional approach as students can learn at their own speed as they can pause and rewind and review when needed. It also means that the instruction needs to be visual and interesting and clear to keep students engaged. Teachers could add captions in another language for those students who are second language learners.
While the initial time investment to create vodcasts might be large, they can be reused in the future, which could save time on planning lessons. Teachers can maintain an archive of lessons to provide for students online or on CD for preteaching, extra support and enrichment.
I think that to some degree a reverse classroom could be applied in the fourth grade. There are some students who will take the initiative to watch videos for homework, but many are not yet ready for that responsibility. It would also require some parent education to gain their support and understanding.
Last year I added the classroom PowerPoint presentations from Writers’ Workshop to our class blog. It was helpful for some parents to see the kind of work we were doing in class so they could further support their children at home. Hopefully the slideshows were a helpful reminder to my students of the craft techniques modeled in class as well.
The next step would be to try some vodcasts for instruction. It might not be completely reverse instruction, but I could see where I could use it for math support to students and possibly punctuation, grammar and writing examples to demonstrate to students when conferring.
