FLIPPING FLIPPING the classroom Professor Michael Rainbow aims for best results for students
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he traditional lecture method of teaching in which students listen and take notes as an instructor speaks in person is at least 800 years old. It developed organically in medieval monasteries largely as a function of the rarity of books. Printed texts, and by extension the knowledge within them, could then be reproduced only singly and by craftspeople of great and rare skill. The lecture was a way to add efficiency to the dissemination of information, to distribute knowledge from a single precious text to many people simultaneously. As technology evolved, as people learned to duplicate textbooks quickly and cheaply, the lecture model persisted. Seeing and hearing an accomplished person describe wondrous things still adds colour and nuance that isn’t communicated through text. But with advances in internet access, miniaturized computing and digital media, there are new, even more efficient, ways to learn and teach. And harnessing those new technologies to make education as easy, available and effective as it can be implies a need for change to traditional teaching methods. One example of that change is a technique education researchers call “the flipped classroom.” In it, class time formerly devoted to lectures is used instead for group exercises. Students cover course material on their own using a variety of resources and spend classroom time working together to apply what they’ve learned. It’s a teaching approach that’s gaining traction at all education levels and it’s one that a brandnew Queen’s Engineering professor has taken with his class.
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THE COMPLETE ENGINEER
Dr. Michael Rainbow is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. He was convinced to try the flipped classroom approach after learning about it from his wife,
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Instead of giving them stuff to write down and spit back up, we’re helping them to synthesize it.
Dr. Roshni Rainbow, who studied it as part of her post-doctoral work at Tufts University. Inspiration came also from Robert Beichner’s Scale-Up program at North Carolina State University and from Queen’s Physics Professor Dr. James Fraser,
who uses similar techniques with some of his courses. Rainbow applied what he learned to his very first undergraduate class, MECH 228: Kinematics and Dynamics. It’s a course about measuring and predicting change in the positions of moving particles over time. “Dynamics was formalized more than 300 years ago,” says Rainbow. “There’s no shortage of content online and there are hundreds of books on it, so students were getting content by themselves. What they weren’t getting is how to actually sit down and use it to solve problems... Instead of giving them stuff to write down and spit back up, we’re helping them to synthesize it.” Research results on the flipped classroom are very positive. They show significantly lower failure rates, higher average marks and higher rates of student engagement across multiple studies of various iterations of the approach. Marginalized and disengaged students perform much better, and learning outcomes are more likely to be achieved. And these measured
