Ken Bauer has been flipping his class for two years and has helped over 100 teachers at our institution Tecnológico de Monterrey in their change to implement flipped learning.

He will share his advice on how to flip university level classes as well as how to work with and around resistance to change. Ken's experience is mainly with university level classes but is working with teachers from primary through high school to flip their classrooms.

General description (generic) on what Flipped Learning is starting at the basics of Flipped Classroom.

What is your best use of in-class (face-to-face) time?

Direct instruction moves outside the classroom.

Use class time for hands-on and high order thinking/working/discussions.

Important:
There is no one single recipe for Flipped Learning, you need to adapt it to your style, your students and your school.

I am a Canadian living and teaching in Mexico since 1995. My background is Computing Science.

I have always believed in education and learning as a social experience.

I have always been an early adopter of technology and pedagogical shifts.

For me and my students, constant contact through social media and our LMS has been very useful to create engagement.

I have been applying a Flipped classroom since 2012 in my courses.

Mostly first year undergraduate courses covering introductory programming for computing majors (using the Python programming language) as well as courses for non-computing majors (using C++).

Since January 2014 I have been implementing a fully mastery based learning approach to my classes.

The Tecnológico de Monterrey has been regarded as a leader in education for decades. They were pioneers in distance education: first with satellite transmissions, later using the internet.

We are currently implementing our strategy of Tec21 across our entire system of 31 campuses, 8000+ faculty and 100,000+ students.

Flipped Learning is very much aligned with this strategy, we should have a publication on Flipped Learning and how it applies to us at the Tec soon if not already published.

I will place that URL here in the notes.

What is working for us?

Teachers like the idea. I have given 5 short courses and now in my 2nd long course on Flipped Learning to 200+ teachers.

We have flippers across the system.

Students are learning to be the focus of learning. This allows them to be creative and guide the learning experience in the direction that works best for them.

Students also learn about focus and time management since they are responsible with that task more with FL.

Teachers are learning to "let go of control" and spending more quality time with their students as individuals and in small groups.

Learning is a social process and FL helps us develop that culture of learning more.

Students have many years of experience in their role of memorizing what the teacher wants them to memorize and repeating on an exam. This is not the way of FL but it is the only way that many students know.

Teachers also have many years of experience teaching in a traditional manner. They have many fears to face in order to make the change to a Flipped Learning environment.

Parents also play a factor and a very important one which depends on grade level of the student as well as cultural and experiential bias.

Administrators have a key role in supporting FL as an educational tool. They can make or break the process.

Government has a role too in defining educational policies including standardized examinations, admissions policies and the flexibility of curriculum design.

One benefit that I have experienced in my implementation of FL is the element of surprise.

Surprise is a good thing if you can embrace it. Letting go of the control of the path of learning inevitably leads to surprise situations at the small level: students asking questions more frequently leads to more questions that the teacher did not anticipate. These are opportunities for growth.

At the meta level I have gained in other ways. My students now have a greater level of comfort and confidence in their relation with me as their teacher.

This is really important (Learning is Social): I know their names, their hobbies, their fears and individual traits because I spend much more time with each one now (both inside and outside the classroom). As a consequence they request my time outside of the classroom much more often: and that is a "good thing".

Students are all different in their backgrounds, their current knowledge, cultural bias and motivations.

FL has allowed me to treat each student differently.

The course I traditionally teach is introductory programming. I have a wide range of experience with my students. (perhaps show clip from Maria Klawe here)

One major gain has been the increased time I can use to reach out to the shy students. Some students are shy from fear of their colleagues and the teacher, some students are shy from being more introverted than others. FL allows me to create a better connection with all of my students including these ones.

I have many local goals for my own classrooms. I need to spend more time on creating formative assessments. Students really enjoy the reinforcement and assurance they provide.

I also need to record more video for my students but at the same time avoiding too much direction of "which way to learn".

I need to share more of what I am doing and what we are doing at the Tecnológico de Monterrey. Blogging, speaking engagements like this one, publishing papers and experience reports are important here.

Inside our institution we have many champions of FL but need to coordinate. That is sometimes are a difficult task and we are working on that. I truly believe communication is the key in that.

Tips to get teachers flipping.

Have a "buddy". Do not do this alone, find someone in your school or at least "close" to you physically or virtually.

Get on Twitter: it is important in English, I don't know about local language use of Twitter.

The FLN Ning social network is very useful.
http://flippedclassroom.org/

Start slow. Do one lesson, document what worked (and did not), do another lesson with what you learned.

Share with others!

I very much appreciate the invitation to share with you.

There is no one single recipe for Flipped Learning, you need to adapt it to your style, your students and your school.

I am hoping for more interaction with you to see how to bring this into practice in your classrooms.