Active learning in the classroom, flipped or otherwise

This started as a comment, but became a post when it started looking like a novel! There is a really interesting discussion going on at xykademiqz's blog in the comments section (starting here, where commenter idm asked about active learning). Xyk's comments about flipped classrooms sync with my experiences, namely that in a flipped classroom, the class covers less material AND that it is easy to screw it up so that the students learn nothing. While it is certainly possible to do a bad job in a lecture based class, I think it is harder to do it so badly that students may as well have not taken the course. In my field, less material per class means that even if done perfectly, flipping all the classes would mean that students either take much longer to a degree, or start out well behind colleagues coming from unflipped programs.

Like Xyk, I find it really irritating that active learning now means no lecturing. I find that I can get students to ask (and answer!) questions in class, even in a room of 200 students. In my lectures, I often stop and poll the students/get them to ask questions/have them set up or solve a problem/demo something or show them a video showing a concept in action, etc. Even an audience of researchers really excited about a topic loses focus if a seminar goes on too long. A lecture-based class does not necessarily mean the professor drones on for the full class time every time. (Also like Xyk, I was an extreme introvert as a student, and would have hated flipped classes and found it difficult to learn if I were forced to interact with others the whole time).

Another commenter (Alex) points out a really interesting study in physics, which suggests that students learn concepts better in a flipped classroom (consistent with most studies), but learn problem solving better in a lecture-based classroom. This is not too surprising to me. Students learn problem solving by wrestling with problems, and they do more of that as assigned homework in a traditional class than in the 150 minutes of problem solving in a flipped class. Plus, watching someone problem solve in a video is not the same thing as doing it live, where you can interrupt if you get lost or confused.

Back in the olden days when I was a student (which was well before flipped classes became a thing), some of my smaller, focused, upper level courses were taught in a hybrid style, where at least some of the class time was used for interactive problem solving (usually one student at the board working a previously assigned problem, with the class discussing the strategy and/or comparing strategies). This was really effective--I still remember some of those classes many years later, especially ones where I was at the board! This mania for flipping things also forces people for whom that style doesn't work well to go against their strengths, just as forcing everyone to lecture would hurt those for whom a more active/flipped learning teaching method is better. As with anything, there is a time and place for everything, and perhaps entry level STEM is not that time or place (at least for folks expected to have problem solving skills like scientists or engineers).