Teachers turn teaching on head with flipped learning
At the beginning of the school year, Leticia Allred had some good news for her Pre-AP Geometry class.
Her students wouldn’t be spending hours every night on worksheets and problems and proofs. Instead, homework would be more like this: Watch a 15-minute YouTube video and take notes. That’s it.
Her students were thrilled. But there was a method to their teacher’s apparent madness.
The videos, created by Allred and fellow Clear Brook High School geometry teacher Mandy Shrader, take the place of class lectures, with topics such as classifying triangles by angle measurements and side lengths or using slope to identify parallel and perpendicular lines.
The next day in class, students practice what they’ve learned, tackling those worksheets and other traditional “homework” tasks. But rather than struggling on their own, alone at home, they’re doing the work under the helpful gaze of their teachers and alongside their classmates.
Welcome to the world of “flipped” classrooms – an educational trend catching on across the country. In the Houston area, flipped teaching has popped up in the Clear Creek, Humble and Klein school districts.