In math, it’s called the transitive property:
If A=B and B=C, then A=C.
And it jumped off my iPhone screen this morning while I was reading my morning stream of tweets on Twitter.
I spend a lot of time thinking about peer instruction with clickers, like this, this and this, which naturally leads to discussions about “flipping the classroom.” That’s when students do work before class, like reading the text in a guided way or watching videos created of the instructor, where they learn the simple, background material. Then, they come to class prepared to engage in deeper, conceptually challenging analysis and discussion, often driven by peer instruction.
If you look on Twitter for #flipclass (that’s the Twitter hashtag or keyword the community includes in relevant tweets), it’s not long before you find Jen Ebbeler (@jenebbeler). She teaches Classics using a flipped class model. This morning, Jen tweeted
part of difficulty is that there are so many varieties and ways to flip a class, not about the videos but what instructor does in class.
— Jen Ebbeler (@jenebbeler) May 24, 2013
The last part, it’s “not about the videos but what the instructor does in class” evoked another quote familiar to most everyone involved in astronomy education research and teaching the introductory, survey course we call Astro 101. At the heart of the Lecture-Tutorials and subsequent work by Tim Slater (@caperteam), Ed Prather, Gina Brissenden (@CAEgina) lies this mantra
It’s not what the teacher does that matters; rather it’s what the students do that matters.
And therefore, by the transitive property, when it comes to flipping the classroom,
it’s not about the videos, it’s what the students do in class that matters.
Which is precisely what Robert Talbert (@RobertTalbert) concluded after he flipped in introduction to proofs class. When you flip your class,
- you have time in class to doing other things, like clickers, because you’re not wasting time going over the easy stuff anymore,
- the students are prepared to engage in the conceptually challenging, “juicy” stuff you want to uncover together.
It’s what you do with that time that matters.
My math teachers always said learning abstract relationships like the transitive property would come in handy in the future. Yep.