Upside down and inside out: Flip Your Classroom to Improve Student Learning.

Educators are notorious for jumping on passing fads and chasing the newest innovations, from the open classrooms of the 1970s to the one-laptop-per-student initiatives of the past decade. It’s not surprising that when the next new thing—the flipped classroom—hit the hallways of America’s schools, it was met with hesitation and skepticism from teachers, parents, and educational critics. The “flipped” part of the flipped classroom means that students watch or listen to lessons at home and do their “homework” in class. But is it just another fad or an instructional design worth keeping? Pioneered just a few years ago by science teachers Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams at Woodland Park High School in Colorado, USA, the flipped classroom now has a conference, several websites, and a professional learning network of more than 3,000 teachers (see Resources, page 17). Bergmann and Sams also have a book coming out in July called Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day (see What’s New, page 44, and read Bergmann’s Point/Counterpoint response, page 6). Some of the most enthusiastic advocates are the math teachers at Minnesota’s Byron High School (BHS), which was the 2011 Intel winner for high school mathematics. Their story suggests that, at least for this dedicated group of educators, the flipped classroom is an educational innovation with legs, if not wings!