Foundations Newsletter

Flipped for FIP

By Lark S Escobar

After chatting with the presenter from last year’s Flipped Classroom session, I tried to think about how to apply it to the foundations classroom, particularly for my level 2 (and now level 1) students. While there’s typically not a lot of traditional lecture in limited-proficiency classrooms, some content is delivered in semi-traditional ways. Flipped Classroom is designed for native speakers with western educational backgrounds. I wanted to come up with a way to apply it in my Foundations classroom.

So, I targeted this: how to present vocab and grammar in context so students who were motivated to try to do more independent learning in class. I created some animated videos with a character to help create continuity for the stories highlighting the target language. It took forever. And ever. I really had to heed the advice of the Flipped Classroom presenter- it doesn’t have to be perfect just put something together.

Here’s one of the results:

I then tested the videos with several classes. Some students were annoyed about having vocab in context, not interested in trying to practice decoding on their own. Other students, however, loved the video and requested more!

The Flipped Classroom model has some potential limitations (it presumes students know how to take Cornell Notes to take notes for traditional content delivery and assumes that students already have basic academic skills) but it can be a helpful supplement for our students with positive attitudes

. The challenge of my video for the students was met with mixed reviews because it required the students to really think through the text and was not a simple listen-think-jot notes task. It was a new task for many of my students to try to use context clues and make inferences, developing skills in Foundations students.

Did experimenting with Flipped instantly transform me as an educator? No. Did it magically change my classroom experience? No. Did it help some students learn and develop their language and academic skills? YES! It is worth adapting and finding applications for those learners whomay benefit from the audio-visual opportunity in a low-risk high-reward context (they can practice privately as much as they want). Have you used Flipped in your classroom? If so, how did it go? Leave a note in the comments below!