I just don’t see my fellows taking well to being clicked at all day. But it brings up a valid point: Are there better ways to teach?
Ferris Bueller & How Not to Teach
If you are of a certain age, you probably remember the scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in which Ben Stein is giving a lecture on economics to a progressively disengaged class. “Anyone, anyone?” he would ask, rhetorically, before moving on to his next point, barely pausing for the answer that never came.
As the joke plays on in the movie, Ben Stein is eventually replaced by a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which seamlessly takes the place of the lecturer at the front of the room. Although entirely orthogonal to the movie, it was a sly commentary on higher education—if all the teacher does is recite facts, why does he even need to be in the classroom?
In the movie, the students are also, eventually, replaced by tape recorders, dutifully recording the lecture playing at the front of the room. While this was intended as a joke, it was prescient; across the country, medical students are sleeping through their lectures, knowing they can download the audio at a later date and use it as background music for their next workout.
The utility of the standard medical school lecture has long been questioned. Some assert that a student’s attention declines after the first 10 minutes of class.2 The average medical student pays most attention to the first 15 minutes of the lecture and the last few minutes. Walking away from that lecture, the average medical student will recall only 20% of what they just heard.3
The Classroom, Flipped
Thus, we come to the concept of the flipped classroom. In 2006, Colorado chemistry teachers Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams decided to invert the natural order of things.4 Their students would watch recorded lectures of the material at home and then come into class to participate in activities—the erstwhile “homework”—under their watchful eyes.
Laura Berry, EdD, dean of Arts and Sciences at North Arkansas College, describes it this way: “For as long as we’ve been trying to help students learn, we’ve wanted students to take responsibility for their learning, and we want to use our time with them to work on the meatier stuff and deepen the learning. … We’re trying to find a way to get that basic-level content out to students without using valuable professor and classroom time to do it.”5
