Charles Prober and Chip Heath from Stanford University put it more succinctly: They are looking for ways to make lessons “stickier.”6
By switching to a flipped classroom, Prober and Heath succeeded in making their class at Stanford more popular—they reported that after they adopted the flipped-classroom technique, student attendance at their core biochemistry class increased from 30% to 80%.
The flipped classroom format is more popular, but is it also more effective? Russell Mumper, vice dean at the University of North Carolina’s Eshelman School of Pharmacy, reported his experience teaching an Introduction to Pharmaceutics course. After almost a decade of teaching the course using traditional didactics, he could predict the average score on the final would be around 80%. After two years of using a flipped classroom approach, the average final exam score finally increased, by an extra 5.1%.7
As an educator, frankly, I find that’s a lot of extra work to put into teaching for a lousy 5% improvement. The universal truth about educators is that we are all underpaid. I have intermittently informed my fellows that faculty actually lose money by teaching, because it pulls them away from seeing patients, writing grants or other activities that actually put money in their pockets.
Mumper’s experience does give us hope, however, that better paradigms for learning exist than see one, do one, teach one. We are just now at the cusp of a reexamination of how we learn, and that 5% improvement is likely just the harbinger of more advances to come.
Gifted Teachers & Other Myths
What about the accidental teacher? Concepts like the reversed classroom are great for that once-a-year lecture you give to the rheumatology fellows, but if you are like me, the bulk of your teaching likely occurs on the fly, either on your way in or out of a patient’s room. Such drive-by teaching is not generally amenable to multiple choice pretests or small group discussions.
Some people are gifted teachers. We all know them. Some people are great at breaking down complex topics into their component parts and teaching us how to do the same. We instinctually seek out these teachers, ambushing them in the hall at the end of the day or sending them an imposing email about a topic we can’t quite grasp. What makes these gifted teachers different from the rest of us?
A good object lesson is Victor McKusick. He was a brilliant man. Early in his career, he focused on the heart. Using a new instrument developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories for the study of speech, he created one of the first comprehensive studies of heart sounds. By using spectrography to create a visual representation of sound waves, he enabled physicians, for the first time, to see murmurs and thrills.8
