The inverted classroom as platform

By Robert Talbert. I’ve been talking a lot with my colleagues about their teaching practices, as part of the NSF grant I’m working on. The inverted classroom (I used to call it the flipped classroom, but I’m going back to “inverted”) has come up a lot as a teaching technique that people have heard a lot about but haven’t tried yet — or are wary of trying. I’ve been wondering about the language being used, namely: Is the inverted classroom really a “teaching technique” at all?
My answer used to be “yes”. When I first started using the inverted classroom idea, I would describe the inverted classroom as “a teaching technique” that involves reversing where information transmission and internalization take place. Later I moved to saying that the inverted classroom refers to “any teaching method” that implements this reversal. Today as I was thinking about this, I think a better description of the inverted classroom is that it is a platform, not a technique. Unlike, say, peer instruction or POGIL, the inverted classroom is not a way of teaching. It is an approach to the instructional design of a course that reorganizes where, and how, information transfer takes place and where internalization takes place. Read more...