Combining Flipped Classrooms with Mastery Learning

(Originally titled “Flipping for Mastery”)

In this article in Educational Leadership, Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams (high-school chemistry teachers and advocates of flipping) note that Benjamin Bloom’s mastery learning theory is difficult to implement because of two logistical issues:

• How can teachers deliver direct instruction on new material when students are all over the place in terms of prior knowledge and achievement?
• How can teachers make the time to create multiple versions of assessments so that students can take them on subsequent attempts to achieve mastery?

Bergmann and Sams believe that recent technological advances solve both problems – if teachers use a “flipped-mastery” model. Online videos make it possible for students to learn new content outside the classroom and at their own pace (even catching up with months of missed work if they enter a classroom midyear). And new learning management systems and online quizzing modules (such as Moodle, BlackBoard, Canvas, My Big Canvas, Schoology, Pathwright, Quia, and Haiku Learning) make it much easier for teachers to create multiple iterations of assessments. 

Here is how Bergmann and Sams recommend planning and implementing a curriculum unit:

• Break the unit into learning objectives (for example, Being able to calculate using the combined gas law).
• Create the videos and problem sets or decide on the textbook segments needed to learn each chunk of material.
• Decide on required activities that students need to complete – for example, hands-on experiments, inquiry-based labs, teacher demonstrations, and online simulations. 

Bergmann and Sams created short videos (about 15 minutes long for their tenth graders) for most objectives, required students to watch the videos outside of class, and then followed up in class with worksheets, hands-on activities, and lots of interaction. 

Does this seem like too much work? Bergmann and Sams say they already had most of the worksheets and activities from years of conventional chemistry teaching, and they don’t recommend creating a video for every objective – for example, atomic theory was too abstract to be explained in a video. But they believe there’s value in teachers making their own videos, because “students recognize that their teacher is taking the time to ‘teach’ them.”

How does this continuous-progress approach deal with the tyranny of pacing guides and marking periods? At first Bergmann and Sams set up a curriculum calendar, telling students what they needed to accomplish each week – but slower learners weren’t mastering content and were falling behind. “We almost gave up because of this,” say the authors. Then they hit upon a solution: they reorganized objectives to front-load the most essential material, and saved the nice-to-know objectives for the end of each grading period. That way, students who fell behind missed only the material that was less essential. 

On the issue of assessments and grading, Bergmann and Sams decided on two layers to meet their school’s requirements and still remain true to their model:

• Real-time checks for understanding – “The most important part of our assessment system was simple conversations we had with our students,” they say. “When students felt they had mastered an objective, they approached us with their evidence, which usually included their worksheets, experiment write-ups, and notes from their interaction with an instructional video.” The teachers quizzed students and were able to judge their mastery quite quickly and redirect them if they weren’t there yet.

• Summative tests – Students were able to take unit assessments as many times as necessary to demonstrate mastery. Using Moodle as their learning-management system, Bergmann and Sams generated multiple versions of each assessment, with the computer randomly pulling from item banks so that each test was unique. Teachers followed up with students individually after tests and discussed items they got wrong. “We realized that these face-to-face interactions take a lot of time,” they say. “But we were able to take the time by shifting all the low-level content delivery out of the classroom.”

Bergmann and Sams feel strongly that flipped classrooms should not be used to reduce the number of teachers by replacing them with videos. “In the flipped-mastery model, teachers are even more valuable,” they say. “Their time in the class is maximized. The teacher’s main role is not to be a disseminator of knowledge, but rather a facilitator of learning.” 

“Flipping for Mastery” by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams in Educational Leadership, December 2013/January 2014 (Vol. 71, #4, p. 24-29), 

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership.aspx; Bergmann can be reached at jon@jonbergmann.com; for other articles by the authors, see Marshall Memo 403 and 457.

From the Marshall Memo #515