Learning Conversations

There's a lot of thought flying around the web at the moment about the concept of "flipping the classroom" - using the internet to provide pre-classroom lectures and the classroom to embed that knowledge through exercises, coaching and discussion.

Key posts include:

Donald Clark - flip the classroom, every teacher should do this

Karl Fisch  - We see this as the future of higher education

Salman Khan on TED Talks - Let's use video to  reinvent education

This is a model that's been working reasonably well in workplace training for a number of years now. It does rely on there being some sort of motivating influence to do the pre-work though. Generally, given the choice, most people will just rely on being able to bluff their way through the classroom session.

The key thing is “appropriate use” of the resources at our disposal. It’s about enabling flexibility of choice for the teacher and for the learner.

We need to balance financial cost with the effective and efficient use of time, and with the underlying motivational level of our students/trainees.

We need to consider whether 1:1 coaching would work best for a particular student/context, or whether a small group discussion, or even a 1:many lecture.

The problem with much of our educational/training infrastructure is that it’s built on a highly inflexible classroom-based model of teaching. The investment has already been made in those buildings and the administration processes that surround them.

To become more flexible, some of these ways of working will need to be torn down before they can be rebuilt.

I can imagine a training or educational organisation that is based around a problem-based curriculum, which uses small Action Learning Sets, coaching, online lectures, searchable resource libraries, inspirational speakers (like TED talks), informal conversations and a whole host of other types of interactions in different sized groups. It would be complex. Sometimes it would appear chaotic. It would certainly be an interesting one to manage. But it would relate far more to the real world than our closed classrooms with a trainer/teacher and delegates/students.