Reflections on a flipping good journey

  I am very fortunate to have worked in two schools that promote and celebrate teacher development. As I attended a university in which exercises prior to laboratory sessions (‘pre-labs’) were part of the course, I wondered whether this model could be applied to my Year 9 chemistry class. I made a video on how to set up a certain piece of apparatus (distillation), asked my class to watch it for homework, and then got them to replicate it in the classroom. The results were uniformly amazing, with one lesson observer saying that it was as good as their sixth-form class. I subsequently learnt that this is formally known as ‘flipped learning’ (Bergmann & Sams, 2012). The Flipped Learning Network has published the following definition in response to misinterpretations and misconceptions of what flipped learning is (Flipped Learning Network, 2014): Flipped Learning is a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual