Throughout my teaching career, I have learned–mostly the hard way–that classroom challenges often stem from problems in course design. Students not seeing an activity as important as I think it is? Maybe I haven’t tied it to very many points in their grade, and it thus looks low-priority to them. Everyone bombs the first essay? Perhaps there weren’t opportunities to practice what I expected of them before they submitted their papers. Next time, I’ll scaffold assignments for them to work from framing a thesis to a writing a formal essay, receiving feedback at every step. As James M. Lang reminds us in his excellent book Cheating Lessons, we can go a long way towards preventing student cheating simply through better assignment design. If I were an engineer, this is where I’d say something cleverly pithy, like “Good design prevents bad performance.” But since I’m a mere historian, I’ll just assert that the evidence suggests we can use course design to address longstanding problems that we face as instructors.

The biggest of these problems, I’d argue, is getting our students to actually read outside of class (and I can sense the heads nodding in agreement from all across the blogosphere!). That’s the primary complaint I encounter from faculty I work with in any discipline: My students don’t read. And in History, you’re not going to get very far without reading. Our courses and their pedagogy depend on students’ reading to be effective and engaging. But here, too, I think a significant amount of not-reading behavior arises from course design. Picture a course that’s straight lecture, and each lecture tends to cover the same material as the assigned reading. Students who choose to not do the reading have made an eminently rational decision, to be honest; they’ll receive the material in lecture, so reading would be redundant. Now, imagine the course where lectures drill deeper into a smaller piece of the topic covered by the reading. For example, students read the “Market Revolution” chapter,” but the lecture immerses them in the world of the Lowell Mills, and it’s interspersed with think-pair-share questions, maybe a low-stakes quiz at the beginning, and a reflective assignment at the end that has them tie Lowell into the larger context. In this second course’s design, the reading is the exclusive opportunity for much of this information. It’s necessary, but not repeated in class. And I think we’d all agree that the second model sounds more interesting from both the instructor and student perspective. If we pay attention to course design–articulate clear outcomes to be measured by assessments, which in turn are prepared for by specific class activities and assignments–we can create the optimal environment in which our students are encouraged to undertake the necessary work. We become mindful and very intentional about how we want to do things in class in order to encourage students to do other things outside of class.

And this is where the “flipped classroom” model comes in. Unfortunately, “flipping the class” has become one of those buzzwords that’s become so ubiquitous as to obscure its original intent. The common description of “school work at home and homework at school” doesn’t get at the full implications of this pedagogy. Flipped Learning, despite what cost-cutting, tech-obsessed administrators might say–is far more than just putting some course content online or simply assigning more out-of-class work. Rather, flipping a class is entering into a pedagogical commitment to maximize every minute of in-class time with work that cannot be done in any other setting. To do so, it also means committing to offload the work that can be done as effectively out of class. In a typical semester-long, three-credit survey class, we only see our students for somewhere between forty and forty-five hours. With all the things we want to accomplish in a US history course, that’s not a lot of time. How we allocate our limited resources is paramount. Is it essential that students see and hear a lecture at the same time in the same place? Is it most effective to have students working by themselves, out of class, on an assignment that requires higher-order analysis? If we want to promote discussion and active learning, shouldn’t we be spending time (and it does take time) to build that culture? These are the types of questions at the root of a flipped-learning pedagogy.

Because of its ubiquity in the TED-talk, Reformist edu-bro discourse, flipped learning is in danger of being co-opted by boosters of the latest shiny app or by decision-makers who value “disruption” because a Harvard Business School Press book told them to. But as with any pedagogy, one size does not fit all. A flipped classroom doesn’t have to be just putting lectures online for students to watch on their own in order to make class time more collaborative–but it could be. Flipped learning doesn’t have to incorporate digital tools–even though those tools can be very useful. I argue that flipped learning needs to be approached as a pedagogical philosophy, not as a specific methodological prescription. To genuinely flip a class is a course-long commitment to collaborating with our students to actively do history, rather than passively be told about it. Course content is the vehicle to developing the type of critical thinking and information literacy skills we want our students to have. But those outcomes are difficult, and asking students to pursue them largely by themselves (“do this research/write this essay/complete this exercise and we’ll discuss in class”) doesn’t create the space for us to effectively help them get there. Why not move the heavier lifting into the place where we–and their peers–can help students work towards the higher-order stuff? In order to maximize the very real benefits of in-class discussion and engagement, we should move the activities that don’t depend on an in-class setting elsewhere. My students can read a textbook chapter and watch a couple of five-minute mini-lecture overviews outside of class. But they can’t do a group application that requires them to synthesize several strands of content and present it to their peers outside of class. They can do a basic compare/contrast exercise with primary sources outside of class, but the discussion of those sources and a debate over those sources’ interpretations and arguments requires us to be together. Students can draft an essay outside of class, but an in-class peer-review/writing workshop session provides the type of feedback and instructional opportunities needed to make those essays significantly better. So my course design, to accommodate the in-class activities that are aligned with my larger course outcomes, takes what a typical course does in class and moves it out. And it takes the higher-order stuff that typical courses often ask students to do on their own and moves it into the space where students and their work benefit from collaboration and engagement. This is what I mean by flipping-as-philosophy: the techniques and tools vary, but my steadfast commitment is to allocating class activities and assessments to the places where they need to be, rather than where they have always been.

And this is where the flipped model has largely solved the student-not-reading issue. By being up-front with my students about what I’m asking them to do outside of class, and–most essentially-why I have ordered things in that manner, I’m asking them to be co-owners of their learning experience. By making it clear that I’m doing my level best to value their time, they see my investment in their success. Reading the chapter, or watching a couple of lecturettes, isn’t busy work. It’s the necessary first step in a process that we continue as a group. And, most importantly, they learn quickly that class time isn’t going to be a simple rehash of what they were already assigned to do. It’s the sequel, not the rerun. By tying my class activities (which are assessed and graded) to that out-of-class preparation, I demonstrate its importance and place an incentive on doing it that students clearly see. Course design, aligning goals and assessments, and letting students into that conversation, thus addresses the not-reading problem far better than simple exhortations or chastising, or any pop quiz, could ever do.

So do all my students become History majors, capable of whipping out a historiographic synthesis in the blink of an eye? Do they wax rhapsodic about primary source documents? Are my classes so pedagogically awesome that students enter the room over a sparkly rainbow bridge guarded by unicorns? Well, no. Like any pedagogy, flipped learning is not a cure-all, and no course is ever perfect. But have a lot of the traditionally-irksome features of a typical survey course largely disappeared as a result of my flipping? You bet. My classes are loud. They’re students talking and arguing and laughing and asking questions. They’re places where students can ask about things they don’t understand and have several peers fill them in, while I affirm the answers. They’re history labs and writing workshops. The results aren’t always optimal, but the process is what’s important. It’s committing to a philosophy of always prioritizing class time for active, engaged, higher-order learning. By asking myself what’s really important, and using the answers to design my course, I’ve been able to use the flipped classroom model to transform my teaching, and with it my courses.