His technique was to introduce his students to a concept by having them read about it or watch a video for homework, and then in class he would ask a question that applied the concept in a whole new context. He would have his students think about their response, then find peers who disagreed with their answer and discuss the problem together.
It’s a technique he calls peer instruction, and he has found that it’s quite effective for students to learn how to reason from each other. He demonstrated the concept with conference attendees, asking a question about buoyancy that challenged attendees to apply what they knew about water displacement to a challenging scenario and discuss their answer with a neighbor.
“Look at this: You all got fired up,” he said when the demonstration was over. By using an inquiry-based approach to instruction, “isn’t it amazing how you can reawaken the creativity of the human mind?”
Using this flipped classroom model, Mazur has realized learning gains that are three times greater than what he saw when he used to lecture.
But eventually he realized there were problems in asking students to watch a video before class.
A More Social Way of Learning
For one thing, it’s a passive learning experience—it doesn’t challenge or engage the viewer on a deeper level. Also, it’s a solitary experience, whereas learning is more effective when it’s a social activity.
In theory, students can create the space to think more deeply about what they’re learning in a video by hitting the pause button, Mazur said. But in practice, students do the opposite: They often set the playback speed to 1.5 or 2 to get through the content faster. What’s more, “students very quickly discover they’re held accountable for watching the video by answering short multiple choice questions,” he said—and they can often do that by skipping lecture altogether and searching for the answers online.
“For the flipped classroom to really work, what we want is to have every student prepared for class throughout the academic year,” Mazur noted. “And I don’t know about you, but I would like this to happen without doing more work as an instructor.”
Mazur’s solution, Perusall, turns the out-of-class component of flipped learning into a social experience as well.
At its heart, it’s a social document reader, in which students can interact with each other as they read about the content. When students log in through their preferred social media platform, they can see whoever else is engaging with that reading assignment in top left corner of the screen.
As students have questions about what they’re reading, they can highlight that section of text and post their question. Students can ask questions of specific peers, or they can ask questions for the class as a whole, and they can also respond to each others’ queries. Students receive an automatic email notification when their question is answered, and they can respond by email as well—and these responses automatically appear in the document itself.
“In a sense, you see asynchronous peer instruction occurring, with students clarifying the content for each other,” Mazur said. “The document I’ve given to them becomes a living document, complete with links, connections to other courses, and so on.”
(Next page: A new flipped learning assessment)
Dennis Pierce is the former editor of eSchool News who currently writes about education and technology.
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