#1318 2007 · Woodland Park High School (Jonathan Bergmann & Aaron Sams) · Secondary education
Two teachers swapped lecture and homework, sending lecture home, keeping practice in class
问题
Students who missed class had no way to catch up on lectures, and struggling students got no help on homework
背景
In a conventional classroom, the teacher spends class time delivering a lecture to every student at the same pace, then sends everyone home to attempt homework alone — exactly the moment when applying new material is hardest and expert help is least available. Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, chemistry teachers at Woodland Park High School in rural Colorado, ran into a narrower version of this problem: students in their small, spread-out district frequently missed class for sports and other commitments, and reteaching the same lecture to each absent student individually was consuming time neither teacher had.
The obvious fix was more of the same structure done better — printed handouts, office hours, or a tutoring period bolted onto the existing schedule. In 2007 Bergmann and Sams instead spent $50 on screen-recording software and began recording and posting their lectures online for absent students to watch on their own time, a stopgap they expected to use only for makeup work.
换别人会怎么做
The standard response to students missing lectures was to reteach the material individually during office hours or a study hall, hand out written notes, or simply accept that absent students would fall behind — all ways of patching the existing lecture-then-homework structure rather than questioning which activity belonged in which setting.
他们看到了什么
Lecture only needs attention, which a recording delivers fine. Homework needs expert help exactly when a student is stuck, which a recording cannot give — so they swapped the two locations.
那一手
They noticed students who had attended class were also rewatching the videos to review, and realized the recordings worked just as well as the live lecture for the part of learning that only requires a student's attention. For the 2007–08 school year they committed to prerecording all of their chemistry and AP chemistry lectures for students to watch at home, and converted class time entirely to the part that actually needs a teacher present: working through problems, with Bergmann and Sams circulating to help students exactly when they got stuck — swapping which half of the school day happened at home and which happened in the classroom.
为什么管用
The value a teacher adds during a lecture is mostly redundant with a well-made recording, since the material is identical for every student and needs no real-time adaptation. The value a teacher adds during independent practice is the opposite — it's precisely the moment students discover what they don't understand, and that moment is unpredictable and different for each student, which only live, in-person help can address efficiently. Moving lecture to an asynchronous format frees the one truly scarce resource, the teacher's real-time attention, for the part of learning that actually needs it.
值了多少
Bergmann and Sams saw deeper engagement and more help for strugglers; the model spread nationally, and Sams won a 2009 teaching award.
什么时候会失灵
It requires students to have reliable access to video and a home environment where they'll actually watch the material before class, which becomes an equity problem in low-connectivity or unstable households. It also depends on the passive material being genuinely lecture-style content well suited to one-way video, and on teachers having the time and skill to record clear videos in the first place — an upfront cost that pays off only over repeated use of the same recordings across semesters.
后来呢
Flipped instruction moved from a two-teacher workaround into a widely adopted model across K-12 and university education, cited in education research as one of the clearest examples of restructuring class time around where student difficulty actually occurs rather than where tradition places it.
资料来源
- [1]The Flipped ClassroomEducation Next, 2012educationnext.org