I’ve been a teacher for 6 years, teaching adults the danish language. The first two years I used traditional methods, standing in front of my class and talking the whole day. I remember that many times my students had questions for me, but I did not have time to answer, because I was so busy talking myself. I was exhausted, my students were both bored and exhausted, they had a lot of homework they had problems with finishing because they needed help from me, but I didn’t have the time to help them.
The year 2012 my school director heard about “The Flipped Classroom” theory for first time. He suggested in a teachers meeting if we could try that method with our students. As a small group of 12 young teachers we agreed, even though no one of us knew how to do this. The first year we did our best, we pre recorded all of our lectures and tried to activate students in the classroom, but we made many mistakes in the beginning.
To mention few of our mistakes:
The first year I started out with my “flipped classroom” with my best intentions. I had my course all planned out, all my lectures were ready and I had defined all projects and deadlines. In the beginning of each class I defined in details how my students should spend their time and wrote the schedule on the whiteboard. I even defined how many minutes the students should spend on each topic. So every now and then I said to my students “now you should change project, stop doing this and start doing that”. In only few days I felt that this was very wrong. I was constantly stopping the workflow of the students that were slow and all the students that were quick wanted to leave class when they had finished all the projects of the day. I realized that I was trying to have the control, I was still trying to be in charge of everything in the classroom. After that I started to let students work in their own pace and take more control over their own study. The result was that no one was at the same place in the book, but it didn’t really matter, because the lectures were all accessible all the time and the right answers were online as well, so the students could check if they were right or wrong and then just keep working. I had a lot of time to walk around, talking to all the students, answering questions and getting to know each and every one of them.
After the first year I felt that this teaching method had worked well, most of the students were happy with my course, even though many things could still get better. Throughout the years I’ve been improving my teaching every year, always trying something new and rethinking new ways to deliver the content to my student in effective way, aiming to make the study easier and more interesting.
One of the most interesting thing for me was to realize why I was teaching things the way I did in the beginning. Usually the ideas of my teaching methods came from my own experience as a student. Now I try to remember to ask myself the question “why are you doing that this way?” Sometimes the answer is ok, but even still after all this years of work I once in awhile get the answer “It has always been done this way” or something similar. And then I know that I have to work more on that topic.
I would never even consider to change back to my traditional way of teaching and the positive feedback I’ve had from my students support my opinion. And I love the challenge to constantly try to improve my work, think of new ways to do things better for my students.
Sigrún Svafa Ólafsdóttir
Danish Teacher at Keilir Academy & top 100 educator leading flipped learning worldwide
The year 2012 my school director heard about “The Flipped Classroom” theory for first time. He suggested in a teachers meeting if we could try that method with our students. As a small group of 12 young teachers we agreed, even though no one of us knew how to do this. The first year we did our best, we pre recorded all of our lectures and tried to activate students in the classroom, but we made many mistakes in the beginning.
To mention few of our mistakes:
- To many students in one group - not enough time for the teacher to help them all.
- If some of the students didn’t listen at the lecture at home and came unprepared in class, the teacher just repeated the lecture. That is a big mistakes, the result is that no one will listen next time, knowing that it would be a waste of time since the teacher will repeat it in class.
- Not having enough of projects for students to work on in the class.
- To long recordings, the video lecture should be short and focused on one topic.
The first year I started out with my “flipped classroom” with my best intentions. I had my course all planned out, all my lectures were ready and I had defined all projects and deadlines. In the beginning of each class I defined in details how my students should spend their time and wrote the schedule on the whiteboard. I even defined how many minutes the students should spend on each topic. So every now and then I said to my students “now you should change project, stop doing this and start doing that”. In only few days I felt that this was very wrong. I was constantly stopping the workflow of the students that were slow and all the students that were quick wanted to leave class when they had finished all the projects of the day. I realized that I was trying to have the control, I was still trying to be in charge of everything in the classroom. After that I started to let students work in their own pace and take more control over their own study. The result was that no one was at the same place in the book, but it didn’t really matter, because the lectures were all accessible all the time and the right answers were online as well, so the students could check if they were right or wrong and then just keep working. I had a lot of time to walk around, talking to all the students, answering questions and getting to know each and every one of them.
After the first year I felt that this teaching method had worked well, most of the students were happy with my course, even though many things could still get better. Throughout the years I’ve been improving my teaching every year, always trying something new and rethinking new ways to deliver the content to my student in effective way, aiming to make the study easier and more interesting.
One of the most interesting thing for me was to realize why I was teaching things the way I did in the beginning. Usually the ideas of my teaching methods came from my own experience as a student. Now I try to remember to ask myself the question “why are you doing that this way?” Sometimes the answer is ok, but even still after all this years of work I once in awhile get the answer “It has always been done this way” or something similar. And then I know that I have to work more on that topic.
I would never even consider to change back to my traditional way of teaching and the positive feedback I’ve had from my students support my opinion. And I love the challenge to constantly try to improve my work, think of new ways to do things better for my students.
Sigrún Svafa Ólafsdóttir
Danish Teacher at Keilir Academy & top 100 educator leading flipped learning worldwide
