S4xE17: Semi-Flipped Teaching
Episode Summary
In this episode, we talk about semi-flipped teaching with our guest, Diane Horton from the University of Toronto and co-host of In the Loop, a podcast for computer science undergraduates. We both teach semi-flipped, where students learn foundational material before class to make room for high-value activities such as addressing misconceptions, building intuition, discovery, peer instruction, and deeper reasoning. However, our implementations are different. So, we compare our approaches to prep work, classroom activities, and motivating students to come prepared, all in service of making the most of the limited time we have with students in the classroom.
You can also download this episode directly.
Episode Notes
Castle Top Diagrams are from Fink, L. D. (2013). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. John Wiley & Sons.
Large Active Learning Classroom
Jennifer Whidham’s from Stanford has links to her MOOC courses on her website.
Transcript
[00:00] Kristin: Hello and welcome to the CS-Ed podcast. A podcast where we talk about teaching computer science with computer science educators. I am your host, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, an Associate Professor of the Practice at Duke University. Joining me today is Diane Horton, a professor of the teaching stream at the University of Toronto. She is also a host of a different podcast called In the Loop, which is a podcast for computer science undergrads. Diane, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
[00:27] Diane: Oh, it’s great to be here with you, Kristin.
[00:29] Kristin: So today’s episode is about teaching practices. Though this time, I’m not bringing you a byte because it would just take too long. It’s not something you can do tomorrow, but I think it’s a very important thing to talk about now, as you’re thinking about soon, maybe updating the next offering of your course. So, Diane, in a single sentence, what would you say is your practice?
[00:50] Diane: I like to teach in a semi-flipped style where students learn the easy stuff at home, so I get to teach them the juicy bits in class, and there’s still lots of time for rich active learning activities.
[01:03] Kristin: Awesome. So, let’s start with context because context is so important when it comes to stuff like this. Tell me more about the classes that you’re teaching.
[01:14] Diane: So, I’m at the University of Toronto, which is a very large university, and our classes, the classes I’m teaching tend to range from about 125, that, that seems small to me, to 200, and my biggest classes are 468. I know the exact number because it’s in this beautiful big room designed for active learning. I’ve also taught in terrible rooms that are the absolutely worst ever, where you’re squeezing down these long rows, trying not to like put, you know, it’s awkward getting past students to get to them for the active learning. So I’ve done it all.
[01:53] Kristin: Oh yes, I think I’ve seen pictures of your active learning room. I am so, so jealous.
[01:58] Diane: It is really good, yeah.
[01:26] Kristin: So, what kind of courses are you teaching?
[02:02] Diane: In the, in recent years, I’ve taught a lot of CS2 and intro to databases. I also have a grad course on teaching that has been really fun to develop.
[02:12] Kristin: Nice.
[02:13] Diane: I don’t use semi-flipped in the grad course, though. That’s a small, intimate, you know, very different kind of experience.
[02:19] Kristin: Mm, yep, yep. So when you say CS2, so that sounds like it’s the second-term course in your computer science sequence. Is it – what’s the main focus on? Data structures? Algorithms?
[02:31] Diane: Yeah, it’s data structures, abstraction, design, testing, recursion, that kind of stuff, and we teach it in Python.
[02:41] Kristin: Teach it in Python. Got it. So, let’s start with what got you into doing semi-flipped, because obviously a couple of years ago, everyone was all the rage about flipped, but you’re saying semi-flipped.
[02:53] Diane: Yeah, so in a flipped or inverted classroom, instead of having students come to class to learn the material and do all the practice with the material outside of class, it’s turned on its head so that students learn all the new concepts and everything outside of class, watching videos or reading or whatever. And then they come into the classroom, and they practice everything while the prof is there to help them.
[3:19] Diane: And I got started in 2012, 2013 when everyone was getting really excited about flip teaching. And in my first trial with it, I introduced, I took a sort of cautious approach. I didn’t want to flip the whole class. I wanted to try it out first. And so I did about a month in the middle of my class. It was my database class, the month on SQL. I did fully inverted. And I had many nerves about it. I had things I wasn’t sure were gonna work and how the students would respond and all of that, and it really went quite well. The students really engaged with the activities, even though I had a 6 to 9 p.m. night class, 3 hours at night.
[4:00] Kristin: Woah!
[4:01] Diane: That’s a long time to come and just do activities like your brain is exploding for 3 hours. It’s, but they were really willing to do it. I thought it went quite well. However, I felt I was missing out. Like, I was obviously standing at the front and running around and gathering them together to talk about things, but it wasn’t that, I didn’t get to explain the hard stuff to them, and I miss doing that. I feel like I really add value in doing that. And a number of my students said to me, this is, I like this approach, Diane, but I miss it when you, I miss you explaining things to us. And so I decided to do something kind of halfway where I kind of divided on another dimension. And they are learning stuff outside of class and practicing it a little bit outside of class, but the easy stuff, the basic definitions, the foundational ideas. And then they come to class, and we do the harder things together. So I get to bring my intuition, I get to adapt my teaching to their learning, and I, that’s my happy place for teaching.
[05:07] Kristin: OK, so how do you do this semi-flipped then?
[05:11] Diane: Yeah, so every week students do some activities we call them preps, preparatory activities where they typically learn a little bit of something new, and they practice what they’ve learned. They have to hand in some kind of evidence of what they’ve done. And so, and we, and I typically make it worth some marks, about 1% a week, and that seems to be enough to get enough of the class to have taken it seriously and come prepared so that you are not reteaching what was in the prep. That would be very counterproductive. And you just take off from there, and they come kind of knowing what they don’t know, and ready to take it further. And then in class we do a back and forth where there’s activities, and then we gather together, and I’m teaching new stuff. And I really try to use the activities to do interesting things, not just practice, but like uncover misconceptions, or especially what I love is when we can do discovery together, when I can set the table for students, scaffold an experience where they’re going to discover something for themselves.
[06:23] Kristin: So I want, I wanna roll back real quick. So when you say that they do that prep material, so I’m assuming it’s like reading or watching a video or something like that. But like, what do you mean by evidence of doing it? Because, like, for my class I also do semi-flip for my elective data science class. And I also call it Prepares. Like, this is your Prepare, you watch this video, read this thing, and then you have to do this multiple-choice, usually online quiz in the learning management system. And I, part of me wonders, like, do you understand what I mean by, like, you need to do these things, and you’re gonna notice what you don’t understand by doing this thing? Cause I think the vast majority are kind of, like, see it as busy work, and I’m like, no, it’s not.
[07:01] Diane: Yeah, yeah, it is challenging, and I find just like everything in teaching, it’s a bit of whack-a-mole, like you’re, you fix one thing, and another problem pops up, and you’re just constantly managing limited resources, especially time and attention. But yeah, I try to, we do a mix of things. Some of our questions are in the LME, and they are multiple-choice, or we get a bit creative, and we find ways to ask questions where they can fill in a blank, and it still manages to be effective. And you can ask questions that are meaningful and not easy to answer in this kind of form, and I don’t know about you, but I feel so excited when I come up with a new way to ask something, a new question type. It’s like, wow, success. And if you can boil it down to something easy to mark or easy to assess online, that’s amazing. But still, there tend to be a fair number of multiple-choice, and you and we give them infinite attempts because we really just want them to do the work. And so some people will game it and just click till they get the right answer, but most of our preps have another component where they have to do something like a coding thing that they hand in and we auto-test.
[8:17] Diane: And we’ve also invested in developing some software that allows us to auto-test their relational algebra. So, in my database course, they’re handing in relational algebra stuff that looks a bit like LaTeX and gets parsed and turned into SQL. Anyway, we can actually run their algebra, and that’s kind of useful because they can, they can learn from that experience.
[08:46] Kristin: So they’re, so not only are they doing like the more like, quote-unquote, simple online quiz in your standard learning management system, but they’re also doing like, like computer science, we know how to code our way to autograders. So they’re doing small auto-grading things before they show up to class?
[09:04] Diane: That’s right. And so they can’t just guess that. They have to get it right. And if you, you can tell they’re engaging with it because you get a lot of, you get a lot of questions on your discussion board if they’re having struggles with it or in office hours.
[09:17] Kristin: How do you motivate them to get it done before class, besides the, like, you know, quote-unquote, the student shame of showing up and not being prepared? Like how do you actually get them to do the work before they show up to class?
[09:29] Diane: Yeah, I, and I wanted to say the student shame is not apparent to me in the classroom, and that’s a good thing. They can evade any awareness from me. But anyway, I make it due before the first class of the week, and there’s no extensions at all on the preps. It’s only 1%, and there’s no mercy on those. Because if people haven’t done them, then the whole model falls apart, and this is why I have some marks on it, and it seems like 1% a week is pretty good. It works for us. I have a very generous late policy for assignments and things where it’s not holding up the lectures if students need extra time.
[10:10] Kristin: Yeah, I just do quizzes in the learning management system, and those have, like, it’s due technically 2 days before class, and then there’s a 24-hour late period so that they are, they are seeing the due date as 2 days before, but they, there’s no penalty to submitting during the late period and I tell them. I’m strongly considering moving to: you need a perfect score, and you get infinite attempts. Right now it’s 3 attempts only, but you need 80% to get full credit because it’s low stakes, just get it done, but like force yourself to get through it. But I do also allow what I call one prepare extension token, where if you just forgot, fill out the form, and we will reopen those quizzes for you, and then there’s a handful who are like, “I did it again. I’m sorry. Can you open it again?” And I’ll be like, yeah, that’s fine. Like, I’ll, I’ll do it for. I have the resources to do it, so I’ll just do it because I don’t want it to harm their grade. But yeah, I think it depends on context, too, though.
[11:06] Diane: Yeah, and it’s some of that is, we’re back to the whack-a-mole because, you know, if you tell them it’s due 2 days ahead and there’s a 24-hour grace period, then do they really treat it like it’s due 2 days ahead, or do they think of the deadline as the, yeah.
[11:19] Kristin: And I think it, it’s so much depends on context. And I think, my school students, when they see the learning management system tell them that this is due this day, they don’t see the late due date. They just do it on that day.
[11:31] Diane: Yeah.
[11:32] Kristin: And my students also, like, I’m kind of pushing them towards, like, you treat the due date as the actual due date because for their homeworks, they have, I have this late token system where, like one token one day, and you have to spend a token to be able to like turn it in late. And they all like instant reaction is to hoard their tokens. And so I think in their brain, like a lot of them have potentially encoded, if I submit these quizzes late, I have to spend a token, which is actually not true. But like, a lot of them, when they first do it, they’re like, “please don’t take a token from me. I’m sorry, I turned it in late.” And I’m like, it’s no, it’s a free 24 hours. And I explained to them like the reason why it’s due this day is because during that 24 hour period is when I’m looking at the data to understand what to emphasize in class because it’s, mine’s a, it’s semi-flipped but also just-in-time where I’m looking at how you all did on the quizzes and then I order the content in terms of what you all struggled with first and I tell them on the first day I’m like, all right, this is how you all struggled, so we’re gonna focus on this content first and we’re, we’re gonna ignore this other part because you all did great and we don’t need to talk about it in class.
[12:31] Diane: That’s really, really a great idea if you have time to look at the stuff and adapt to it from the prep. I don’t find I’m doing that. Sometimes I have an activity at the very beginning of class that will check on their understanding and raise up the misconceptions, and then you deal with them just by what’s happening in the room.
[15:49] Diane: So it’s interesting that you, the way you describe adapting because one of the challenges I find with semi-flipped is that you’re kind of locked in because you need to get the students ready for the next prep by the end of the week or whenever you’re, however units of time you’re thinking of. For me, it’s the week. I need to have them ready. The preps are already in the can. I can’t be making them up during the term, although maybe the first time you’re scrambling, but in the classroom, you, with any active learning, things will zig and zag, and you don’t know how it’s gonna go, and you want to go with that flow and adapt to it. But it really is challenging with semi-flip because you’re also teaching some of the important content in the classroom. So, you’ve got to do this adapting, but you also have to fit the content that they need to be ready for the next prep in. So, do you find that you’re actually shifting your preps down the, down the pipe, like?
[13:15] Kristin: In my case, no, just because like the class has 10 modules and it’s 1 module per week, and since it’s a data science class, the modules are a little more disjoint and less like feeds into each one, compared to like a CS2 or a database class, I think. And on top of that, very little content in class is new. The reason why I call it semi-flipped is that often we’re going deeper on a concept. Or my standard mode of operation is basically they do the prepared material by Monday. The Tuesday I’m like looking at how everyone did. And pretty much everyone did the same as last semester. And so like the order of class is kind of the same. I might move some slides around, but in class it’s kind of like semi, little chunks where I’m like peer instruction, a set of like one or two slides to re-explain what people struggled with most on the peer instruction with an emphasis on the wrong answers and the peer instruction is multiple choice if the students most like picked, like the most popular wrong answer, then I’ll talk about like, “Why is this one wrong? Let’s like discuss this. This is a common misunderstanding.” And then we repeat, or we move to doing, like, a worked example in class. And so, I, and this is across a whole week, so I have two classes to kind of cover what I need to cover. But at the same time, since things are ordered by most important first, if we don’t get to the last, like, little sublecture, it doesn’t matter because I’m like, “y’all did mostly fine on precision and recall, and we don’t, didn’t have time to get to it, but I’m going to assume you all are mostly OK.” So that’s how I handle not getting to everything. I just don’t handle it. I drop it because it’s like, it’s the least important thing for class anyway.
[15:33] Diane: Right, right. And that’s a bit different from what I’m doing where I’m, I’m doing the, some of the most important stuff in class because I’ve reserved it so that I get to teach it to them so that I can break it down and, respond to how they’re understanding it and create these discovery opportunities as well and so that puts a lot of pressure on and it actually if I were co-teaching with a sessional instructor who was just like a graduate student who was hired to teach it’s a very demanding kind of teaching to ask somebody who’s junior to do and I still find it challenging every time so it’s the only thing I don’t like about about semi-flipped the way I’m doing it, but somehow I get through every term. We get through what we need to learn. I do punt on things too, like I have to sometimes, but I get through the important stuff.
[16:26] Kristin: I would assume also that you’re doing it because you think it’s worthwhile.
[16:29] Diane: Yes, I really do.
[16:31] Kristin: So, you’re sometimes doing stuff to build off of what they’ve learned outside of class, and sometimes you’re focusing on some activity. How, what are the standard like chunks of things that happen in class?
[16:45] Diane: It’s different for every lecture, every topic, I guess, I take when I designed it in the first place, I took the material that formerly had been done in traditional lectures and in a certain sequence that I was happy with, it was a well functioning course and I just thought, which of these are the hardest things and which are really basic and in the sequence I kind of, I use this thing called a castle top diagram where you make a line and above the line could be something they do out of class, and in the, and below could be something they do in the class. And I sort of divided it up that way, and then I thought for the, for the juicy bits as I like to call them, the crunchy nuggets, how can I do something really valuable that takes advantage of this precious time we have together in the classroom, and I thought about what makes this hard or what’s mysterious about this and how can I, you know, reveal something that will give them an intuition or how can I allow them to discover it for themselves, for instance, and then it, it’s really specific to the individual things. I could give examples if you like.
[17:57] Kristin: Yes, I would love an example.
[17:58] Diane: Yeah, so my examples are gonna come from my databases class, which I’ve been teaching a lot recently. I’ll try to make them not down in the weeds too much of relational databases. That’s not on the tip of the tongue for everyone, I’m sure. So, one example is to check whether students are able to understand the notation they’ve learned to define the structure or schema for a database that we’ve given them a notation, a mathematical way, kind of, saying these are the relations or tables, these are their columns, these are the keys and the foreign keys, and so on. And so, I’ve come up with some really, it’s a new question type that I made up, which is to give them the structure or schema, and then, and say suppose there are 25 rows in this table. How many rows are in the other table? Is there a lower bound or an upper bound? And they have to reason about that. And it boils down to a multiple-choice question, but you really have to understand every little nuance of what that schema is to answer the question. So if you think the foreign key goes the other way. If you misunderstand the mathematical notation, you’re going to get it wrong, for instance. And so I give it as I do that one as peer instruction. And that’s at the beginning of the class, right after they’ve learned in their prep work, how to read those things, or they’ve learned that stuff prior. And so that’s a great one to clear up misunderstandings.
[19:28] Diane: One of my favorite things though, as I said, is discovery learning. So in this course, we teach relational algebra, which is a mathematical, it’s an algebra, and it underlies SQL. It’s, everything is based on the algebra, and I actually spent quite a bit of time teaching the algebra and having students write queries in the algebra because I think it’s a good foundation for understanding SQL properly, thinking about it the right way. Anyway, in the prep work, they have learned the relational model, so they understand relations in tables and foreign keys. Now we teach them in the prep very few little operations you can do, like filter rows based on a boolean condition. We give them, just like 3 or 4 operators. And they’re so basic and really easy. And they practice them at home. And then they come to class and they do a sequence of harder and harder queries using those simple operators, and eventually they get into territory where it just seems impossible. It’s like I’ve erected a brick wall that I know they’re gonna run into.
[20:41] Diane: One good example is I give them a table that has student numbers and grades, and I say, find this, the student number of this one who got the highest grade. But there’s no max function, there’s no loops, there’s no variables, there’s none of the things that they’re used to. And they, they’re losing their minds. We’ve done all this easy stuff, and all of a sudden, how am I supposed to do that? And so it’s this beautiful iterative thing where it takes about 3 iterations roughly, where I let them loose, they’re working away, and I’m running around the room watching, seeing what they’re doing. And the class as a whole sort of seizes up like they can’t do it, they’re stuck. And then I go back to the front, we gather around the campfire, and you say, OK, what happened? What just happened? Why are you stuck? What’s the problem? And they discover something fundamental about relational algebra. And for example, they discover on the first, the first thing is typically that, oh, the only way I can make a choice is with this filtering operation, and it only looks at one row. We’ve got this narrow, narrow window. So if you’re gonna make a choice, is this student in the answer or not, you’ve got to get the information in one row, OK. Go forth and try that.
[22:02] Diane: And then we reiterate several times, and through this, they each time discover something new about the relational algebra that’s really foundational. For instance, they want to put all the rows into one row so they can look across them all and see the max because if I can only look at one row at a time, I got to get everything in there. But there’s no way to do that. You would need to do an indefinite number of Cartesian products, and then you’d need a loop to look across. We don’t have loops. And so they’re like pulling out their hair, and then we try to figure out what can you discover, what can you learn from just looking at two rows side by side. This one is a higher grade than that one, and inevitably somebody says, oh, this one, they write a query that picks the bigger one, but of course that isn’t necessarily the bigger in the whole table. Anyway, it’s a series of these discoveries, and ultimately they learn that when you compare two rows, you can’t tell this one is the bigger one is the max, but you do know something from that comparison, and I leave them to think about that for a while, and they realize, oh, the smaller one is not the max. Oh, so you can do something, and how do you get the max from the, you know, the not max? And we learn we need a set complement, and eventually they get to the algorithm, and in like 20 minutes they’ve figured it out themselves completely, so it’s much more memorable than me teaching it to them, and it’s so fun.
[23:29] Kristin: So, if this is, though, like a 400-student class, like, how do you navigate that? Cause like, obviously, one student in one end of the room isn’t talking to a student on the other end of the room, but it sounds like they’re working together and then you bring them back together, and then is it basically like you’re trying to get one of the students to say the important new bit of information and then you like announce it to the rest of the room? Like how are you doing that?
[23:57] Diane: Yeah, so they’re working in pairs or groups, and in that really large room, as you’ve seen it in photos, I think it, it’s set up with these tables of 4 to 6 people. So it’s designed so that they’re working together at those tables, and I’m running around cajoling them to actually talk to each other. You have to, you have to establish a pattern in the room where they’re used to doing that and used to talking to each other, which I’m, I’m sure you’re, you’re doing in your classroom as well.
[24:26] Kristin: It’s so hard.
[24:27] Diane: It is really hard. At the end of each little round, I go back to the front, and we talk about what’s just happened. And I get different groups to volunteer what they’ve discovered or what they hypothesize might be the answer.
[24:42] Kristin: I see. OK. So, basically, like, there’s a round of like, they’re working together, and then you can try and cajole the answer out of them, or potentially lead a group that you’re the group that’s like sharing to, say like, this is what we’re all trying to get to.
[24:58] Kristin: Let’s, let’s go, into some details about the mechanics of how you get the students to do stuff like, definitely we can agree, grades are motivating, but how do you do it in a way that still feels equitable and all of that.
[25:10] Diane: Right, it was tricky because I have a pretty limited TA budget. And so I’m probably more limited than yours. Our TAs are unionized, and they have a really high rate of pay, and they have to be paid for every single hour, and there’s no volunteers. There’s nothing like that. So I have to be very circumspect with where I put the grading work. And so I have found the prep is essential, so I grade the prep. It just wouldn’t work if they didn’t do the prep. In class participation, I have usually not graded because I feel like it’s, I’ve always felt all through my career, it’s my job to make a compelling experience that students will want to come. That has not been as easy in the AI era. So I’ve changed my policy and started grading that. We could talk about that if you like. And of course there has to be grading on the homework.
[26:07] Kristin: Yeah, so, let’s be precise though. When you say grading, are you talking about hand grading or like multiple-choice, auto-grading of some kind?
[26:15] Diane: Yeah, for the prep we’ve been able to make it all auto-graded, auto-tested, code and algebra, for instance, and those LME questions, no problem. For the homework assignments, some of it is auto-tested; like their SQL code is auto-tested, but other things are graded by hand. And for in-class participation, just this year, I’d been on sabbatical last year, and my colleagues were telling me attendance was plummeting last year and also in office hours like you could shoot a cannon through our help center, which used to be packed with students waiting to talk to a TA. So I was really trying to figure out a way to get students to come to class, and I decided to put some grades on that. And for that we told students they would be hand, they’re already doing these activities of this, this semi-flipped activities all term long, but we told them this year, once a week, you’re gonna hand one of them in on a piece of paper, and we’re going to grade it. And we mark, there’s 12 weeks of term, and we say it’s best 9 of 12, so you mostly need to come to class. You just, you have some flexibility, but you mostly need to come to class, and we don’t tell them which hour of the 3-hour week it’s gonna be in. We just do it when it’s the right moment, for what, for the learning that’s going on in the class. And those are marked for effort. So as long as they’re doing something, it’s the lightest possible marking, and that’s, that’s done by hand because it’s pencil and paper on a sheet, and we use the crowdmark platform. I don’t know if that’s popular in the US.
[28:03] Kristin: I’ve heard of it. I think.
[28:05] Diane: It’s for marking exams. Every booklet gets a QR code on every page, and it’s scanned and uploaded, and we do it with these sheets. We just have a one-page sheet, and it’s got the, I student fills in their student data, and there’s Crowdmark platform QR code, and the backside is empty. We don’t tell them till the right moment in the class. OK, question 3, write your answer for that one on, and we’re gonna hand that one in today. We make it up on the fly. It’s working really well. Attendance has been way better than I feared. It’s really pretty good, and we’re doing a little survey to find out what students think about having that graded because they’re forced to come to class if they don’t want to give up the marks for that.
[28:50] Kristin: It makes me wonder that, since the fact that it is randomly chosen and that even if they know that it’s graded for effort, but they have to, you know, do something that like shows that they are making an effort. It makes them just take all of the activities more seriously. Because, in contrast, in my class, I have just like a whole lot of forms, because like, that’s what I have, Microsoft Forms. We are a Microsoft campus. And so I have all these Microsoft Forms to collect things like the peer instruction answers, they’re like, for work examples, when I’m like, all right, go work on this question for the next 10 minutes, but then you’re going to fill out this form at the end to tell me like, how fast do you want me to walk through the solution? Super fast, like, walk it through, type it out slow. Like, what do you want? And so then, they earn 3 attendance points, or I call them engagement points per day, and it’s based on the number of forms they filled out. Like, if you filled out all minus 1, you get all 3 points. If it’s less than that, you get 2 points. If you filled out at least 1 form, you get 1 point. And they need 60 points by the end of the semester for 5% of their grade. But that’s all based on literal effort of like, you don’t have to be right. You just have to fill out the form.
[30:08] Kristin: And I do see a behavior where clearly the first ten or so students are not trying. They just open the form and hit the first answer. Hit submit because when I look at the results as they’re coming in, I’m like, there’s an equal distribution of people choosing the answers, the possible answers on this multiple-choice question. Like, you’re not even reading it. There’s no way you read it in time, like to, before you hit the submit button. While, in your case, it’s basically, yes, it’s based on effort. You have to be trying for you to get the point, and it’s also random. They don’t know when it is, so they’re actually paying attention. I’m now, I’m tempted to do something similar where I’m like, what are the peer instructions that I will randomly pick that day? You have to be right to get an extra point or something.
[30:49] Diane: Yeah, what I’m doing is a lot less elaborate. Like, you’re collecting a lot more evidence of their participation than I am. Mine is so light, and we’re so generous in the grading of that, really, if they’re there, and they wrote a scribble down that looks anything to do with the course, they’re going to get the credit. And they kind of know that. So I don’t know if they’re taking it as seriously as I want them to. The only evidence I have is from running around the room and talking to them. I do feel a shift in the AI era. Still, if there’s more students this year than I’ve experienced before who seem to, it’s just a layer of them, but it’s a bigger layer who are getting by and not really engaging very well, and they’re, they’re still there.
[31:35] Diane: But I’m, this survey is really interesting to me, the results, because I wanna hear what they say about those very questions, like, did I take, did I take it more seriously because I was handing it in even though it was a generous grading policy. And I’m also the randomness, I’m worried about the randomness because they could interpret that as, oh, they’re trying to trick us. They’re trying to force me to come every hour, and, I, you know, when I would only come on the time when they’re doing the marked booklet, if they would only tell me when it is. And it’s not a trick. It’s just we’re looking for the right moment when I have time to hand out a piece of paper and collect it, and it’ll fit in with what I’m teaching. So I’m curious about that too. We’ll find out.
[32:19] Kristin: I have a bunch of scripts that kind of handle all of the awarding of the points and that kind of thing. And then there’s. And there’s like opportunities to earn, I think, up to 20 points outside of class. And so students can, if they are willing to do all of that outside work, are able to like skip a good chunk of class if they needed to. So it’s really, like, it’s kind of like, if you show up to class every day you’re gonna get all of the points and like the default is you’ll earn all the points but like I know a bunch of you have various reasons you need to sit the class or you’re sick or something and there’s so there’s these other opportunities outside of class to, to earn these points for yourself.
[32:59] Diane: You have a lot of flexibility. That’s great.
[33:01] Kristin: So where do you think semi-flipped would work versus not work?
[33:07] Diane: I think semi-flip can work in any context. It’s a matter of whether you like the idea of it or not, for you think it, you think it appeals to your teacherly instincts, I guess. It’s more to me about what’s challenging about the semi-flip model, and I think of two main things. One is you have to make the materials, and, if you’re gonna go whole hog and semi-flip your whole class, it’s going to be a big job. But you can start small. You can make gradual change. You could just pick one unit or one week or one lecture and just semi-flip that. And see what you think of it before you invest a whole lot in it. You also don’t have to make all the materials yourself, like for instance, when I first did the fully flipped month of SQL, I used Jennifer Whidham’s videos from Stanford, which she, because she had invented a MOOC on databases, and I didn’t have time to make videos. I thought, also, why reinvent the wheel? She had these great videos, so I used them. And if you want to make your own, you can gradually replace them with your own. So it can be done in an incremental fashion. Doesn’t have to be whole hog.
[34:21] Diane: And the other thing is the constraining that I mentioned to you that you, it does put down a stake in the ground that you have to get to that point in order to get them ready for the next prep because you wouldn’t want a rippling change all through all the preps you’ve prepared. So I find that a little bit challenging.
[34:39] Kristin: How do you frame it to the students? Cause I feel like, the student borgmind has actually been more open to flipped for the past couple of terms. But then you always have a portion of the diehard, “how dare you make me do anything except sit here and listen.” How do you frame things to the students?
[35:01] Diane: Well, I think transparency is always so critical in your teaching. Let students know that you’re making very thoughtful choices, intentional choices informed by the literature or best practices you’ve learned or experiences in other courses. And just tell them about that at the beginning of the term, and I have, well, that’s one of the things I was most afraid of when I, when I first did fully flipped. I thought, oh my God, they’re gonna be doing worksheets. They’re gonna think I’m treating them like elementary school children. Why is she getting paid to do no work? Well, you know, just handing out these worksheets. I’m so afraid of that.
[35:39] Kristin: Like, it’s crazy to me when students like imply that we’re not gonna work. Like, we’re not working because we’re, like, getting them to do all the work, and I’m like, do you have any idea how much work this is for me?
[35:52] Diane: It’s so much more work.
[35:54] Kristin: It’s easier to just lecture at you.
[35:56] Diane: Lecturing is so easy, and it’s fun. I love explaining things. I guess that’s why I like semi-flip, but yeah, I was really afraid of it the first time, and I didn’t get that reaction to my utter surprise. And also, I wasn’t even using my own videos. They were Jennifer Whidham’s videos, and I thought, oh my God, they’re gonna think I’m so lazy. But it didn’t happen, and over the years I’ve had very few complaints about it. In the, in my course evaluations, it’ll be the odd student sometimes. Most terms nobody will say anything. And of course I benefit now from being in an environment where lots of other people are doing active learning, and flip classrooms and so on, but it really has worked pretty well. And in the first lecture I talked, I put in references to the literature, oh, and I talk about our own research on flip classrooms and the effect of them that’s consistent with that literature, and it seems to work.
36:53] Kristin: So, before we close out, what would you say is the highest-order bit that you’d want people to get out of this conversation?
[37:01] Diane: I think most of us who are teaching really love to teach and if you love explaining things to students, if you love providing intuition, if you love diagnosing where they’re stuck and figuring out how to help them through that, semi-flipped is a really good way to give you the opportunity to still be teaching the really interesting hard stuff, but also have space to do meaningful, engaging, rich, active learning activities. So, it’s a really nice in-between approach, and I love it.
[37:34] Kristin: Ah, OK. I like that. It’s a way of getting the quote-unquote more boring things out of the class, so you make space for the things that are more fun to teach.
[37:45] Diane: Exactly, and you know, there’s a reason why we’re there in the classroom. Like we bring value and we get to really do that through the teaching parts as well as by designing the really rich activities. There’s so much creativity in coming up with those, don’t you find, like, oh, how can I evoke this response I want to get?
[38:05] Kristin: Or just designing the materials in general of like, is this a good thing to try and explain it to students so that they understand it outside of class so I can get to the more interesting things in class or at least like, let’s confirm that you all don’t have this misconception before, outside of class and if you do, then we’ll fix it in class, but let’s at least find out outside of class.
[38:25] Diane: Yeah, yeah. Making space.
[38:28] Kristin: Yes, making space. That’s maybe that’s another way of thinking about it. Semi-flipped is about making space inside of class for the more high-value interactions.
[38:39] Diane: Yes, the high-value ones. There, yeah, that time in the classroom is so precious. It’s probably our most precious resource, the time together. It’s a very small number of hours, and I wanna use it really, really well. I find that this semi-flipped approach seems to be doing it for me.
[38:55] Kristin: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Diane.
[38:57] Diane: That was really fun. It’s great to talk with you.
[39:00] Kristin: And thank you for listening. If you know someone who might find this episode helpful, share it or give us a shout-out online. That is a great way to support the podcast. And if you’re looking for other ways to help us out, join us on Patreon at patreon.com/csedpodcast, particular shoutout to patrons Andy Carle, Kendra Walther, and Clark Scholten for helping to keep the podcast ad-free and supporting production. For past episodes, transcripts, and links, visit csedpodcast.org and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode! And otherwise, this was the CS-Ed Podcast. I am your host, Kristin Stephens-Martinez, and our producer is Chris Martinez. And remember, teaching computer science is more than just knowing computer science. I hope you found something useful for your teaching today.