Flipped Classroom:a new challenge of teaching

Abstract

This thesis explores a new dimension of teaching, arrived in Italy a few years ago and established itself in some schools only by a year now. Flipped Classroom model is a new way of teaching supported by technologies that will reverse the time and manner of work. It is not the class to be "upside down" but the normal scheme of work in class. In the case of the "flipped classroom" the revolution lies in the different ways of proposing the contents to the students and to articulate the learning curve. The idea is to provide students with teaching materials specially selected and prepared by the teacher, who is assigned the task of teaching. This can be a video, multimedia resources, books or ebooks. The first thing students do then becomes that of studying watching video, referring to the materials and by using them repeatedly until the concepts are not clear enough. All this happens before, and outside the school, and not after as in the classical model. The second part of the work happens in the class where the teacher will find a group of students already prepared and, according to the supporters, finally homogeneous. At school the teacher will care then to propose and follow the application activities: exercises, tasks, problem solving, case studies, in-depth activities.

We will begin from the description and from the creation of this modus operandi in the United States, analyzing the results obtained in the application of this teaching model, and then describe the first applications in Italy focusing on its use in the classes of English. Subsequently, we will analyze the problems arising from this type of setting, criticized by those who support the constructivist 'cooperative learning, group work, problem based learning, and the many critics to' effectiveness of these alternatives, as dispersion, the complexity in the implementation, doubts about the results. And also the problems that this new methodology triggers on the role of the teacher and the student, analyzing them in terms of pedagogy. We will conclude with a discussion on the results obtained with this methodology in the teaching of foreign languages.