Dan Pink discusses Karl Fisch’s classroom techniques in the Telegraph article: Think Tank: Flip thinking – the new buzz word sweeping the US
However, instead of lecturing about polynomials and exponents during class time – and then giving his young charges 30 problems to work on at home – Fisch has flipped the sequence. He’s recorded his lectures on video and uploaded them to YouTube for his 28 students to watch at home. Then, in class, he works with students as they solve problems and experiment with the concepts.
Lectures at night, “homework” during the day. Call it the Fisch Flip.
This article shows how a relatively small shift can have some big impacts. I’ve noticed that art schools have used a similar model for years; class (studio) time is for practice & feedback while evenings are for reading. My wife is currently doing her BFA and this is the model for both her photography studio and print-making workshop.
I think the education and training fields can learn much from the arts & crafts, who never abandoned the mentor/apprentice model. With unlimited access to information, we waste our time together if it’s just information presentation. Perhaps this means we’re seeing the final days of the industrial classroom and the rise of the practice/collaboration room. With this flip, people will need to develop as self-directed learners and instructors will have to focus more on coaching, mentoring and activity development.
The notion of a flip is one that the McLuhan’s discussed in detail in the Laws of Media and is explained concisely by Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Toronto, in this interview:
every new medium:
- extends a human property (the car extends the foot);
- obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);
- retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);
- flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis).
Bingo ! (Your blog platform said my comment was too short, so I added this parenthetical clarification ;-)