Don’t just flip the classroom, flip the school day

Don’t just flip the classroom, flip the school day
By: Michael B. Horn

Oct 10, 2019
Flipping the classroom—in which students independently consume online lessons or lectures and then spend their time in the classroom focused on what we used to call homework—crashed on the scene eight years ago. But if Bob Harris, president of Edudexterity and currently working as the head of human resources for Pittsburgh’s school district, is to be believed, it isn’t enough.

It’s time to flip the high school day, he says, and he has plans for how to do it.

The basic idea is that almost all students would benefit from gaining a variety of real work experiences while in high school because they would gain a deeper appreciation for their potential directions in life; an understanding of their strengths, passions and purpose—a glaring gap in high schools that emerged in research for our new book Choosing College—and social capital in the form of mentors and potential professional connections outside of school and the circles of their family and friends, about which my colleague Julia Freeland Fisher has written extensively.

In Harris’s conception of the flipped school day, students would start their day at 9 a.m.—more in line with the research around when teenagers should wake up and start their days—by reporting to a workplace that could rotate every semester or year.

After working half a day, the students would then break for lunch and head to school to do their extracurricular activities and work on projects with their fellow students.

Finally, in the evenings, students would take their classes online from home when their parents are more likely to be at home—also more in line with research that suggests students tend to perform better in courses that meet later in the day. They wouldn’t have homework per se, as work would simply be woven into their online learning experiences.

One of Harris’s insights is that a big reason school exists as it does is that it plays an important custodial function in the lives of many families. For years, the only way to learn from a teacher was in a classroom.

But with the advent of online learning, students can theoretically learn anywhere, which means that you can change what you do during the times when it’s important to provide custodial care for students. All too often, students are already doing most of their learning late in the evening anyway. Rather than fight it, why not embrace it?

All too often, students are already doing most of their learning late in the evening anyway. Rather than fight it, why not embrace it?
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Plus, far fewer teenagers—roughly 20%—hold a job today compared to a generation ago when 40% did. Flipping the school day would rectify that challenge and fill the morning time in a productive fashion.

Doing so would also equip students with an understanding of how their learning connected to their potential careers after school, which, in the ideal, would help them build motivation for when and what they learn online—which itself could be far more tailored for their learning needs, both in terms of the choice of courses and in terms of the learning pace and path within the courses.

It would also seem to present an interesting solution to the return of people’s nostalgia for career and technical education. And by flipping the school day for all students, it could potentially avoid the historical perils of tracking students into academic versus career pathways in high school.

Flipping the school day for all students could potentially avoid the historical perils of tracking students into academic versus career pathways in high school.

Finally, flipping the school day could also greatly bolster the counseling function in high schools. Today counselors operate at a 491-to-1 student-to-counselor ratio in high schools, which means there is little time for meaningful advice for students. But by placing students into jobs in the community, schools could potentially leverage a far wider swath of their community’s resources to help counsel and guide students into the choices they make in their lives.

If no high school wants to go all-in on the experiment, then they could try it as a pilot for a segment of their students. In so doing, they could also use it to create more capacity in their school by changing when and how the building is utilized and providing more shifts for students so that the schools would be open for far longer, act more as community centers, and students could experience smaller class sizes with teachers.

Given all we know, flipping the school day seems like a worthwhile experiment to me.


Michael B. Horn

Michael is a co-founder and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He currently works as a principal consultant for Entangled Solutions.

4 Reasons Why Chromebook Beats iPad in 1:1 Programs

Add price to the list of three below.  Most important to me:  iPads are about consumption of learning and Chromebooks are about construction of learning. 

3 Reasons Why Chromebook Beats iPad in 1:1 Programs

Joshua Kim
Jun 30, 2014

The Chromebook vs. iPad debate may be one that we never resolve.
Whatever I say for the Chromebook, or whatever you say for the iPad, we will never convince each other. The truth is probably that any 1:1 device program is better than none.
Although, many of you will counter by saying that buying or mandating any single device is misguided to begin with, and that we should be focusing on a BYOD (bring your own device) structure and diving deeply into the world of VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure).
Case in point is Tim Holt’s passionate plea for choosing the iPad route in his essay, “Why We Are Misunderstanding the Chromebook-iPad Debate.”
In the end, someone has to make a decision. The decision to do nothing, to have no 1:1 or VDI program is also a decision. And each decision has consequences and costs, upsides and downsides.
To give you a little context, I am no stranger to this debate. I’ve been a big fan of choosing the iPad for 1:1 programs, for many of the same reasons that Tim Holt enumerates. In my last gig at Dartmouth College I helped roll out a 1:1 iPad Mini program for our students in our low-residency online Master of Health Care Delivery Science program. We put all the course materials on the private iTunes U app. We experimented with creating text, image, and video case studies with iBooks Author. Students loved the ability to have all of the readings and videos on the iPad, and they particularly loved being able to download all the materials for offline reading and viewing.
But after spending the past month with a Dell Chromebook 11 my thinking has begun to change.
The iPad makes sense as a 1:1 device if you know that the student already has access to a laptop.
But if your 1:1 program starts with the assumption that the device that you choose--iPad or Chromebook--will be the device that the student primarily or exclusively uses for learning, then the better choice is a Chromebook.
Why?

Reason 1: Chromebooks are for Creating, iPads are for Consuming

Tim Holt and legions of keyboard-toting iPad case owners will no doubt disagree, but the fact is that iPad was created with consumption, and not creation, in mind. The keyboard cover started as an aftermarket hack, and creating anything more than nuggets of text has always been an unsatisfying experience on an iPad.
The Chromebook has one huge advantage over the iPad that even the most hardcore iOS fanboys cannot dispute. It was built to type on.
You may concede that writing is a non-negotiable element of learning, and that typing on a Chromebook is better than an iPad. And you can argue that creating can accommodate many different types of inputs. The iPad enables creation with video (two cameras and all those video editing and picture apps). The iPad enables creation with sound. The iPad enables creation with the finger, gesture and touch.
But I would submit that anyone making the argument that the iPad is adequate for creating should be willing to live with only an iPad. How far would you get in your work if were iPad only? Everyone I know who owns an iPad uses it as a complement and a supplement to a laptop. They might bring their iPad to meetings attached to this keyboard or that, but for serious work (which almost always means creating documents), it is back to the laptop.
Should we expect our students to have anything less than what we rely on?

Reason 2: The App Versus the Web

The decision to go iPad or Chromebook is really a decision between the app or the web.
Do you believe that students should learn in an app or a web ecosystem?
The app world is seductive. The interfaces are slick and the features are many. The problem is that it is surrounded by fences and border guards. The price of admission is the cost of buying into the iOS ecosystem, which means purchasing a device manufactured by Apple. This may be a fine choice for the consumer, but it is less defensible for the educator.
Building our teaching and learning around an iOS device means that only those in the iOS club get to participate. Our students can’t connect or share or learn from anyone outside of the club. Is this what we really want?
The Chromebook, by contrast, is connected to (and yes, unusable without) the Internet.
The Internet, for all its flaws, has the advantage of being open to anyone who can find some way to gain access. Yes, that is not everyone yet, but the rapid growth of Internet-connected mobile devices and efforts to build out national and global broadband infrastructure will ensure that the numbers will increase at exponential rates.
Students using a Chromebook to learn can share materials and creations with everyone else on the Web. They can access the same sites and use the same tools.
All this openness comes with costs and difficulties. But these are teachable moments.

Reason 3: The Google Ecosystem for Collaboration

The final reason I recommend a Chromebook over an iPad, in a 1:1 setting where the only device that the student will reliably have is the one you pick, is that the Google ecosystem allows for easy collaboration.
The advantages cannot be oversold. A platform that encourages and facilitates teamwork will be a platform that encourages and facilitates learning. A Google Doc created in Google Drive can be easily shared with anyone on the Web. It can be read and worked on by a team. Nobody needs anything more than some way to access the Internet.
It may be that at some point Apple will catch up to Google with cloud-based collaboration tools. At that point, however, only those owning an Apple device will ever be able to take full advantage of the Apple creation and collaboration platform.
With the Chromebook a student is seamlessly connected to the Google collaboration ecosystem. An ecosystem that does not require the ownership of Google hardware to take full advantage.
All the learning and the work that the student invests to learn how to use Google collaboration tools will be relevant in their future education and work life, even if they never own another Chromebook.
Can that be said of an iOS device?
What device are you choosing for your 1:1 education program?

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Educational media per day

Children are using less educational media per day as they progress through preschool and elementary school, a new survey from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center found.

Yet at the same time, the overall time children spend in front of a screen goes up, from an hour and 37 minutes a day on average for 2 to 4 year olds to 2 hours and 36 minutes a day for children between the age of 8 and 10. The 2- to 4-year old set spend 78 percent of that screen time, or 50 minutes a day, with media that parents considered educational. The 8 to 10 year olds spend slightly less time — 42 minutes a day — than their younger counterparts on educational media. More than half of parents reported that their child has learned “a lot” from the educational media.

The vast majority of that time is spent front of a television, the Cooney center found. Children ages 2 to 10 spent 42 minutes per day with educational media on TV, while mobile devices, computers, and video games all captured 5 minutes or less on average.

— Maggie Severns

POLITICO