Flipped Classroom: Meaning, What the Research Says, and a Step-by-Step Plan to Flip One Chapter in Your Coaching Class

Flipped classroom meaning, in simple words

In a normal class, the teacher explains a new topic in class, and students try the hard questions alone at home. In a flipped class, students watch or read the explanation at home, and do the hard questions in class, where the teacher can help.

A teaching guide from Vanderbilt University's Center for Teaching puts it in terms of Bloom's revised taxonomy. Students do the lower levels of thinking (knowing and understanding) outside class, and the higher levels (applying, analysing and evaluating) in class, where their classmates and teacher can support them.

India's University Grants Commission (UGC) describes it the same way in its concept note on blended teaching. Students watch a short lecture video online and then come to class for group work, projects or other exercises. The UGC calls the flipped classroom a sub-model of blended learning. If you want the bigger picture of mixing online and classroom teaching, read our guide to blended learning. This guide stays with the flip itself, and how to do it well.

Where the idea came from

The idea is older than online video. The Vanderbilt guide traces it to the book Effective Grading (1998) by Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson. They suggested that students do the first learning before class and spend class time on the processing part: solving, analysing and discussing.

In 2000, Maureen Lage, Glenn Platt and Michael Treglia reported an inverted classroom in an introductory economics course. Students got textbook readings, lecture videos and slides with voice-over before class, filled in worksheets that were collected and graded at random, and used class time for experiments and small-group problems.

Around the same time, Eric Mazur and Catherine Crouch at Harvard described peer instruction. Students read before class, and class time alternates short talks with concept questions that every student must answer. Later, the Flipped Learning Network, a group of educators, published a formal definition of flipped learning on 12 March 2014, with four pillars: Flexible Environment, Learning Culture, Intentional Content and Professional Educator. The same page stresses that the terms flipped classroom and flipped learning are not interchangeable. The practical point for a teacher: sending videos home is only half of a flip. What happens in class has to change too.

What the research says, honestly

Many websites say the flipped classroom always works. The research is more careful than that. Here is what four well-known sources found.

Three lessons come out of this for a coaching institute.

• Do not cut class time. Van Alten and colleagues found better results when face-to-face time was not reduced compared with the normal class. A flip is not a way to run fewer classes.
• Be careful with how you check preparation. Van Alten's team found that adding quizzes helped. But Roehling and Bredow found that pre-class quizzes and assignments used to hold students accountable were linked with lower academic gains, perhaps because students focus on the quiz and not the material. The safe middle path: keep pre-class checks short and low-stakes, and use them to plan the class, not to punish.
• Start small. Roehling and Bredow found that partly flipped courses tended to do better than fully flipped ones, and say partial flipping may be easier for new teachers. Flip one chapter first, not the whole syllabus.

Most of this research is from colleges, not school tuition. Treat it as a guide, not a promise, and check your own batch's results, as shown later in this guide.

The four things every flipped class needs

The Vanderbilt guide lists four key elements. If one is missing, the flip usually breaks. Here they are, with what each looks like in an Indian coaching centre or tuition class.

Notice that only one of the four is about technology. The other three are about planning. That is why a flip done with a phone camera and a well-planned class often works better than one with expensive videos and an unchanged class.

Is a flipped classroom right for your institute?

A flip suits some batches better than others. Use this table before you decide.

Be honest about the cost in time. The first chapter you flip will take longer to prepare than a normal chapter, because you are recording videos and writing new class activities. The second and third chapters get faster, and videos can be reused with the next batch.

How to flip one chapter, step by step

1. Choose one chapter. Pick one with a clear explanation part and lots of practice questions. Avoid the first chapter of the year, when students do not yet know your style.
2. Write two or three learning goals. Say what students should be able to do after the chapter, for example "solve problems on speed using distance and time". Our guide to learning outcomes shows how to write them.
3. Split the explanation into small pieces. One idea per video. If an idea takes more than about 6 minutes, split it again.
4. Record or choose the videos. Use your own phone recordings, or a free government course. SWAYAM, a Ministry of Education programme, hosts free courses from Class 9 to post-graduation, each with video lectures, reading material, self-assessment tests and a discussion forum. NCERT and NIOS are its national coordinators for school education.
5. Write 3 or 4 check questions per video. Easy, multiple choice, and on the main idea only. Add a one-line explanation for each answer.
6. Plan the class. Decide what the first 10 minutes will be (fixing the most common mistakes), what the main activity is, and how the class ends.
7. Tell students and parents before you start. Explain why the class is changing, what students must do at home, and how long it takes (see the message below).
8. Run it for two weeks, then look at the results before you flip another chapter.

Decision point: if fewer than half the batch watches the first video, do not drop the flip at once. Ask why. It is often data, a busy school week, or a video that was too long.

How to make pre-class videos students actually watch

The biggest study of educational video we know of is by Philip Guo, Juho Kim and Rob Rubin. They looked at 6.9 million video-watching sessions on the edX platform. Their findings fit a flipped class well.

A simple recording kit

• A phone on a stand, recording from above a notebook, or facing a whiteboard. Good light from a window in front of you, not behind.
• A quiet room, or a cheap clip-on microphone. Students forgive a plain picture; they do not forgive bad sound.
• One take per idea. Small slips are fine. Re-recording for perfection is the most common reason teachers give up.
• Start each video by saying what it covers in one line, and end with "Now answer the questions below".

If you already teach on YouTube, your old videos can work as first exposure, as long as each one covers one idea. Our guide to microlearning has more on building short lessons.

What to do in class: activities that work

Class time is where the learning really happens in a flip. If you just repeat the video in class, students learn that the video was not needed and stop watching. Here are activities that use class time for harder thinking.

The UGC's concept note gives a useful guard rail. For blended courses in higher education it recommends that at least 30% of classroom time goes to learner-centred activities, and that the teacher's lecture takes not more than 40% of classroom time. A coaching batch is not a university, but the idea carries over: if you are talking for most of the class, it is not yet a flip.

Worked example: a two-week flipped plan for a Class 9 science batch

Here is how a tuition centre could flip one topic, speed, velocity and acceleration, for a Class 9 batch that meets on Monday, Wednesday and Friday for one hour. The timings are an example to adapt, not a rule.

In total, students watch about 23 minutes of video over two weeks, in four short pieces. Every class still runs for the full hour. The difference is that the teacher spends most of it beside students who are stuck, instead of at the board.

Message to send to parents and students

Copy and change this before you start:

Dear parents and students, from Wednesday our Class 9 science batch will try a new way of learning for the next two weeks. The evening before each class, students will watch one short video (about 5 to 6 minutes) and answer 3 or 4 easy questions. This takes about 15 minutes. In class, we will spend more time solving problems together, so students get help right when they get stuck. Please make sure your child has a phone or computer for 15 minutes on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday evenings. If this is hard for your family, tell us, and we will give a printed note instead. Thank you.

Running a flipped class on an LMS

You can run a flip with WhatsApp and paper. But once you flip more than one chapter, a learning management system (LMS) makes three jobs much easier: putting videos in order, checking who prepared, and keeping the questions with the videos so the next batch can use them.

Sikhami is a social network for people in India who are learning anything at all, and it gives coaching institutes and tuition centres a free LMS. Here is how its parts fit a flipped class.

Two things to know. Live classes are not hosted on Sikhami: a batch keeps a Google Meet or Zoom link for online or hybrid batches. And the Analytics tab shows, for each test, how many took it, how many passed and the average best score, not which single question each student got wrong. For a fix-it start, look at which test had the lowest pass rate, then ask students in class which question tripped them. The Help Centre explains course analytics and tests and certificates in detail, and our page on the free LMS covers everything an institute gets.

Common mistakes, and how to avoid them

One more trap: thinking the video is the product. In a flipped class the product is the class. A rough video and a well-planned class beat a polished video and an unplanned class.

How to tell if your flip is working

After two weeks, look at four simple numbers and one question. You do not need special software; a register or a spreadsheet is enough.

If test scores fall, look first at the class activities, not the videos. Then decide: carry on with changes, flip only part of each chapter, or go back to normal classes for this batch. All three are fine choices. Our guide to learning analytics explains how to read student data without over-reading it, and the maths quizzes on Sikhami can give students extra practice between classes.