The Future of Education

Activating innovative educational strategies is the challenge that today's educators are called to face in order to render their teaching relevant to students' learning. In this regard, the emerging "flipped classroom" pedagogy might help instructors effectively capture attention and strengthen motivation offering new opportunities for students to review, discuss and investigate contents.

The purpose of this study was to implement an experimental "flipped" classroom for the teaching of Puritan literature and history to a group of thirty Grade XII High School students specializing in Humanities and to evaluate the impact of the "flipped" mode on the students' lexical acquisition and learning outcomes.

Short videos and lectures presenting clips from Puritan history, ethics and literature were viewed by students at home before class sessions. Each material came with a brief online quiz offering the teacher immediate feedback on whether any essential points had been missed. Class time was devoted to review materials and to participate in instructor-guided discussions and activities with the teacher functioning as a coach and advisor, encouraging learners in individual inquiry and collaborative effort.

Student scores from a written post-test were significantly higher for the flipped topics than for the other curricular subjects receiving traditional lectures. Also vocabulary knowledge proved expanded and appropriate as confirmed by the analysis of the learners' written data collected in a learner corpus purposefully compiled to further investigate the students' vocabulary range and size.

This demonstrates that the classroom flip, if properly implemented with cooperative learning, can lead to students' increased language performance and satisfaction. More importantly, the classroom flip focuses on how to teach literature so students feel it really matters in their lives.