When I showed up to the first day of my Introduction to Human Anatomy and Physiology JanPlan class, the professor, Dr. Klepach, told us that, for the first week (and maybe longer), we wouldn’t be having a typical lecture-style class. Instead, we were expected to watch podcasts of the following day’s lesson and come up with questions to go over with our classmates. Then, during the lecture block, we would be doing activities and having discussions about the material we had reviewed the night before. After lecture, we would go to the lab for 90 minutes to review anatomical structures and study histological slides in preparation for our lab practicals. As a student athlete with two jobs on campus, having an additional hour and a half of podcasts to watch outside of class, in addition to the homework and studying that was already expected of me, was pretty overwhelming. An average day for me started at 5:45am, when I woke up for morning practice, and then I was either at work, class, practice, or reviewing for the next day’s lecture until I crashed in my bed at night. However, as taxing as the first week of JanPlan was for me, the flipped classroom experiment definitely did pay off in some ways.
For one, it allowed my classmates and me to do fun, interactive activities during lecture block, instead of just sitting listening to a professor talk. One day, during a lecture block devoted to neuron firing and cell physiology, we split into groups and acted out the different types of graded and action potentials. Understanding the electrochemical gradient was a lot easier when I could see my classmates passing through a doorway to achieve an even number of students on each side!
Another benefit to the flipped classroom is that I went into class each day feeling far more prepared and ready to learn. In a fast-paced, content-heavy course like Anatomy and Physiology, it definitely helped me to be able to come to lecture already prepared with questions from the lecture. Given that we were trying to fit a full-length college anatomy class into only three and a half weeks of JanPlan, it was really important to be prepared for class and stay on top of the material. The recorded lectures were helpful in this way because if I missed something while taking notes or needed more review on a topic, I could just pause of rewind the video to the section I wanted to watch again. However, the fact that the lectures were recorded meant that I couldn’t raise my hand to ask the professor a question when it occurred to me, and I would need to wait until the next day for clarification, usually when the topic was no longer fresh in my mind.
As interesting as the flipped classroom experiment was, I was glad when the class voted to return to a normal lecture style for the remaining weeks of JanPlan. Not only did a standard lecture structure allow me more time for athletics and my job, I also felt less stressed about trying to find a 90 minute or longer block of time where I could watch the lectures. Luckily, the PDFs of the lecture slides, and all of the podcasts, were still available through the class website, so if I missed something in class I was able to go back after and review. Although I think that a flipped classroom would probably work better during the regular semester, as opposed to JanPlan, which is already hectic, it was definitely an interesting experiment that forced me to work on budgeting my time and planning out my day so that I could fit in all my commitments.