Title of case study	Flipped Classroom, with buzz groups and role play in postgraduate Education
School/Subject:	CoSS/Education
Lecturer(s):	Anna Wilson
Course:	Introduction to Education and Social Research (EDUC5410)
Student Level:	Masters
Class size:	500-700, up to 27 students per seminar class
Location:	On campus/in person

 

Brief summary

Anna was the course lead for Introduction to Education and Social Research, which is the first core course taken by students on most master's programmes in the School of Education. When Anna took over the course in 2022, she revised both content and pedagogy to better suit the very large, mostly international student cohort with very diverse backgrounds. She abandoned lectures in favour of a flipped classroom approach: the students have a two-hour seminar each week, which is spent on student-centred, active learning activities that build on readings and videos available in advance on Moodle. There is a lot of group discussion, and some activities include elements of buzz groups and role play.

 

Objectives

I used to be a physicist and was lucky to have started my teaching career in the Department of Physics at the Australian National University at a time when there was a real energy about trying different student-centred approaches. The place was full of people who loved their discipline and loved helping their students learn and progress in it – I think it’s still like that. While I was there, I gradually moved away from lecturing and saw the benefits of other kinds of learning activity and have never really looked back. The purpose of Introduction to Education and Social Research is to do exactly what it says: introduce students to education and social research in principle and practice. It’s really important to me that the course helps students begin to see themselves as education researchers. This isn’t the kind of thing that can be easily learned from lectures – students learn about asking questions and designing research to answer them by thinking, discussing and interacting. So, the first seminar asks them to explore the research they already do, and stresses that it doesn’t have to be academic research but could be how they decided to come to Glasgow, or how they decided what to bring when they moved here. The aim of the course is to let students understand what it means to do research, why people do it and how they are able to do it. It aims to humanise research and make it accessible to the students.

 

What is done?

The course is divided into two sections: in the first five weeks, we introduce core concepts; then after that, each work focuses on a different journal article that illustrates a particular kind of education research, illustrating different research aims and the methods that are chosen to achieve them. The students are asked to do some preparation each week – reading a chapter or article, and sometimes also watching a video. These then form the basis of discussions that mix small groups (of 4-6) and plenary sessions that bring the whole class together. These discussions extend from the preparation materials rather than just checking that students have read/watched them, so we emphasise how important preparation is from the very start of the course. In the second half of each seminar, there is some kind of practical activity related to the focus article. For example, in the week where the set reading describes research using interviews, the students get to practice interviewing. We split them into groups of four and they decide on some interview questions that they want to ask. They then split into two interviewer/interviewee pairs, ask the questions and then come back together to compare answers. We end that session talking about the challenges associated with interviewing, which even that short experience gives them a bit of a feel for. One of my favourites is the week where the focus article uses discourse analysis. In the associated seminar, the students get one of two articles on the teacher strikes about ten years ago, one from the Daily Mail and one from the Guardian. They work in small groups to note the use of language and images in the texts and then come together to discuss the similarities and differences in these two (very different!) accounts of the same event.

 

What works well?

The first seminar sets the tone for the rest of the semester – right from the start, students get to engage, interact and, importantly, relate the course content to their own experiences. The cohort for this course is very diverse, with a large number of students coming from China, which is a vast and very diverse country, alongside students from the across the world. There’s also a huge range of backgrounds, with students having undergraduate degrees in everything from French Literature to Agricultural Science to Engineering, and a range of different professional and work experiences. This enriches and enlivens the conversations they have with each other, helping them learn from and with each other. Another thing that helps make research seem like an accessible, human practice is my use of videos of 'chats’ with other academics in the School of Education, where I ask them about their research, including what methods they use and why they use them. I also use lots of examples from my own research, including my Education PhD research, and encourage students to question and critique whether all the decisions I made were good (they weren’t!). This sets them up for starting to critique the research they read about in the second half of the course, which otherwise they might have a tendency to accept as good simply because it has been published and I’ve chosen it as part of the set reading. By dedicating the two-hour contact hours to seminar-style activities, we get a lot further along the journey of students starting to see themselves as researchers than we would if it was just a series of lectures.

 

Benefits

Students

Staff

Provides an understanding and practising of using journal articles. Shows the value of research and lets students see how they already use research; this breaks down the fear of research some students may feel. Allows students to get an interaction with lecturers around their research. Get more time with lecturers than would in a lecturer of 700 people

It’s a chance to get to know students in a way that is otherwise very difficult with such a large cohort. I learn a lot from the students because of their diverse backgrounds and interests. Each week, I learn of students’ experiences and so can respond to it straight away or feed into the next class, tailoring the course to the cohort. It’s much more enjoyable preparing activities for the seminars than it is preparing lectures. I look forward to marking essays to see what students have learned from the course.

 

Challenges            

Students

Staff

This is a new approach to learning which many students have not interacted with before. Forstudents who don’t have English as their first language, discussion-based classes can be challenging. There is work required before class, which can be difficult with students’ timetables and schedules, especially with students from several different programmes on the same course.

Quality assurance – I was the convenor for this course and there are more than 20 seminar groups. I provide a seminar plan each week to try to ensure we are all doing the same thing, so the students are getting to do the same activities, but there is no way of checking this. It can be difficult to get feedback from students during the course. I often find students are very polite and kind and will only say that something did not go well when the course is over and it’s too late to make changes that will fix the problems or benefit them.

 

What did you learn?

Running this course has made me particularly sensitive to the impact of the environment and wider context. The first year I taught this was 2022, at the time the university returned to on-campus teaching after Covid restrictions. This was particularly difficult when students were coming from China and they were not able to leave the country until after the course had started, and many of them caught Covid once they arrived. There was also a lot of anxiety and stress about family in home countries. Then 2023 was really different, with far less illness and far less obvious anxiety about family health. So, I have learned to let the course play out and try to judge what is working well in real time, and make adjustments (such as providing extra drop-in times) if I can.

I also realised how important it is to choose articles that relate to contemporary issues and challenges in education, so the second half of the course will need updating on a reasonably regular basis.

At the moment I’m not teaching the course, but I know my colleague Bonnie who took it over has kept it largely the same. I think this is a good thing, as when we make big structural changes to a course, it’s important to try it out a few times to get evidence to judge whether it’s really an improvement on the past. There’s sometimes a kind of novelty effect, where teaching staff are more enthusiastic the first year or so of doing something differently, and when that happens it can be hard to tell whether any improvement in student learning outcomes are a result of the nature of the changes or just the more positive vibe. In some ways it might be good to give students the chance to come up with their own topics to focus on in class, but to be honest this is difficult as it is an introduction course and is intended to build their skills to do perhaps do this in later courses.

 

What advice would you give to others?

This method is very transferrable to other classes and courses across the university. If you want to try it out, don’t be afraid – go with it. Having said that, it is important that not everyone teaches in the same way, and some courses/topics are better suited to different kinds of learning activities.

However, if the main thing putting you off trying out setting preparatory activities and using a flipped classroom type of approach, then don’t worry, that's not the case. Students, especially post-graduates, are not paying all that money and committing to these courses with the intention of not doing the work. We need to trust students and treat them as adults.

 

References

Wilson, A. N., & Howitt, S. M. (2016). Developing critical being in an undergraduate science course. Studies in Higher Education, 43(7), 1160–1171

Developing critical being in an undergraduate science course: Studies in Higher Education: Vol 43 , No 7 - Get Access (tandfonline.com)