Reverse Teaching at Middle School in a suburban/urban district

I have experimented with the concept of reverse teaching this semester in my Intro to Robotics class and found to have mixed results so far. It did give me more time to work with kids on the concepts we were teaching in class and it also reduced the amount of homework kids were doing in my class. However I found that there are two big hurdles I need to work on if I am going to continue with this in to the future.

One hurdle is figuring out what exactly I need to include in the lectures. This is hard for me both because it is a new curriculum and I am learning right along with the kids and I don't always know what points to emphasis until after we have done the lesson/units. The other issue making it hard to know what to talk about is that the curriculum itself is a video. It is a video trainer that does a good job of explaining the big picture concepts and introducing application but can be over kids heads at times. I struggle with finding a good balance of restating what the video says completely vs. just giving a tease and ending up generating more questions and adding to confusion.

The other struggle I have is actually getting kids to listen to the lectures online, both mine & the video trainer. I am hoping that over time as I continue down this path of reverse teaching this issue will go away. My hope is that as I perfect the lecture technique students will naturally flock to the online lectures. The only real proplem that I find difficult to overcome here is that of students with a lack of access to the internet at home.

As this is a discussion I would love to hear from those of you who are doing reverse teaching. What are your stories, experiencs, frustrations, etc. Suggestions as to what you have found helpful. Even those of you who don't do reverse teaching I welcome your questions, thoughts, or suggestions for making more engaging video lectures.

Tags: Reverse, lecture, papeless, teaching, video

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Kids often have trouble listening to lectures in person, so it's no surprise they also have trouble online. There really is no way around this. It is an inherent problem with lecture.

One thing you might try is to have your students watch some of the videos in class independently. That way you could see for yourself where they are. Maybe run your class as a virtual class that meets during the school day. This is how I run my Arduino class. (If you're interested electronics.flosscience.com )

If you really need your students to watch lecturs at home, you might try burning a set of video DVDs. Even if a student doesn't have Internet they may have a tv with DVD player.

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