When I first signed up for live Mandarin Chinese classes last year, I quickly found that it didn't work for me. The pace of the lessons was too slow and the content-driven approach was not conducive (for me personally) to learning a language. So I withdrew from the class and was very lucky to have been offered 1:1 tuition with Teacher Jia, who agreed to teach me using flipped classroom. I bought the books and CDs and went through the content at home, noting down questions and problem areas. In our 1:1 lessons, Teacher Jia used an active learning approach to test me on the learning objectives using her beautifully crafted hand-made games and props. Thanks to her amazing flipped classroom approach, and an emphasis not upon content but upon practise and repetition (see my Sherwood-Suzuki project) I whizzed through HSK1 (level 1) in a few weeks and passed my exam scoring 100%. I would never have got this far with in-class learning, and most students didn't.
What would happen with remote learning?
Well, as it happened, exactly the same thing. After the first group lesson, I withdrew from the class for the same reasons and was very lucky to have been offered 1:1 tuition from Teacher Wei. We are now trying out remote flipped classroom and it's working a million timed better than live content delivery. I'm once again teaching myself the content at home... this takes time - I need to go through workbook exercises, tests, listen to CDs and then spend a lot of time doing extra reading into the characters, the grammar, sentence structure... one lesson is probably taking me around 14 days at the moment. This would normally be "covered" in two hours in class. So this approach certainly takes more time - but it's time well spent.
For next week's class, I have just prepared two learning activities for my teacher, her daughter and I to play together - this shows that I am getting confident in the content, but that I need to highlight and correct my mistakes. One is a matching pairs activity made using Educaplay (type in Mandarin colours and you can play too!). Teacher Wei can then correct my pronunciation and tones, she tests me on my characters, and through structured chats she can test my vocabulary and sentence structure.
None of this would be possible with a delivery-led live session approach, nor would it be possible through an asynchronous model. I am absolutely convinced by my own experience that we have to teach remotely using a flipped classroom approach, so that we can engage with and test our learners' knowledge, skills and understanding, without wasting time talking at them. These days, there is no excuse for lectures to be "delivering content" - we can use pre-sessional videos for that. Let's now get on with training and supporting lecturers to be confident in an active learning approach to live sessions, which focus on testing flipped content. It's amazing and it works!
