Dive Brief:

• While flipped classrooms do not have to lead to major changes in the way teachers approach personalized learning, assessment and grading, they can certainly facilitate the transition.
• According to eSchool News, flipped classrooms free up teachers to personalize the lessons and assignments they ask students to do in school, opening the door to letting students choose their own paths, and personalizing instruction could lead to personalizing assessment, which could give students the option of proving mastery with a project rather than an exam.
• Letting different students prove mastery in different ways lends itself to a standards-based grading system, where teachers pay attention to mastery of specific objectives rather than points earned on a test. 

Dive Insight:

Flipped learning remains a popular buzzword in K-12 education. While there are few rigorous studies of the learning outcomes resulting from flipped models, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence supporting the benefits for students, including better engagement in class.

There are, of course, also some downsides. In the traditional model, teachers give a lecture during class and ask students to practice those skills at home. When they don’t do their homework, they lose that practice. In the flipped model, however, when students don’t do their homework, they don’t get the foundation for even being able to attempt the practice.

That is a major concern of flipped classrooms — especially if students cannot watch video modules at home because of a lack of access to a computer or an internet connection. Schools are getting creative in solving this problem, including by outfitting buses with Wi-Fi, sending students home with computers that have internet hotspots and expanding their networks to cover the entire district.