Let's Talk about a Dirty Word: Money!

 careerservices.lafayette.edu

The topic of this week's blog entry is the flipped classroom. That is the topic I am addressing here. However, at the risk of being deemed a pariah, I want to look at it from the perspective of money. More specifically, I want to look at it from the perspective of the flipped classroom's potential negative impact on the income stream of educators.  

I want to believe that those of us who become professional educators do so for three reasons. First, we enjoy imparting knowledge, know-how, and wisdom to our students. Second, we believe that through educating our fellow man we can help the world become a better place. Third, well, we need money! We are professional educators, not volunteers!

Judging by events taking place at the college where I teach, flipping my classroom may force me to get an additional job flipping burgers. The administration seems to place a premium on time spent in front of my students lecturing and seems to substantially undervalue lab time spent standing behind each one helping him or her resolve issues and correct errors. 

I teach digital art courses. These courses require that I teach the students how to use computers and software. While it is possible to just lecture to my students, the only way that they will ever learn to master the material I teach is by using the software and working their way through the projects. As necessary, I devote class time to helping my students learn the required computer skills by having them work through each one with me guiding them. The administration considers this sort of instruction as lab work. 

The administration wants to establish a new pay structure which places a premium on lecturing and devalues lab work. If the proposal becomes policy, due to the nature of the courses I teach and the way I teach them, I will either have to teach an additional course to maintain my current level of compensation or I will simply receive even less compensation per credit for the work I do now.

ilearnproject.com

If I flip my classes and, in effect, turn my face-to-face time with my students into lab time, the administration may very well increase my teaching load or reduce my compensation per credit even more than they are already trying to do! Unless someone can figure out how to make the day longer than 24 hours or I decide to live in my truck, I do not know how I could survive if I flipped my classroom and the administration deemed my new class structure as 100 percent lab.

Flipping the classroom does sound good in theory. As an educator I love the idea of flipping the classroom. It would be awesome to have my students come to class prepared. It would be fantastic to be able to spend the precious commodity that is face-to-face class time trying to help my students polish their understanding. However.... Knowing my students, knowing that the vast majority of them do not bother, or cannot be bothered, to read the material I painstakingly create and prepare for their benefit, I doubt, seriously doubt, that they would take advantage of the educational opportunity presented in theory by flipping the classroom. 

Remember that education is the one thing that people will pay dearly for but for which they will often not partake. Even if I could lead my students to the educational waters presented through the flipped classroom, I doubt that many of them would drink!

Flipping the classroom would most likely encourage the administration to try to either increase my workload or decrease my rate of compensation. It would not serve about 90 percent of my students well. Viewed through the lens of these possibilities, in my case, flipping the classroom would just be a bad idea!