My son's algebra class is supposedly "flipped" but no work is done outside of class.

Background: I have twins in eighth grade. Their algebra class is taught by the same teacher, with my daughter being in the standard algebra and my son in the advanced. My son is less motivated but things tend to come naturally to him. My daughter has ADHD but is motivated and works very hard. Both are honors students. This is the first year they have split classes in this way. The advanced class takes on a few more topics and that's basically it.

Son, who has generally high marks in math, recently failed a test. He could recall very little of the material when we went over the test. A common refrain was, "We never went over this."

We have seen complaints about this particular teacher before. That she doesn't lecture. That everything is done with notes. That there is no formal instruction being done. Parents of past students have also concurred that this is how this class is run. Specifically, it is a flipped class though they don't tell that to parents at the time.

I begin researching flipped classrooms and discover that this is effectively the design. But is it? My understanding is the students watch the videos before coming to class, and spend class time doing the "homework". But this is not what is happening here. The teacher's videos are watched during class. The notes are copied down by students during class. The practice is done during class. Mastery quizzes are multiple choice, undertaken in class, and can be repeated as many times as necessary (which to me encourages gaming of the system rather than learning).

I thought the whole point of flipped classrooms is the rote teaching is done outside the classroom to free up class time for higher thinking. But it sounds like this has been corrupted into something which is leaving kids behind at a similar rate as the old ways. Please tell me I'm wrong about this and there are just growing pains here. I just find it bizarre that we're this deep into a unit about slope and both my kids - one getting a B and the other staving off a D grade - can't tell me the definition of a slope, cannot graph y=x, and have to refer to their notes to recall any work.

Submitted December 31, 2023 at 11:34AM by EdgeBandanna https://ift.tt/4Kj0mEn