In the unfolding terrain of 21st-century education, history teachers are called to be more that simply narrators of the past. We are, increasingly, called to design of learning environments for engagement, agency, and meaning. In my own classroom, this shift has been most visible in my evolving use of a flipped learning model.
When I began to discover the flip…
I’ve been flipping my classroom for years now. I think I was first flipping my classes sometime around 2015 or 2016… and, back then, I’m pretty sure that I didn’t know “flipping the learning” was a thing! I wasn’t flipping because it trendy. Not because some edtech guru was spruiking about it. But because it made sense to me.
My memory is notoriously weak, but I have a distinct memory from those years. I can remember lecturing students in a Year 9 History class from a PowerPoint presentation. And it was lecturing. It was ‘sage on the stage’ mode. It was teacher centred teaching. It wasn’t ineffective and, I suspect, it was a responsive and engaging form of lecturing but it was, in essence, didactic. I suspect that saw myself as the primary source of knowledge for students.
At the end of that particular lesson, I can remember reflecting: “Why wouldn’t I just screen record my discussions of this PowerPoint? Wouldn’t it make more sense to let the students watch it at their own rate?” – so, that’s what I tried.
Thus, began what must be close to a decade long engagement with flipped learning.
Since that first lesson, I’ve done a lot of reading and learning about flipping. I’ve discovered in that time that flipping is much older than I had realised and about much more than making videos of content.
Over the last decade, flipping has become core to my practice… but I don’t think I’ve ever directly addressed my experience of flipped learning approaches in detail here in my blog.
History needs to be more.
History teaching, if it is to mean anything, must be more than the transmission of other people’s narratives. There’s something deeply passive about copying down notes, reading set texts, and coming to pre-baked (often teacher positioned) foregone conclusions about the past. In those classrooms, students become spectators. I think our job is to help young people become ‘players in the arena’ -to think, question, and engage with their world.
That’s where flipping the classroom comes in.
Flipping to me isn’t just about putting my didactic lectures online or assigning a video before class. When I talk about the “flipped” model, I’m probably most shaped by some of the key ideas of a Harvard’s expert on peer instruction Eric Mazur who positioned flipped learning as more than a teaching technique, but as a radical reframing of how classroom time is used.
Mazur isn’t the only pioneer of the flipped classroom. Perhaps the true pioneers of flipped approaches are American teachers Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams. Alison King, Lage, Platt, and Treglia are other names that you might track down when you explore the idea of inverting classrooms. A notable pioneer of the use of instructional videos is also Sal Khan. His work with Khan Academy is significant and also of note in any discussion of flipped approaches. But, to me, Mazur is a significant influence.
Defining the approach
Flipped learning, in its classical form, is deceptively simple. Students absorb core content – lectures, assigned readings, videos – outside of class, and then use the limited precious classroom time for the more complex tasks and the journey of sense-making: for discussion, problem-solving, and working through misconceptions together.
As Baepler, Walker, and Driessen (2014) put it, the flipped classroom uses “interactive learning activities” in class while lectures move “out of formal class time.” In this way, the traditional classroom is ‘inverted’ or flipped. What I’ve noticed in my practice is that in this flip, much of the solitary work of foundational learning is done outside of the classroom and that the time we share in the classroom in community and connection with others is used… well, in community and connection with others!
I feel that the real heart of this model is found by reference to Mazur’s two-step framework, Mazur’s work emphasised the importance of peer learning but at its core was a recognition that we do not truly work to the best of our ability in isolation. Humans are social creatures. Schools are (should be?) social place. In these spaces, Mazur saw learning as a two-step process:
- The often individual and solitary engagement of the learner in a process of transfer of information; and
- the work of sense-making – the moments when learners apply, discuss, critique, and reshape knowledge into deep and lasting understanding. To Mazur, this second stage was best performed in collaboration with others.
Mazur’s The Two-Step Learning Process: A Snapshot of My Practice
Mazur frames learning as a two-step process:
Education is a two-step process. The first step, you need to transfer information. In the second step, the learner needs to do something with that information — build mental models, make sense of it, be able to see how that information and the knowledge embedded in it applies to the world around us.
Let’s break that down with reference to my classroom.
Step 1: Information Transfer, in my approach to flipped learning, (generally) happens outside the classroom. It’s where students encounter core content for the first time. In my classes, it’s usually through my home-made short video explainers that are upload to my school’s YouTube channel… but it doesn’t have to be a video.
This ‘transfer encounter’ might be through a set reading, a provided primary source, a reflective task, a required conversation with family, or even a visit to a site in the students’ local area.
What’s important at this stage is that there’s a shift of responsibility: students in Step 1 are entrusted with the responsibility to engage with some set content before class, thus setting the stage for deeper engagement when they join the class group.
Mazur has been clear about this shift:
Simply transmitting information should not be the focus of teaching; helping students to assimilate that information should.
This phase is often misunderstood as passive. In my practice, it’s anything but. It requires careful scaffolding. Step 1 requires student activity and engagement. Substantive interaction with the learning. Pre-lesson tasks need to be deliberately designed to activate and connect with prior knowledge, build new understandings and experiences, generate questions, and identify misconceptions – which then shape the second, more crucial phase.
For the flipped model to work, Step 1 MUST happen. Students need to be held accountable for their learning at this stage.
Rigorous and authentic checks for understanding (and completion) are essential. It is not enough to assign pre-class work and hope students engage with it. I’ve learned that without meaningful accountability, Step 1 loses its power.
Students must know they will be held to account for their learning in the private space — not through punitive measures, but through structures that make their thinking visible. These checks must be more than a tick-the-box recall quiz; they need to assess comprehension, spark reflection, and surface confusion. They need to be a process whereby evidence of learning is collected. These checks for evidence of learning (CELs) must be intentionally designed to reveal whether the learner is truly ready for the deeper work to come.
I routinely require students in my class to develop a unit mind map as they study. Using styluses in Microsoft OneNotes, they add information to and edit their unit mind maps as they engage with my videos. In my checks for understanding, I often require students to ‘talk me through’ these mind maps in unscripted screen recordings submitted as Assignments in Microsoft Teams. When students complete the assignment / check for understanding they get feedback. When they don’t, the get follow up action. Students must be held to account for their own learning. In this way, I believe I am gathering authentic evidence of student learning on multiple occasions throughout the unit of study.
In a flipped classroom, accountability isn’t about control. It’s about a lot of things but, to men, it’s primarily about knowing the learner and how they learn, it’s about helping me to be a responsive teacher, and it’s about ensuring students arrive equipped for sense-making. It’s the hinge on which the whole model turns.
Step 2: Sense-Making happens in class – and this is where learning becomes richer and more visible. It’s where students are invited to collaborate and share their ideas. We come together in groups in classrooms not to sit in silent rows but to become communities of learning that collaborate, connect, challenge, and engage with complexity. We come together to test our ideas in the company of others who have done the same. We come together to support each other as learners, and to share and apply what we’ve encountered privately. It’s where we wrestle with the tensions of historical narrative, the complexity of evidence, and the demands of interpretation.
Active learners take new information and apply it, rather than merely taking note of it. Firsthand use of new material develops personal ownership.
From Passive Reception to Active Meaning-Making
History, as Sam Wineburg and other pioneers of historical pedagogy remind us, must move students from spectatorship to participation – from watching others make meaning to doing the interpretive work themselves. A flipped model that stops at the level of passive video consumption risks is missing the mark entirely.
In my classroom, then, the flipped model isn’t simply a delivery method. It’s a design philosophy.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Front-loading content: Early in each unit, students access curated historical content through (largely) self-paced resources. Often, in my practice these are videos. The videos I make are generally using a product called ScreenPal but the product you use doesn’t much matter.
- Sense-making as central: Classroom time is repurposed for discussion, collaborative inquiry, and ethical interpretation. Students engage with each other, with historical problems, and with their own evolving understandings. Class time is precious time. My aim is to make every lesson a deep learning experience if I can!
- AI as partner, not proxy: I’m conscious of the risks of cognitive offloading and the need to maintain cognitive friction in my classes. Learning must be appropriately challenging and appropriately accessible. My goal is to work in a way where students work transparently and critically with AI as a thinking partner, not an answer machine.
- Teacher as the ‘guide-at-their-side‘: I prefer my wording of this to that of others. In the classroom, I try hard to do more ‘sitting with’ students as they engage with problems. I am very hesitant to rush to rescue students from the cognitive friction. I see my role as having shifts from instructor to that of coach or trainer. (Sporting metaphors abound in my classes.) I love seeing my students push their boundaries – and the boundaries of the tasks they are set – to work ‘to failure’. I try to move through the room with offering more questions, than answers – and what I’m watching for isn’t content recall, but epistemic growth. I’m keen to see: how a student reasons, argues, and justifies their conclusions; why they believe something and the evidence they use to support that belief; their ability to connect, synthesise, evaluate, and create new ideas. I want to see them moving beyond a single “right answer” toward acknowledging complexity and ambiguity.
To me the flipped model in motion is not a pre-packaged system for content delivery, but a living structure, responsive to student needs and anchored in deep pedagogical values.
The AI Shift: What Needs to Evolve
We are teaching at a moment of extraordinary technological upheaval. AI is changing how students learn, what they produce, and how they see themselves in relation to knowledge. That means our pedagogies must adapt.
Mazur’s insight – that “simply transmitting information should not be the focus of teaching” – has never been more urgent. AI can, or will likely soon, transmit information better and faster than any teacher ever could. Such disintermediation of information is a process that has been developing for some time. But it is not a tool that truly amplifies the humanity of our students. That amplification comes from how teachers work with their students. I see the role of the teacher as one of amplifying student connection, sense of community, voice, and agency. I think these things are crucial.
What AI can do, however, is extend our power as teachers to carry out this amplification. It can free up time, personalise resources, and open up new avenues of inquiry. It can support student self-differentiation. It can act as a student’s 24/7 instant tutor in ways that free up teaching time for something richer – something more. But only if we use AI wisely. While maintaining appropriate friction and cognitive load. Only if we treat AI as a means to deepen learning.
In this sense, it’s my view that AI won’t replace the flipped model; it’ll enhance it. It’ll helps us go further with the flip. But the goal will remain the same: in-class time is for messy meaning-making, for the hard work of thinking together.
Towards a Flipped AI Future: A Call for A Reimagined Pedagogy
The flipped classroom must not become some sort of set pedagogical dogma. Its strength lies in its adaptability – in its capacity to evolve in the face of different circumstances, challenges and opportunities.
In my own practice, I’ve come to see the flipped model as a vessel – one that can hold multiple approaches, values, and provocations. It can be slow and deliberate. It can be digitally rich and human-centred. It can support generative, reparative, and transformative history pedagogies that invite students to imagine possible futures, not just recall past ones. It can support students to be more present in ‘the now’.
Ultimately, to me, flipping is not about activities and exercises.
It’s about finding deeper purpose in our classrooms.
Flipping is about making the time in our communal shared spaces of learning for something richer and more in history classes. Classes that aren’t about simply about the past but very much about the now and the tomorrow.
Flipping the default assumptions about who and what matters in a history classroom.
It’s about flipping who gets to speak. Who gets heard. Who gets to question. Who matters.
It’s also about how we might use our classrooms as platforms for building a better world.
That’s the flipped model I believe in. And in a disrupted world, it’s the only one worth building.
Happy Holidays To You All!
Have a Wonderful Christmas and All the best for the New Year!
Disrupted History 
You must be logged in to post a comment.