Flipped Classroom Workshop
Before changing students, change must first begin with its teachers…
In March 2015, as a collaborated effort to revolutionize Taiwan’s traditional education system, The Alliance Cultural Foundation (ACF) and Junyi Academy together organized the second Flipped Classroom Workshop at Junyi School for Innovative Learning in Taitung. The workshop, aimed to inspire more teachers the notion of flipped classroom, hosted 123 teachers from 40 primary and secondary schools in the Hualien-Taitung (Huatung) region of Taiwan.
Flipped Classroom Workshop, first introduced a year ago in March 2014, was purposely conducted in Taitung, due to the limited resources brought into remote regions as such in Taiwan. It promotes the use of the free mandarin-Chinese based online education platform, www.junyiacademy.org, which features online video lectures developed by Junyi Academy to inspire teachers to take the podium out of the classroom, giving the stage back to its students. Flipped classroom education encourages video lectures to be assigned as homework, and homework assignments to be done in the classroom supporting interactive study. The workshop hoped to bring teachers working out of the remote regions together to share and encourage one another in how to best inspire their students in the classroom through flipped learning.
The online learning website offers students from remote regions an equal learning opportunity as students from the city. It currently has over 150,000 registered users, with thousands of viewings per day. 18% of its users are registered in Taitung – the highest percentage separated by region in Taiwan. Taitung currently has 20 schools implementing the flipped classroom theory. Because of its remote location, flipped classroom is especially beneficial to students there as teachers and resources are limited which often leads to impeded learning.
On the first day of the workshop, 13 teachers shared their flipped classroom experiences, they emphasized that learning is no longer restricted to only using textbook material and that a variety of teaching methods may be implemented to help find what best suits the child’s individual learning needs/style.
In this day and age, technology is more than ever integrated into education. As more educators are gathered to be inspired by the theory of flipped classroom, ACF and Junyi Academy hopes to advance Taiwan’s educational system, whether it be through new or traditional teaching styles, so that Taiwanese youths may shine on the world platform. For change to occur, teachers must first take a chance in changing their habits and trying unconventional methods of teaching. Through time, effort, transformation, and encouragement, our child’s success is then possible.
