What if you flipped the flipped classroom?
When instructors “flip” their classrooms, they generally assignprep work ahead of in-person or virtual meetings. The thinking is that learnerscan consume lectures as video content; they can master foundational concepts orfacts on their own, by reading or watching videos. This frees teaching time forguided work on problem-solving, analysis, and applying learning to varioustasks.
Guild Masters Bob Mosher and Conrad Gottfredson, partners atAPPLY Synergies, suggest flippingthat model one more time: Flip it “application forward,” which Mosher alsodescribes as “flipping after the classroom experience” in a 2016article, “3 Ways to Flip the Classroom.”
“A lot of people flipped the other way: They flip before.They think of all these things they need to do and provide the learners beforethey get to class, so that when they come to my room they’re prepared tolearn,” Mosher said. “Con [Gottfredson] would say that’s not what it’s about.What it’s all about is what happens after they leave your room.”
What does it mean to flip the classroom application-forward?
Start with critical skills analysis
According to Mosher, Gottfredson coined the term “criticalskills analysis” 15 years ago, and, while developing that concept, he “had anepiphany.” When studying critical skills and tasks, instructional designerscommonly look at which tasks are “important”; they rank tasks from simple tocomplex; and they are accustomed to grouping concepts and chunking information.“These are all very familiar words to IDs,” Mosher said, “but Con said there isa missing variable that changes the whole nature of the classroom.” Thatvariable is criticality.
Criticality is measured in terms of the consequences of anerror, Mosher said. Gottfredson “has a rubric—a one-to-seven rubric, veryspecific, bulleted, what is a one, what is a two, what is a three. You canimagine: Ones are totally inconsequential, meaning if I fail, it’s a blip onthe screen, I have to look something up; it takes me a couple seconds, and I’mright back where I was before, and frankly, no one but me notices. It doesn’thurt the company; it doesn’t hurt me,” Mosher explained. “Now a seven? A seven.If you screw up on a seven, people die. Maybe literally. Companies are sued.Customers are lost. So these are things he puts under a seven, right? So thenyou can imagine that there’s all the things in between.”
Once the task analysis is done and Mosher and Gottfredsonknow the workflow, the typical day, and the tasks that learners need toperform, they figure out the criticality level of each. “I know all the thingsyou do as an accountant from 8 to 5; I know all the tasks you perform,” hesaid. “What I don’t know, though, is which of those 35 tasks we’ve identifiedare the most critical—not ‘important.’ Everything’s important.” Mosheremphasizes that word choice matters here. All of the tasks might be important,he said, but not all have the same consequences if the employee makes amistake. “If you screw up this task at 9 o’clock, what is the consequence offailure? And if the consequence is a two? Well, guess what? I’m not teaching atwo.”
That’s where the critical skills analysis comes in.“Critical skills analysis lets us look through a very clear, practical lens atwhat the workflow they are going back to is literally like,” Mosher said. It’sabout figuring out the toughest tasks a learner will face. “What are thingsthat are scary to fail at on my own, and what are things that I can brushmyself off and, with a good support tool, figure out in the context? And fromthat, I craft my blended classroom workflow solution.
“Once we’re done, and we’ve labeled all these things by thiscriticality, we theoretically take all the fives, sixes, and sevens—that’s kindof the dividing line—the fives, sixes, or sevens, and that becomes ourclassroom experience. Now there are some fours that make it for a lot ofreasons; it’s not a hard line. But that’s kind of where we divide.”
Why? The consequences of a learner failing at thelower-ranked tasks are minor. The learners could look up what they need in awell-designed job aid—which Mosher and Gottfredson also provide. But the sevens,the sixes, even the fives? Those are worth practicing with the coaching andguidance of the instructor. That is the essence of flipping forward.
Focus on what matters
“What it’s forced me to do is look at the entire experience,and all of the tools of my craft, including the traditional ones, through avery different lens, and therefore, the deliverables have been very different,”Mosher said. The deliverables that he and Gottfredson create are layered tools,based on a pyramid. Employees can quickly find the information they need,presented at the level they need. For the employee looking for a quickrefresher on how to fill out a form, it’s the top of the pyramid. A new hire,doing the form for the first time, can start at the base of the pyramid wheremore context is presented. This approach to eLearning is paired with a face-to-faceor virtual-classroom experience that is flipped application-forward.
Gone are the days of weeklong in-person training on how touse a spreadsheet, Mosher said. “Now, if people have an hour to take aneLearning module on Excel, they’re lucky.” Rather than bore learners and fillclass time with lectures, this flipped model uses learners’ scarce time withSMEs and instructors to focus on the tasks with the greatest criticality. “Conwants to make that experience, with those people in the room, for the rare timewe have left at doing it, as impactful and really optimizing the things that aclassroom does best.”
Their approach often gets pushback from clients. “A lot ofpeople say, ‘Well, Bob, you’re skipping material.’ No, no, no. I never use theword ‘skip.’ What I say is, ‘I’m not covering it in this modality of teaching,but I’m covering it brilliantly in my workflow learning tool that I givethem,’” he said. “When I made my original design—that’s my promise to mycustomer, that they’re going to get it covered—it’s all covered. Now thequestion is, how? And how most effectively? The classroom is a stunninglearning environment. Stunning! But it’s really badly used with lecture andPowerPoint slides and all this stuff, because the poor instructor’s trying toget through the 5,000 slides.”
Mosher and Gottfredson know that learners can read or watch thatmaterial on their own. Instead, time in the classroom “becomes about understanding,experiencing, struggling with those critical tasks. And then, the other onesare left to be learned in the context of work with the performance supporttool. That’s the flipping I describe in that article. It’s flipping application-forward,which is the only place it can ever happen—in the workflow.”
