Inverting the Classroom in Large-Enrollment Classes: A Beginner’s Guide

Abstract

The inverted classroom model (ICM) has started to attract attention as a pedagogical approach in political science teaching. While there are many publications describing the application of the model in single courses and analyzing students’ performance in inverted classes, the existing literature provides little guidance for first-time users of the model. In this Political Science Instruction article, we offer a beginner’s guide for preparing and applying the ICM to assist other instructors who wish to invert their classes based on our repeated experiences with the ICM in an introductory International Relations course. Employing a constructive alignment approach, we show how a course can be broken into learning units, each with an online preparatory phase geared toward knowledge acquisition and attendance and follow-up phases focused on application and the development of higher-order cognitive learning objectives. To deal with frequent challenges and pitfalls, we recommend trying a partial inversion first, inverting a familiar course, being prepared for initial resistance from students, sticking with the concept, rethinking theinstructor’s role in the classroom, and combining tight planning but flexible execution of the attendance phase.

Keywords:

• Inverted classroom
• active learning
• lecture

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to Tobias Rammel for research assistance and thank Markus Bayer, Carola Klöck, Felix S. Bethke, Dorte Hühnert, Aletta Mondré, Andrea Schapper, Kai-Uwe Schnapp, the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this paper.

Notes

1 Fink (2003, 66–154) provides a more detailed model of instructional design that is very similar to our approach.

2 The growing sophistication of learning analytics also makes it possible to design adaptive learning paths where, e.g., students doing poorly on one test are directed toward a remedial exercise while better-performing students are moved directly to the next assignment.

3 We thank one anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

Additional information

Funding

The data collection for this paper was financed by a grant from Stifterverband für die deutsche Wissenschaft [grant no. H120 5228 5008 24723].

Notes on contributors

Daniel Lambach

Daniel Lambach (PhD, University of Cologne) is a Heisenberg Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. He is also a Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Institute for Development and Peace and a Privatdozent at the Faculty of Social Sciences, both at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He is co-speaker of the Teaching and Learning section of the German Association of Political Science.

Caroline Kärger

Caroline Kärger is academic adviser to the vice president for digitization at the Hamburg University of Applied Science. She is working on digitization strategies of higher education institutions as well as on teaching and learning in the digital age. In her political science courses she regularly uses innovative teaching and learning methods, especially from the broad spectrum of digital possibilities.