The Flipped Classroom, Lethal Mutations, and the Didactical Contract: A Cautionary Tale

Abstract

The flipped classroom model interchanges the roles of in-class and out-of-class time to allow students more time to engage with cognitively demanding tasks when expert help from their instructor is more available. An extensive body of literature supports the effectiveness of this model. In contrast, I present a case study of a less-successful model: the instructor did not attend class sessions, which were instead staffed by three graduate teaching assistants. Students reported dissatisfaction with this model; they believed that the instructor breached the didactical contract. I propose that this case represents a lethal mutation to the flipped classroom model.

Keywords:

• Flipped classroom
• inverted classroom
• calculus
• didactical contract
• lessons learned

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my appreciation to colleagues Chris Rasmussen and Rich Levine for providing valuable fact-checking services. Additionally, I wish to thank several anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their valuable feedback and for the subtitle of this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Spencer Bagley

Spencer Bagley is an assistant professor of mathematics in the School of Arts and Sciences at Westminster College; he lives in Salt Lake City with his husband and three cats. He was previously an assistant professor at the University of Northern Colorado. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics education from San Diego State University and UC San Diego. He is currently interested in developing scalable assessments for conceptual understanding of calculus. He promotes active learning pedagogy in his teaching and research. He enjoys cooking, baking, good food, and a nice cup of tea.