For all lessons?

I love teaching - anybody! I have struggled with the way we are supposed to express this. To some the term teaching means you are the font of all knowledge, you stand in front of the class and they listen adoringly as you explain the meaning of life the universe and everything. This has never been my teaching style. I freely admit when I am uncertain about something, I am happy if a pupil has further knowledge or more knowledge than me and I expect to be challenged (about knowledge), I love acting (sometimes in a crazy manner) to draw attention to a point, I love getting the pupils engaged in physical learning where they need to move around and experiment. I call this teaching, although I have been told on multi occasions that this is facilitating, this is my teaching!Within a flipped classroom this experience often changes and the pupils work in the lesson on an independent task or a group project that is linked to the learning they undertook before the classroom. Now I understand that making time for group activities is important,

“Increasingly,  education’s value-add is and will be in the coaching and troubleshooting when students are applying their learning, and in challenging students to apply their thinking to hands-on learning by doing and teaming:  so let’s have them do these things in class, not sit and listen.”

However, I have also spent years looking at differentiation in the classroom. Can we truly expect every child to learn from a flipped classroom. Some pupils will, they will engage with the material, they will seek the key points and then they will be able to use these skills in the class discussions and activities. But what happens to those who do not learn like this? Those who ask all the questions as questioning is their learning tool? Those that you literally have to pull through the class and you know will never do any work at home (sometimes they have nowhere that they can call home). Surely we need to look at models that can engage all these groups - hence the need for differentiation in class.I have developed a teacher toolbox (mine would be a bit of a mess like this!)and in this box there is a variety of methods to make lessons engaging, interesting and accessible - trying to give different tasks and instructions to the differing abilities. This is my job! My job is the decide on the best fit for each topic, each class and each child - and that changes there is no one-size fits all. My toolbox constantly grows and I enjoy experimenting with new ideas, this is where I see flipped classrooms. This is a tool that I may use, when I think it is appropriate, not a tool that will be used for every lesson.  So the flipped classroom. Lets just assume all the pupils have a method of viewing this and they all have the English (as I teach in English) required to understand and they all are motivated to watch and have the mental capacity to understand the topic from a video, at this point than I can see real value. I have seen it work. The high level mathematics class is taught through this method, at my school. They watch theoretical instructions (created by the teacher) out of class (and can watch them over and over until they are sure) they use the class time to apply the theory and it is excellent they are all very engaged and the pupils can work at their own pace. I produced a couple of "nearly" flipped lessons that were to be taught by a variety of teachers. By producing the lesson content it allowed the pupils to follow at their own pace and to re-watch any elements they did not understand. These were a little bit different though as the videos were used in the lesson and not before. [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR4n5aQvuJs[/youtube][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iULfOyah1bg[/youtube]However it is my first real experimentation with this technique and I hope to develop it further, so that I feel confident to use it, when I think it will be of real value!