Jasper Fox gives an interesting presentation on his experience of flipping the classroom. There are some great ideas in here and you get a real sense of his dedication to his work.
He kicks off by contrasting tradional education – all students doing the same thing at the same time – with asynchronous – each student doing different things at their own pace. It’s a simple idea and was desperately lacking in the classrooms I grew up in. It’s also lacking in a huge number of corporate trainings, where the ghastly phrase “If you’ll all turn to page 94 in your manual” tends to prevail.
I also recall how a psychotherapist told me that a huge proportion of relationship difficulties come down to differences of pace. If you miss that difference you end up thinking the issue is something else, and end up pursuing red herrings.
I think what makes working with groups interesting and frustrating is to be reminded that although we assume people are alike, they are in many ways different. Again and again, someone in a group will say confidently that this is how we should do things, or this is how we actually did things, only to to be surprised to find not everyone agrees. (See this post on the game One to Twenty for a bit more on that).
Pardoxically, I think there’s an aspect of being on the same beat that can also be very satisfying to people, and still compatible with learning. We can have a shared experience, even though we get to make very different meanings of it.
Balancing these needs for beloning and feeling connected, with those for difference, is an interesting and continuing challenge.
Hat tip: David Gurteen for this tweet
