On a recent morning Landry’s eighth-grade biology class examined similarities in amino acid configurations to trace evolutionary relationships between horses, donkeys, rabbits, snakes, turtles and whales. If that sounds advanced for a middle-school classroom, that’s because it is.
Landry said he frequently introduces his students to advanced concepts to prepare them for high school and beyond.
Technology is a big part of how Landry teaches, and instead of doing roll call each class, he has his students run a personal QR Code over a scanner. He maintains an online resource for his class, and students are required to watch online videos and listen to specific podcasts before class.
The actual classroom time sees students divided into teams of four and given assignments to carry out. Students are also equipped with plastic discs that are green on one side and red on the other. When students get stuck, they place the red side up on their table so Landry will come help them.
“I never give them the answer. I always ask them questions so they can find the answer,” said Landry.
J. Wesley Baker, a communications professor at Cedarville University in Ohio, is one of the early proponents of the flipped classroom approach and helped popularize the name. He said the approach allows the instructor to interact with students during the most important time of the teaching process: When they are working on problems.
“They’ll hit a roadblock and won’t be able to understand it,” said Baker.
He said lecturing reduces the role of the instructor to transferring information to students, often in a mindless, unengaging way that doesn’t stick very well. It’s like they’re reading a textbook out loud.
The urban legend website Snopes.com has an entry about a tale published in 1963 in which a college professor started delivering lectures by leaving a tape recorder on his podium and leaving the room. He supposedly went back early one day to find the students had all left but placed tape recorders on their desks to record the lecture.
Baker found himself in a similar situation in the early 1990s. He was delivering lectures for class that consisted of him reading slides to his class as he worked to develop a class that could be taught remotely. Students were writing down what the slides read verbatim.
“I thought, `This is really stupid,”‘ said Baker. “Information was traveling from the slides to their notes without passing through either of our brains.” He finally gave his students the information from the slides, and he had walked halfway back to his office before he realized he had just given away all of his content and didn’t know what he was going to do for the rest of the semester.
Baker ended up using classroom time to check that students understand the course information and had them work on assignments in the classroom. Someone else told them he was “flipping” the time and place of homework and class lectures and the name stuck.
Baker said there is no single model for flipping the classroom, only a set of guidelines. He said there is still a place for the instructor to lecture the class, just not as often.
- Children learn best on paper: We need better technology, not less of it - July 13, 2026
- In districts, reaching readiness, retention, and success - March 5, 2026
- AI use is on the rise, but is guidance keeping pace? - January 2, 2026