so you see how they're in the same what if you took the traditional school day and flipped it on its head not literally of course but having lessons offered at night at home and homework done by day in the classroom that's the experiment underway at Clinton Dale high school just outside Detroit an area is still reeling from the economic and social ills of the nearby city the school serves many low-income families and faces tight budgets and declining enrollment so what's the number parking on April 3 just three years ago almost half of Clinton Dale's ninth graders were failing math science and English and overall school performance was ranked in the lowest 5% in Michigan yeah principal Greg Green decided to take a risk frankly when we're doing very well and so yeah we had to make a change I mean we were we're desperate for change his aha moment came while coaching his 11 year old son's baseball team having learned to record and post instructional videos for his players to watch outside of practice he was struck by how much time was then left to focus on individual players on the field he saw the educational potential starting with the power of videos because go back and watch them as many times that they want and enemy ISM is an instructor or expert I don't have to redo that all the time and I can spend my time with with the students in class and actually assisting them and so if I could do that with 11 year olds imagine what we could do with 15 or 16 year olds to be math Green went all in flipping the entire school urging his staff to rethink the use of technology and how it complements traditional teaching and getting local businesses to help fund the after the legislative branch make the laws now lectures are recorded and posted online the American Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865 where teachers can assign outside videos from the popular Khan Academy and TED Talks pretty small yeah students watch these videos as homework outside of class why do you say akuto Nia in class students now do what was once considered homework assignments designed to test learning comprehension clinton dale teachers say this allows more time for one-on-one help and often encourages students to collaborate in problem-solving but English teacher Rob damron said it took some convincing when we first did this it was funny to look around that staff meeting I look at a lot of staff members you know especially the ones that have been here 25 30 years it's in what are you talking about what's a blog you know what's a Google group apostrophes makes a noun show ownership or possession for teaching for 20 years I know what lessons kids are going to have a problem with but I think with doing this flipped approach there's problems I didn't even know existed so you really can't hide back there in the corner and say yeah I got it you know and then the teacher sees later on well no you really didn't get it one problem the school faced head-on students who can't afford or don't have access to technology outside of class they're given extra time in the school's media lab segregation before 1954 taking the technology driven approach further some lesson plans are now tailored to have students use the latest trends in social media I think the moment is when we have the right to vote we do you think about we deserve like this project have required constitutional amendments to be summed up in six seconds for the popular website vine Greene says that taken all together after three years the flip is paying off our HTT games have have shown LW the national average as far as ECT games you know state testing we've had some mixed results on that and we've also seen an increase in graduation rates to almost 90 percent of college acceptance rates at 80 percent senior Darrell Wallace jr. is one example his grades have risen from a 2.5 GPA as a freshman to 3.5 as a senior and he says the flip has played a big role he now watches videos on his cell phone taking the bus home into a rough section of Detroit where he lives with his mother and four sisters I really looked at the videos more because I know I might not have as much time at home because my sisters are in college and they need the computer so I'm like I can do it on my phone and the bus ride is like 30 minutes so I probably get like half of my assignment done Darryl's mother's Sabrina young also likes the flipped model saying there's only so much she can do to help with traditional homework especially algebra so I'm doing it s Co is a plus for him an as well as me because I just didn't remember do we charity of it the popularity of online learning is surged in recent years and flipped classrooms have started popping up everywhere from elementary schools to some of the nation's top universities Clinton Dale is the first u.s. high school to do a total flip Harvard's Justin Reich has been studying the trend and says he's cautiously optimistic what is exciting to me about the flipped classroom is that it gets teachers asking two really important fundamental questions what are the best ways for me to use my time especially the very precious time I have in classrooms with my students and then what are the kinds of direct instruction that I could provide that could be digitized so that people could watch it again I gave you a week five but Reich says that flipping alone isn't enough as with any lesson plan it all depends on exactly what's being offered if what we see from the flipped classroom is that we take bad lectures and uninteresting worksheet problems that characterize a lot of the experience that students have in schools and we simply flip the order of those two things the odds that we see significant improvement in our schools is pretty low and so now we're going to be taking the derivative with respect to T meanwhile some individual teachers are experimenting with the flipped classroom on their own three years ago Stacey Roshan flipped her upper level math classroom at the private Bullis High School outside of Washington DC where students pay up to $35,000 a year in tuition high r-squared age she says it's been working for her but that it might not be for everyone I think what's the most important thing is that you really think through what your problem is I wouldn't say that because everybody's doing the flipped classroom it's cool you should do the flipped classroom too my problem was really time anxiety and perhaps if I went to another school I would do things completely differently one added surprise for Roshan in structuring her class this way is what she learned about the reach of her online lessons I get thank-you letters from students all the time not even just from the US but overseas too and I at that part always amazes me back at Clinton Dale principal Greg Greene's big experiment is getting a lot of attention more than 200 educators from around the world have visited the school trying to draw lessons from the flipped classroom