Thinking on this more: There's a high level of self-direction required of students in a flipped classroom model, and by my experience in the US public school system, the kids who're already doing well will do just fine in a flipped (or otherwise self-directed) model, but the at-risk kids are the ones who would need more attention--just like in the classroom.
So I'm friends with one college student, and she hates flipped classrooms. It's not because she's irresponsible, either. (This is college, not high school.) She feels like it takes more time and she gets less out of it. It really doesn't work for her.
So I think that
> the kids who're already doing well will do just fine in a flipped (or otherwise self-directed) model
is not true in all cases. I suspect she's not the only outlier, either.
I concur. When we tried these things in undergrad, it would be three people on their phone, three people giving an earnest effort but having no clue what to do, and one person who actually understood what was going on being burdened to drag the other people through the exercise like an unpaid TA. If there was more than one person who understood what was going on that was almost a bigger issue, running into the 'too many chiefs and not enough indians' problem which kills productivity and ends in frustration on all sides.
Ahh, that's very fair as well. I guess the underlying issue is, of course, different people learn differently, and we shouldn't have a one-size-fits-all solution... even though that's what we're driven to: efficient-in-terms-of-quantity systems to churn through large piles of students with minimally enforced expectations of the quality of received instruction.
