Kate Lavelle
A page within Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning (CATL)
Dr. Katherine (Kate) Lavelle teaches in the Communication Studies Department and is the director of the UWL Public Speaking Center (part of the Murphy Learning Center). During the Fall 2020 semester Kate decided to take a flipped classroom approach for her Communication Criticism (CST 315) course. Flipped Class learning while having been around for a while, took on a slightly different meaning with our virtual teaching environment. For facilitation purposes, Kate separated her class into 3 different cohorts each cohort would meet during a synchronous or live session. After engaging with prerecorded lectures ahead of time, the synchronous meetings were designed to deepen understanding through discussions of peer reviewed articles, applying the material to a variety of different texts and through clarification conversations.
She admits that the flipped classroom approach was more time intensive to prepare and, in an effort, to not overwhelm her students with tons of lecture material to engage with, got through less content than in a normal semester. Her advice to faculty interested in implementing this model of instruction is to be ok with covering less content and use canvas announcements/communication systems to share answers and information across cohorts.
Interested in learning more about flipped classrooms? Berkley’s Center for Teaching and Learning has a great article outlining the different models and shares some potential resources to help the process.
Contact Info
Profile: Kate Lavelle
Email: klavelle@uwlax.edu