The project complements what emerged in the case study on the “E-school” section at the “Melchiorre Gioia” Classical, Scientific and Linguistic High School in Piacenza, a co-founder and leader of the Educational Avant-garde Movement. The case study’s objective was to experiment with the “integral” Flipped Classroom method, that is, extended to all classes and all subjects of the study pathway. The research showed that:

• having students exercise autonomy and responsibility in the home study phase, and even more so when working with classmates at school, is an enabling factor to adopt the Flipped Classroom approach. In the absence of autonomy, the teacher’s direct intervention is required, and this can progressively return the “flipped” lesson to the familiar territory of the conventional taught class;
• the opportunity for children to constantly work in groups on a daily basis, in all disciplines and over the course of five years, emerges as a possible key factor in the development of transversal collaborative skills, cooperative problem solving skills, public speaking skills and creativity when using digital tools for production. The above seems to underscore the importance of a systemic, “part of the working day” and non-sporadic approach to this type of teaching;
• for students to study and achieve results by using video lessons prepared by their teachers, the lessons must be precisely prepared and teachers have to possess the necessary media design skills. Hence the need for targeted training, which is currently left especially to the initiative or talent of the individual teacher;

Given this evidence provided by a single school in the Educational Avant-garde Movement, the need emerged to understand whether and how such evidence might apply to the extended community of teachers in the Movement. There are currently 1,333 schools, 687 of which have adopted the Flipped Classroom method. The research activity is related to the Strategic Guidance Document, precisely the Institutional Policy Guidance Act concerning the identification of the Ministry of Education’s political priorities for the year 2022. It particularly refers to Objective 3 “To promote processes of didactic and digital innovation” for the part concerning “Innovation of didactic methodologies including through the integration of digital tools”.

Research questions

Q1: Following the experiences of distance learning and integrated digital teaching, what is the current level of implementation of the Flipped Classroom in Educational Avant-garde schools? In addition to those already known, are there any experiences of an “integral” implementation of the method?

Q2: Do teachers implement actions aimed at promoting and supporting autonomous learning by students? What actions?

Q3: What is the state-of-the-art regarding the self-production and use of digital educational content and the multimedia skills of teachers involved in experimenting with the Flipped Classroom approach?

Recipients

Teachers at schools in the Educational Avant-garde network