Unforeseen Impediments Emerging in the Process of Flipped Learning: A Lesson Learned in FIBER

Abstract

Flipped Issue-Based Enquiry Ride (FIBER) is a pedagogical framework to integrate flipped learning into the approach of issue-based enquiry in social humanities education. This working paper presents the work that we conducted in the first research cycle (the first year) of a piece of two-cycle design-based research (DBR) on implementing FIBER in the context of formal curriculum learning and teaching in Hong Kong. The entire DBR involved 9 teachers (from 9 different secondary schools at different academic bands) and their Secondary-5 classes in two consecutive school years. In this paper, we focus on discussing the unforeseen impediments emerging in the course of FIBER that hindered students’ learning in the first research cycle. The findings not only shed light on how to improve and optimize the current teacher facilitation acts in FIBER to be enacted in the second research cycle of the DBR, but also alert “flipped” educators and researchers to the potential problems occurring in the course of flipped learning.