Flipped Confirmation:

A year-long case study and what we have learned

by Rebecca Fisher

When your pastor straps a GoPro on his head and dives into a swimming pool to illustrate baptism, you have a middle-school student’s attention! Thus, Week Two of our year-long experiment to bring flipped confirmation instruction to our children and parents began.

Ask most high schoolers how they solve atough problem and they will often refer to what they watched rather than what they read. Khan Academy, YouTube, Twitch and Tasty are samples of often-used go-to resources. In addition, in our community of Lincoln, Neb., all middle school students, whether public or Lutheran schooled, own Thus we need to immerse ourselves in their water.and use Chromebooks as a vital part of their educational life. This is their fluent language, it is the water in which they swim. We want to reach them passionately and personally, because lessons learned in confirmation have so much value when internalized fully. Thus we need to immerse ourselves in their water.

We decided to flip our confirmation classroom this past year, asking students to watch a 10–15 minute video at home before each Wednesday night session and both respond to and provide questions that are sent directly to our confirmation director. When a student arrives at confirmation on Wednesday night, the pastors respond to the questions generated by the students and learning gets personal, connections are forged. The final 30 minutes are spent applying the concepts even more personally in a small “family group” setting under the careful direction of a small group leader.

Why make this change from the more traditional model of direct confirmation instruction?

Students with learning disabilities and sensory processing disorders have difficulty catching all the information when surrounded by 100 others, looking up at a pastor, a screen, a stage, and trying to take notes. They benefit from the ability to replay, rewind, and review at their leisure.
Increasingly, consistent attendance on Wednesday nights is challenging for students who move between two homes each week, are involved in sports, or who get caught in snowstorms (this IS Nebraska!). This provides a means of getting the information that they might miss.
We serve a large number of 7th/8th grade students, which makes it difficult and a bit embarrassing to ask the pastor direct questions about the lesson for even the most outgoing of the group. Because students submit questions EACH TIME they watch a video, each child is heard. We found that we were receiving 30–50 unique questions each week. The pastor still had to select a representative batch to address.
Students have time to open their catechism and Bible, as the video can be paused for the resources to be assembled.
Previously, parental engagement was thin. That has changed significantly, as often the students listen/watch in the car on their mobile device between games or on the way to a destination. Parents become a part of the audience. So when your pastor shows up on screen with his beloved Eagles football jersey and connects it to the Jewish concept of “remembrance” it is seared in a student’s memory... and the parents can’t help but watch and/or listen. Most weeks, one end-of-video directed question asked the child to interview the parent about a topic. “Mom, tell me about my baptism!”

So what does Wednesday night look like now that direct instruction is happening at home?

The end game is to create memorable lessons that will remain in the students’ minds as they leave the door of the church and step into the world outside.Our first 10-minute segment is designed to hook students into the topic at a personal level. Using Kahoot, Pictionary on whiteboards, Poll Everywhere, and other game tools, the students answer questions relating to the material they watched. This gives the leaders an opportunity to determine any missed material and reminds the students of what they just watched.
A quick segue leads into the pastor spending 15–20 minutes answering the questions that students submitted online after watching the video. Students sometimes beg to have their questions answered as they submit them. They are engaged; these are THEIR questions.
An active multi-sensory experience occupies the next 10-15 minutes. Some examples: penny washing, sin demolition, newspaper wars, Seder meal (split into three different weeks during communion discussion). We’ve even used mousetraps under silver platters; the end game is to create memorable lessons that will remain in the students’ minds as they leave the door of the church and step into the world outside.
The final half hour consists of direct personal application and discussion in small groups that move and then settle all over our campus. The leader engages students in the topic once the weekly highs and lows are shared.

What is required to make this happen?

Two keys: a pastoral staff willing to go on camera, and a theology-comfortable and tech-comfortable leader to edit in the middle school visual appeal while being aware enough of the current culture to hook them. We use Camtasia Studio to edit the video from the pastors, and host both the computer and mobile version of the edited video on Screencast, allowing us to obtain the questions directly from the students. We receive data reporting whether students did or did not watch the videos, what they rewatched, what they skipped, and at what time this occurred. Yes, there’s a lot of watching on Tuesday nights and Wednesdays on the way to cross training in the family minivan! But they are engaged, and our “watched” percentage hits 95 percent.

Challenges?

Our flipped classroom challenges are primarily time-based. Pastors at Christ Lutheran embraced the concept enthusiastically even though it requires some creative thinking and a comfort level with the not-so-flattering reversed cell phone camera or webcam in their face. Maria Castens, Assistant Director of Middle School Ministries, does a great deal of editing. She finds that the editing process fills as much time as she allows it, so she has to create clear, self-imposed time boundaries for each video.

Blessings?

Both the students and their parents have responded enthusiastically, and they are more engaged in class and small group discussions. Some unexpected benefits emerged as well. We invite willing, seasoned congregational leaders to conduct face-to-face interviews about the materials covered with the same pair of students each quarter. These interviewers have found the videos to be beneficial as well, as they now know what the students have learned, and they enjoy the very different method of instruction from their confirmation process. We also have others who are not in our confirmation program watching the videos. All are available on our church website.

Is the juice worth the squeeze?

We believe it is, and so we will continue to invest our time and attention in this new delivery system. Since visual learning through technology is the water in which our students swim, we want to be ready to jump in and swim right alongside those little fish, so that “we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!" (Acts 2:11b NIV)

Rebecca Fisher serves as director of children and middle school ministries at Christ Lutheran Church in Lincoln, Neb., a dual-site growing congregation. Prior to this, she directed the middle level education program at Concordia University, Nebraska and taught in St Louis, Los Angeles, and Orange, Cal. She or Maria or Pastor Jeff Scheich would be happy to answer any questions about this grand experiment.

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