Great at Work: The Hidden Habits of Top Performers

by Morten T. Hansen

A few months into Scheel’s experiment, when Green sat down at his desk to check the students’ first set of exam scores, he thought something had corrupted the data. Students in the flipped classroom were outperforming the traditional class. The lowest grade was now a C. Students who had been forced to repeat a grade were now thriving. Best of all, the failure rate had plummeted. To zero. How was this result possible? Green suspected that Scheel’s students had succeeded in the flipped model because they could receive help with their homework in the classroom. Once these students left school, it was hard for them to focus—their homes were too chaotic, their neighborhoods too dangerous, the demands of their after-school jobs and other obligations too heavy. These students usually had nowhere to turn for assistance if they had trouble with their homework, since the subject matter exceeded their parents’ comprehension. Under the flipped model, students watched the lessons wherever they happened to be—on the bus, in their bedrooms, in the break room at the grocery store. During class time, when they dug into the work itself, a teacher or fellow student had helped them clear each academic hurdle.