Flipping v lecture

I began this post about one year ago.  I have not posted in quite some time due to many things.  I am beginning again I am leaving the part I began as it is and am editing after in italics

Flipping the classroom is all the rage right now and I am was fully on the bandwagon.  I have this niggling fear that many of us in the teaching profession are going too far with this idea.  I have tried fully flipping and although (as I posted earlier) there are many benefits to doing it, after a couple of years I feel like I am losing the very thing that makes me a quality teacher.  You cannot be personal on a video.  You can tell stories but videos are really all about information.  I am a story teller.  I love to teach (lecture, discuss) biology with stories about my life, life in our town, their lives and things I have learned.  This is extraordinarily difficult to do in a ten minute video.  When you lecture, you are delivering a message with words, powerpoint, images and video clips.  You are in the moment, engaged with students in an adventure of learning.

"Sage on the stage" is the derogatory phrase often used for a "lecturer".  However, I can really remember things I learned from great teachers who lectured.  True, not every kid may be "engaged" in my lecture, but not every kid is "engaged" when I give them group work to do either.  NO KID "engages" all the time.  I don't "engage" all the time in meetings etc.  It is human to disengage and reengage.  It is up to the leader to keep a person "engaged". 

One phenomenon I have found interesting is how the very people who preach against lecture espouse using things like Ted videos for learning.  Wait a minute...isn't that a VIDEO OF A LECTURE?  That is interesting.   So, I (the person they see every day, the person who taught their siblings, the person who hugged them when they were down, the person who laughs at their dumb jokes, the person who has met their parents) should not lecture them but an anonymous scientist from some far off land should?  This is not to say that TED lectures are bad to do in class, far from it.  Neither are Khan academy videos or any other means to bring the outside world in.  They just should not be the be all and end all.

I have come to the conclusion that if I cannot make an interesting lecture out of a topic, then students should watch a video.  If it is facts I want them to know, a video is a good way to do it.  If it is a topic that requires thought, is interesting to talk about, and can be fun to discuss, the lecture/discussion should take place live.

Over the years as I incorporate lectures back into my classroom, my students ask for them more and more.  They don't really say why but I believe it is because lectures stimulate thinking and the "Why" questions pop up.  They want me to be the leader in the classroom, they don't want to have to look up every factoid in google, they want to hear interesting stories and laugh out loud.  They want to know why things work the way they do not from "howstuffworks.com" but from me.  

If you read my previous posts, I went into flipping with all I had.  There are MANY good reasons to do it. I am not sure that LEARNING is one of them anymore.