Abstract:

Introduction:
Italian school, nowadays, doesn’t seem to play the role of social elevator, knowledge acquisition and culture promoter that once had (Benvenuto, 2011). Pedagogy shows that participation, experience, engagement are real driving factors towards the development of deep cognitive and learning activities (Vygotsky, 1978; Bruner, 1997), but Italian high schools seem to be linked to old traditional transmission practices and to struggle more than others in promoting, at an institutional level, more participatory didactic practices.
Within this landscape and in the theoretical framework of the pedagogical activism (Dewey, Motessori, Freinet, Ferriere), the Caetani high school in Rome has started, 4 years ago, a trial based on the flipped model (Bergman& and Sams, 2012; Maglioni, 2018) that involves an entire section of the three-years period of the “Human Science” grammar school.

Objectives:
The research aims to observe, through a qualitative approach, if this kind of teaching works in terms of: student and teacher satisfaction; feeling of belonging to school and community; motivation; participation to the activities; learning.

Participants :
Four experimental classes (flipped model; 83 students aged 15-18) and three control classes (traditional model; 64 students aged 15-18) of the same school.
The instruments for collecting data are: participant observation; questionnaires and focus groups, both for teacher as for students.
The observations were held for 2 weeks for each experimental class and for 1 week for the control ones (total of 55 days).
The questionnaires were addressed to the whole teachers and students of the experimental and control classes; they are on a Likert sale and include several batteries: CKP (Muukkonen et al., 2016), AMOS QAS (De Beni, Moè, Cornoldi, 2003) and ECPQ (Du Merac, 2017) for students; CKP and MESI (Moè, Pazzaglia, Friso, 2010) for teachers.
The focus groups are seven for the students, one for each observed class, and two for the teachers (one for the “traditional” and one for the “experimental” ones).
In July a partial initial restitution of the collected data will be shared with teachers and in November another cycle of participant observation will be held, and interviews to the teachers will be collected, in order to observe if any change will be occurred.

First results:
Data are still under investigation. At the present, student questionnaires (n.= 135) and teacher focus groups have been partially analyzed.
Student questionnaires have shown that there is a statistically significant difference (One Way Anova p<.05) between flipped and traditional teaching-learning method in 10 scales out of 18: “Learning to exploit technology” (M traditional 2,54; M flipped 3,55), “Integrating individual and collaborative working” (M tr. 3,21; M fl. 3,54;), “Development through feedback” (M tr. 2,86; M fl. 3,16), “Self-evaluation” (M tr. 3,42; M fl. 3,66), “Participation” (M tr. 2,62; M fl. 2,89), “Feeling of belonging” (M tr. 2,64; M fl. 3,07), “Impartiality” (M tr. 2,75; M fl. 3,06), “Pressure/competition” (M tr. 3,17; M fl. 2,91), “Quality of the teaching proposal” (M tr. 2,80; M fl. 3,24), “Pleasant accommodation” (M tr. 2,07; M fl. 2,78).
Teachers focus groups’ analysis has shown a different approach to students, learning and ideas regarding school between the two groups; furthermore, the flipped one was incredibly richer than the other and the teachers were much more homogeneous and tight-knit.

Keywords:

Flipped model, experimental classes, high school.