Speaker 1: What if you took the traditional school day and flipped it on its head? Not literally, of course, but having lessons offered at night at home and homework done by day in the classroom. That's the experiment underway at Clintondale High School, just outside Detroit, an area still reeling from the economic and social ills of the nearby city. The school serves many low-income families and faces tight budgets and declining enrollment.

Speaker 2: So what's the number part that I'm going to need for all three?

Speaker 1: Just three years ago, almost half of Clintondale's ninth graders were failing math, science and English. And overall school performance was ranked in the lowest 5 percent in Michigan.

Speaker 2: Principal Greg Green decided to take a risk. Frankly, we weren't doing very well. And so we had to make a change. I mean, we were desperate for change.

Speaker 1: His aha moment came while coaching his 11-year-old son's baseball team. Having learned to record and post instructional videos for his players to watch outside of practice, he was struck by how much time was then left to focus on individual players on the field. He saw the educational potential starting with the power of videos.

Speaker 2: Kids can go back and watch them as many times as they want. And in me, as an instructor or expert, I don't have to redo that all the time, and I can spend my time with the students in class and actually assisting them. And so if I could do that with 11-year-olds, imagine what we could do with 15- or 16-year-olds doing math.

Speaker 1: Green went all in, flipping the entire school, urging his staff to rethink the use of technology and how it complements traditional teaching, and getting local businesses to help fund

Speaker 3: the effort.

Speaker 4: So the legislative branch makes the laws.

Speaker 1: Now lectures are recorded and posted online. The American Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865. Or teachers can assign outside videos from the popular Khan Academy and TED Talks. Students watch these videos as homework outside of class. In class, students now do what was once considered homework, assignments designed to test learning comprehension. Clintondale teachers say this allows more time for one-on-one help, and often encourages students to collaborate in problem-solving. But English teacher Rob Damron said it took some convincing.

Speaker 5: When we first did this, it was funny to look around that staff meeting and look at a lot of staff members, especially the ones that have been here 25, 30 years, and saying, what are you talking about? What's a blog? What's a Google group?

Speaker 6: Apostrophes makes a noun show ownership or possession.

Speaker 5: For teaching for 20 years, I know what lessons kids are going to have a problem with. But I think with doing this flipped approach, there's problems I didn't even know existed. So you really can't hide back there in the corner and say, yeah, I got it. And then the teacher sees later on, well, no, he really didn't get it.

Speaker 1: One problem the school faced head-on, students who can't afford or don't have access to technology outside of class. They're given extra time in the school's media lab. Taking the technology-driven approach further, some lesson plans are now tailored to have students use the latest trends in social media.

Speaker 7: Thanks to the 19th Amendment, us women have the right to vote. We deserve to vote. We deserve to vote.

Speaker 1: Like this project that required constitutional amendments to be summed up in six seconds for the popular Web site Vine. Green says that, taken all together, after three years, the flip is paying off.

Speaker 2: Our ACT gains have shown doubling the national average as far as ACT gains. State testing, we have had some mixed results on that. And we have also seen an increase in graduation rates to almost 90 percent and college acceptance rates at 80 percent. Senior Darrell Wallace Jr. is one example.

Speaker 1: His grades have risen from a 2.5 GPA as a freshman to 3.5 as a senior. And he says the flip has played a big role. He now watches videos on his cell phone while taking the bus home into a rough section of

Speaker 4: Detroit, where he lives with his mother and four sisters. I really looked at the videos more because I knew I might not have as much time at home because my sisters are in college, and they need the computer, so I'm like, I can do it on my phone. And the bus ride is, like, 30 minutes, so I probably can get, like, half of my assignment done.

Speaker 1: Darrell's mother, Sabrina Young, also likes the flipped model, saying there's only so much she can do to help with traditional homework.

Speaker 7: Especially algebra. So him doing it at school is a plus for him and as well as me, because I just didn't remember the majority of it.

Speaker 1: The popularity of online learning has surged in recent years, and flipped classrooms have started popping up everywhere, from elementary schools to some of the nation's top universities. Clintondale is the first U.S. high school to do a total flip. has been studying the trend and says he's cautiously optimistic.

Speaker 3: What is exciting to me about the flipped classroom is that it gets teachers asking two really important fundamental questions. What are the best ways for me to use my time, especially the very precious time I have in classrooms with my students? And then, what are the kinds of direct instruction that I could provide that could be digitized so that people could watch it again?

Speaker 6: You'll notice that the last set of notes I gave you were for week five.

Speaker 1: But Reich says that flipping alone isn't enough. As with any lesson plan, it all depends on exactly what's being offered.

Speaker 3: If what we see from the flipped classroom is that we take bad lectures and uninteresting worksheet problems that characterize a lot of the experience that students have in schools, and we simply flip the order of those two things, the odds that we see significant improvement in our schools is pretty low.

Speaker 8: And so now we're going to be taking the derivative with respect to T.

Speaker 1: Meanwhile, some individual teachers are experimenting with the flipped classroom on their own. Three years ago, Stacey Roshan flipped her upper-level math classroom at the private Bullis High School outside of Washington, D.C., where students pay up to $35,000 a year

Speaker 8: in tuition.

Speaker 1: She says it's been working for her, but that it might not be for everyone.

Speaker 8: I think what's the most important thing is that you really think through what your problem is. I wouldn't say that, because everybody's doing the flipped classroom, it's cool, you should do the flipped classroom too. My problem was really time, anxiety, and then, perhaps, if I went to another school, I would do things completely differently.

Speaker 1: One added surprise for Roshan in structuring her class this way is what she learned about the reach of her online lessons.

Speaker 8: I get thank-you letters from students all the time, not even just from the U.S., but overseas too. And that part always amazes me.

Speaker 1: Back at Clintondale, Principal Greg Green's big experiment is getting a lot of attention. More than 200 educators from around the world have visited the school trying to draw lessons from the flipped classroom.