BGSU Classroom Technology E-Mag Spring 2018 | Page 28

Flipping Physics

By: Carolyn Bajaksouzian

Flipped classroom is not necessarily a new idea. Many have heard of giving a video lecture the night before a class, and using the class time to increase student interaction with the content of the video through activities or examples. But what if it were done in the opposite order? What if students were able to construct their own ideas of a concepts through a guided line of questioning before being introduced to the content? That is what I did with my AP Physics flipped classroom.

When introducing the concept of the Law of Conservation of Momentum, I came up with a list of questions to get students thinking. What quantities are conserved? Could momentum be conserved? If so, when might momentum be conserved? If momentum were conserved, what would that mean? If it were conserved, what would the conservation of momentum equation look like? Very little guidance was provided at this point.

From there, I asked them to consider a collision. Would momentum be conserved there? What would that equation look like if it were conserved? If they were to test for conservation of momentum in a collision, what would that experiment look like? In groups, the students created a procedure for an experiment they would conduct the next day.

After students had their own ideas about the content, then they were able watch to either confirm or adjust their misconceptions. This is opposite of of the traditional flipped classroom, and worked well for this type of inquiry lesson!