Yau-Jong Twu, a physics teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, inaugurated the flipped classroom with her colleague, Dr. Laurent Rigal, in the fall of 2012. Rigal, a native of France, was surprised when he first arrived in America to find that physics was not a required subject for all high school students in the U.S., as it is in his home country. Some high schools had only one physics class of 30 students in a school of 2000. “The vast majority [of high school students] will graduate without having taken one minute of physics in their lives,” Rigal said. He views this as unfortunate.
The number of physics students at ERHS is substantial. The school has eight classes of Physics ST and two classes of AP Physics B. Rigal estimates the total number of physics students at from 250 to 260 students.
In the fall of 2012, Twu (pronounced two), who had been teaching AP Physics at ERHS since 1999, started a flipped classroom for her AP Physics B classes. In Twu’s classroom, students watched assigned instructional videos the night before. In class she re-capped the material and assigned activities. The point was to free up time to do more student-centered activities. In a flipped physics classroom, Twu could help students with problem-solving, and do a lot more labs.
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