Every new teaching strategy has a learning curve. Just trust the process — your students will follow.
I almost abandoned my flipped classroom and went back to traditional during my first year of flipping. I am so glad I didn't listen to that voice. It's 2026, and every single one of my classes is still flipped. I trusted my gut. The gut won.
But here is the thing — that first year was rough because I believed a bunch of lies about what flipped classroom is supposed to look like. Lies I told myself. Lies I read on the internet. Lies that almost made me quit. Let me share them with you so you don't have to fall for them too.
§Lie #1: "I need a catchy introduction."
"My video needs a catchy intro to grab attention."
I wasted hours on this in the early days. Recording fancy intros. Adding music. Trying to start with a hook like a YouTuber. "Hey what's going on guys, today we're talking about the y-intercept." Cringe.
No, you don't! Your students are not on YouTube to be entertained. They are on YouTube because they have a homework problem due tomorrow. Skip the intro. Get to the math. The first 5 seconds of your video should already be the lesson.
§Lie #2: "My videos need to be long so I can explain more."
"Longer video = more learning."
So I made 20-minute videos. 25-minute videos. Once a 35-minute AP Stats video. I thought I was being thorough. I was actually losing my students at minute 6.
Keep it under 5 minutes. If the topic is bigger than that, cut it into Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Short videos get rewatched. Long videos get abandoned. (See my full take on the 5-minute rule here.)
§Lie #3: "I trust my students will watch the video."
"They are good kids. They will watch."
They are good kids. They will not watch. Or some will, some won't, and you will not know who is who when you walk into class the next day. Trust without accountability is a recipe for chaos.
Don't grade the watching — that's impossible. Grade the notes from the video. Hand-written notes, photo of notes uploaded to the LMS, or a quick walk-around at the start of class. That single change saved my flipped classroom. Students take notes → students learn → students are accountable.
§Lie #4: "I will not teach as much, since the lecture is on video."
"Flipping = less teaching for me."
HA. No. I work harder in a flipped class than I ever did in a traditional one. But it is a different kind of work — and it is the good kind.
You don't teach less. You teach differently. Class time becomes hands-on, problem-solving, project work, peer-teaching, real conversations about why a method works. You become a coach instead of a lecturer. The student who used to zone out in row 4 — now you actually have time to walk over and help them.
§Lie #5: "Students will just copy each other's notes."
"They will cheat. The whole system will collapse."
This is the one that almost made me quit. I caught a student copying notes from a classmate who had watched the video. I panicked. I thought, "this is the end of flipping. Everyone is just going to copy."
Students will cheat — it's inevitable, and it happens in traditional classrooms too. But here is the magic of a flipped classroom: even the student who copies still learns something. When they copy notes from a classmate, they are reading and writing what their classmate watched on your video. They are still being exposed to the lesson. Compare that to a traditional class, where students copy answers on the homework — without ever understanding the steps. In a flipped class, even the cheating teaches.
§The truth about making videos
I want to leave you with something honest. Recording lessons can be frustrating. Even after 16 years of doing this, even with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, even after Google flew me to Manila — recording videos can still be a mess.
Sometimes the marker dies mid-sentence. Sometimes my dog barks during the take. Sometimes I lean in too far and the corner of the whiteboard slider tries to take me out. Like, literally.
Even Apple Distinguished Educators get head-butted by their own whiteboard sometimes.
Recording a calculus lesson and… well, accidents happen :) Just like any skill — flipping math takes practice, patience, and a willingness to laugh at yourself.
Every new teaching strategy has a learning curve. The mistakes are not the proof you should quit — they are the proof you are doing something new. Trust the process. Your students will follow.
§So if you are in year one…
Don't quit. Believe me. The voice telling you to abandon ship and go back to traditional teaching — that voice is wrong. I listened to it for about a week and a half before my gut told me to push through. Best decision of my career.
Year two is easier than year one. Year three you will wonder why anyone would ever go back. By year sixteen, like me, you will be teaching every single class flipped, and you will not even remember what it felt like to lecture for 50 minutes straight.
The mistakes I made are not bugs. They are the curriculum. Make them, learn from them, and keep going.