Example Flipped Lesson: Constitutional Law

📌 This front-loads the vocabulary a lesson depends on. Students meet the difficult terms and their definitions on their own, before anything asks them to reason with those terms, so that the concepts are already in place when the real content arrives.

In this example, students work through a short flashcard deck: a term on one side, its definition on the flip. They do this first, and only then watch the concept video. The order is the design. Meeting the vocabulary first means students are not decoding unfamiliar terms and following an unfamiliar structure at the same time, and research shows that students who review key terminology before a lesson learn more from the lesson.

📌 The pre-class video does not have to be a recorded lecture, and in a theoretical, knowledge-heavy course it often isn't, since the length that makes a recorded lecture complete is the length that stops students from watching it. The usual fallback is a summary of the lecture to come. But a summary only previews the lecture; it does not prepare students for it. If you cannot move the whole lecture to pre-class, give something that supports the lecture instead: the key terminology, or a map of the concepts and how they connect. 

In this example, the pre-class video is a short mind-map concept video, designed together with an instructional designer from CELT, that lays out the structure of the lecture to come: the main concepts and how they relate to one another. It works as an advance organizer. Students arrive already holding a map of the territory, so they follow the lecture more easily and notice more while it is happening.

📌 The Bridging Activity, also called a Transition Activity, carries students from the pre-class stage into the classroom. It takes place during class time but still targets the Remembering and Understanding levels of Bloom's Taxonomy: students retrieve what they met at home before they are asked to build on it.

In this example, it is the first thing students do when they walk in. A short Mentimeter poll asks what was covered in the pre-class concept video and flashcards, and the whole class sees the responses at once. What happens next depends on those responses: if many students answered incorrectly, the instructor clarifies briefly; if most answered correctly, the class moves straight on to the lecture and the active learning that follows.

📌 When content is theoretical and dense, moving all of it to pre-class may not be possible. The risk was never the lecture itself, but a lecture delivered to students with nothing to attach it to. 

In this example, the pre-class stage supplies that structure and the bridging activity confirms it is there before the lecture starts. Because students arrive already holding the concepts and how they relate, they are less likely to drift off, and the instructor can more easily run the lecture as an exchange: they have had time to think about the concepts of the lesson before meeting them again here. 

The instructor does not assume the lecture landed. Every session closes with an active learning task, where understanding is demonstrated rather than presumed.

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