Episode 32 - Master Physics Teacher on How to Prepare for AP Physics - Dan Fullerton

In this episode of the SupportED Learning Podcast, Dr. Joe Sebestyen sits down with Dan Fullerton, NY State Master Physics Teacher, author of seven physics prep books, and founder of APlusPhysics.com, to explain how a microelectronics engineer who built semiconductors at Samsung and Kodak ended up teaching high school physics and pioneering an approach that flipped the traditional classroom on its head. 

Dr. Joe Sebestyen and Dan Fullerton break down what students and families actually need to succeed in AP Physics, including the real difference between AP Physics 1, 2, and C, why math is the language of physics but not the point of it, how to recover from a bad first quarter, and the free resources he recommends students use alongside textbooks. Dan also explains why 1:1 device rollouts haven't fixed learning, why "whoever does the work does the learning" should be every teacher's north star, and why grades are just a silly letter on a silly piece of paper.

This episode is especially useful for students preparing for AP Physics, parents trying to understand which AP Physics course fits their kid, high school physics teachers rethinking their classroom model, and educators interested in flipped learning. Dan gives a clear, honest framework for building resilience, owning the struggle, and using physics as a way to learn how to learn anything.

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📲 Connect with them: https://www.aplusphysics.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aplusphysics

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You're listening to the Support Ed Learning Podcast, where we challenge the status quo of education and reimagine what learning should be. I'm Dr. Joe Sebastian, and in every episode we dive into critical thinking, Bloom's Taxonomy, educational innovation, and how AI is shaping the future of learning. Whether you're a teacher, parent, policymaker, or lifelong learner, you're in the right place to rethink, reshape, and revive education. AP physics is one of the most feared exams in the AP lineup. Students freeze up, parents panic, and most prep resources just throw more content at the problem. Dan Fullerton was research scientist who helped build semiconductors at Kodak and Samsung, and then he walked away to teach high school physics. He's since written several prep books, built a video library with millions of views, and pioneered approach that the flipped the traditional classroom on its head. Today we're unpacking how he does it. Welcome back to the Supported Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Joe Sebastian. Families often ask me how to navigate the rigorous landscape of college emissions as well as high school prep for various AP courses. And usually the answer involves finding the people who have figured out the rules of the game and cracked the system. So that is why I'm thrilled to introduce Dan Fullerton here today. He is a veteran physics teacher and the founder of APhysics.com, author of seven plus physics prep books, NY State Master Physics Teacher, and currently the RIC director at Marone on is it B O C E S, where he oversees OCs, where he oversees technology services for school districts and the Rochester region. So we're going to dive into AP Physics, why it terrifies students, and what most families get wrong about prep and the framework Dan has built that has helped millions of students worldwide. So Dan, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Thrilled to be here. Quite my pleasure. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Yeah. So I've given them the highlight real like, how does a person that's in the corporate world, in the tech world, looks like has a great, great career there, just say, Yeah, I want to teach now. How did that happen?

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Complete mistake. So I was a uh microelectronic engineer by background, got my bachelor's, master's, worked at Samsung and Kodak here in Rochester, New York, where we were making computer chips for digital cameras. And after I finished my master's, the uh program I was in at Rochester Institute of Technology called and asked if I would be an adjunct professor, teach a uh a plasma physics thin films course at night. Uh, not having anything else to do, no family yet or uh or what have you, I thought it'd be a fun adventure to try. And when I started doing that, I really got the teaching bug. It was an absolute blast. But what I found was I got a little frustrated and I taught for four hours a week, usually two-hour sessions, uh, two evenings a week. And I was going through the curriculum so fast that I never had time to really meet the students. It was fun, but the interactions were limited. And somebody that I was working with at Kodak a year before had left to become a physics teacher at the high school across the river, said, Hey, why don't you come spend a day with me? And I did, and it looked like so much fun working with the kids. Physics is everywhere, so you can find tons of examples, project-based. And after sitting with them for a day, I thought, man, this is the way to do it. This looks like fun. They wouldn't even have to pay me. So I uh pulled a bait and switch on my wife who married an engineering manager, said, I'm going back to get my teaching degree. Eventually, I took over that classroom as that teacher moved somewhere else and uh had a great time doing it. So walked into it by accident, but wouldn't have it any other way in retrospect.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

Yeah, what was going through your head there? Just that basically you wanted to make more of an impact towards kids, and the really the seems like you sought out relationships in that aspect.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

Very much so. Very much so. And in all honesty, part of me was saying this is ludicrous, and I'd love to say it was about making the world a better place when I first started, or you know, I really want to give back to the community. True, all nice things, but it was really driven selfishly initially, and that just looked like a whole lot of fun. And I could see where we were at Kodak, the lifetime of the industry we were in was going to be taken over. They weren't going to be in business for a whole lot longer. And then the opportunity to go do something that I thought I would do tomorrow, even if I won the lottery, was just too much to pass up. And my wife was extremely supportive. So uh I did it because it was fun initially.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

And, you know, it's funny because like most uh European countries like Finland comes to mind of you become a master at something else before you go into the teaching, which it sounds like that was your pathway. So you have already mastered some aspect of engineering and are now coming back to the classroom to teach when a lot of teachers don't have that pathway. So you have real-world experience, which I'm sure the school appreciates and the parents appreciate.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Oh, thank you. You are too gracious. I wouldn't say I've mastered anything except the art of failing productively. Make a mistake, learn from it, and figure out another way to try it.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

So you get into the classroom and you immediately see starting to see like what's broken potentially or what's working, what's not. So when you walk into a classroom with an engineering brain, what did you see that most career teachers probably miss?

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Hmm. That's a tricky one. And if you don't mind, I'd love to turn that question around just a little bit to share. I know so many folks say if you uh can do, if you can't teach. And I kind of had a little bit of that attitude too. I'm teaching graduate plasma physics at a uh well-known university to engineering students and being successful. High school should be straightforward. And as I was student teaching with that same friend who I had uh visited his classroom before, the first two weeks I thought I was on fire. I was lecturing, we were getting through the material, I had it well organized, I had handouts for the kids. I turned around after two weeks and saw blank faces with kids having no idea what I was talking about. And really the turning point for me was I stopped and I talked to the students after two weeks, which was very uh challenging as a student teacher trying not to screw up. But they gave me all the feedback, honestly, of that's nice that you can write. We have no doubt you're smart. You didn't help us at all. So that really led me to a whole new pathway of how to think about teaching. I don't try and teach students. Instead, I think the real goal as an instructor is to learn with the students. If you can set up that sort of collaboration where you're going to learn hand in hand with them, that I think becomes effective and you're all marching to the same drummer as a team. That was my turnaround moment.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

So, you know, physics, especially AP physics, has this reputation of being extremely challenging. It's the AP exam that families fear the most, just because historically the pass rate's under 50%. What's the actual disconnect in what you've seen in how it's taught and how it's assessed, and ultimately why kids underperform when most of those kids are pretty smart.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

I think there's a couple things going on there. Number one, I think physics gets a reputation as tough and scary, partially through the media from Big Bang Theory to Albert Einstein. You say somebody's an Einstein, they must be smart. Folks don't really uh emphasize how much of physics is common sense and that you're you're doing it every day. If you can catch a tennis ball that's tossed to you, you're doing calculus in your head to figure out where to put your hand to catch that ball. You're doing projectile motion. Where folks get hung up then is understanding that oftentimes mathematics is the language of physics or the tool that helps us write physics in shorthand. So recognizing math is a tool, but it's not really about the math, that's where I think folks tend to get hung up. And you really need to know the language in order to converse and continue to grow in that. So having the math to go with the physics, but recognizing that it's just a tool to help you, I think, is a uh a big piece of the pie.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

And so if parents come to you and say their kid is struggling in AP physics, what should I do? What do most kids most parents get wrong about this situation?

SPEAKER_00 8:27

One of my favorite questions there too. I think it's that assumption that struggle in a class is a bad thing. I'm having a discussion regularly at home with my daughters right now, one of which is uh taking physics, and I used to tell parents at parent night the first uh couple weeks of school, if your child doesn't come in here and struggle, if they don't fail at least one exam this year, I'm not doing them justice. I want them to learn more than anything that it's okay to not always reach your goal on the first time. The students who have never failed, everything comes easy. They get in a hard situation, they get beat down once, and then they quit or give up. That's not what we're trying to build. 90% of the students who come through my classroom may never need physics in their career. That's not what it's about. It's really about helping them learn to struggle that it's okay, to fail productively, to screw up and recognize, well, what could I do different next time? How can I go about this and find a way to build that resilience as I also build the ability to teach myself independent learning school skills? That's what physics is all about to me. For the 10% of my students who go on to be engineers or physicists, they'll have lots of time to get that physics down. It's really more about learning how to struggle and that it's okay. It's not always going to come easy. That's the life skill.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

How does that go over with parents that are looking for like straight A's or get into schools?

SPEAKER_00 9:54

Yeah, that that has been a point of contention a couple times. Most of them are pretty uh pretty good about it. When I set up my classroom, I allow reassessments of I have used to have at least four versions of every exam that would test the same skills. And as long as the students took the time to go over with me the questions they missed, proved that they'd work on it, if they wanted to come take another exam on the same material, I was all about it. I don't care when you get it. I care that you do get it, that you keep at it. And once that was explained that it was really about how can we together come to a uh come to help your uh your kids reach their goals. That really changed the whole mentality. And then I started to get lots of fans, both with the students and the parents.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

So you saw a problem with kids struggling with AP physics, obviously inside, particularly outside of your classroom, instead of just complaining about it, you built something. Walk me through A plus physics.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

Another one of those happy sort of mistakes. So one of the challenges that I had, I think I told you those first two weeks, I lectured and realized nobody was getting it and really quickly helped me determine lectures aren't overly effective. Maybe you can get basic vocabulary or a couple things down, but I have a short little attention span too. After 10, 15 minutes, I'm not paying attention. Right. So it seemed to me it would make a whole lot more sense for me to give the kids for homework, watch this 10 or 15 minute video and watch it actively. Take notes, try the problems with me, things like that. But what we're gonna do is the 45 minutes we have in class every day, that's extremely valuable. I can't make that up at other times, and neither can they. They're all busy. Let's really maximize the use of that time where they're coming in, they're actively engaged in hands-on experiments to build understanding, they're working in small groups, I'm working with them individually, they're trying problems while I'm there to help if they get stuck. And if I can really, really do it well, instead of me versus 28 different students, if I can build a classroom of teachers so that I have 28 teachers in the room with myself just as a facilitator and they're teaching each other, man, that just becomes magic. It's a whole lot of fun. The kids like to be there, and we are so effective and efficient. So the idea was to build these short videos that would at least get you introduced to the topic, not in place of a lecture, but to start you down that path so we would be more efficient in class. Then I had a student sat in the corner who said, Hey, you know, could we have some notes for these? I'm trying to keep up, but after I do my own notes, I'd love to see how you organize it. Put those together and they were very popular, and the students said, Man, it's a pain in the butt to keep printing these out to three hole punch them, put them in a binder. Why don't you put them in a book? Well, I said no for a couple months and thought maybe that isn't such a terrible idea. I'm getting tired of fighting with the copier too. So that led to the first A plus physics book.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

So was this originally just for your kids in school? When did you decide to like actually do it outside of outside of what you did?

SPEAKER_00 12:59

Nope, that one student, I could tell you exactly what she looked like, where she sat, Emily, third row on the right in the back, uh, said, you know, you you ought to publish that. This would help a whole bunch of other students too. The kids in the f other physics classroom across the hall are asking about your notes and things. Right. And at the time, uh self-publishing was just becoming a new thing, and I thought, well, it's gonna be a whole lot cheaper than running to the copier every time, even to get these uh self-published and printed. You can put a cover on it, I can just hand them out to the kids. Boy, would that be simpler. So when you did that, there was a little button that said, Oh, you can also publish it on Amazon. All right, why not? And uh, I'll be darned the thing started to sell.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

So you've you've helped countless of kids with this, but you pioneered the flipped classroom for physics. A lot of people misunderstand what that means. Can you break it down what a flipped classroom looks like, especially with AP physics, and why it works so well?

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Yeah. Um, I think the the biggest mistake that comes to mind with flipped classrooms is folks thinking that flipped classrooms is learning by video. We're sending kids home to learn by video while they're watching videos on their phone or computer. And that's really not the point. The whole point of those videos is really to give the kids a brief introduction to the topic so they have some idea what you're talking about when you dive into class and gives you much more time for hands-on learning activities, collaborative learning. Uh physics, to my mind, is something you do. It's not something you know. The knowing piece, 10%. Being able to take that and do something with it, applying fundamental knowledge to new and unique situations, transfer skills, that's what physics is about. And the only way you get better at that is doing it over and over and over again. And that also ties into the philosophy of what can we do to change from being a teacher to I'm a facilitator and we're learning together. Once you start to set it up that way, where your labs are to help discover the next fundamentals, if you determine the relationship between how fast something falls, uh, you're gonna remember it a whole lot better than if somebody gives you a formula to memorize.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

This episode is brought to you by Supported Tutoring, where we don't just help students get better grades, we help them become critical thinkers. Whether it's mastering AP exams, maximizing college applications, or building lifelong learning habits, our expert tutors focus on critical thinking, confidence, and real growth. Head to supported tutoring.com to find the support your student deserves. So we say that a lot here too. We learn by doing, right? Whoever who telling is not teaching, whoever does the work does the learning. And you said that your fully flipped classroom for AP Physics C, you had no lecture, all hands-on, you saw the saw the highest exam scores you ever had. Tell us what did that what does that tell us about learning and about, I guess maybe what we're doing wrong.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

No, I think you just nailed it. If the teacher's doing most of the work, you're doing something wrong. And the only way to fully flip that classroom to where there was almost zero lecture in class, I had to have high performing, high executive functioning students, which you have typically in AP Physics C to begin with. These are kids who are already co-enrolled in calculus and they're in that class because they want to be there, or their parents really want them to be there, which is almost as good. So they're motivated, they've got those study skills down. And in that way, by sending them home to watch the videos, they would actively watch those try and build their own understandings, come into class asking pointed questions with background as to where they were stuck. I could get them to teach each other. They would work in very small groups and different projects tied to a tied to what we were doing. It was a whole lot of fun. I recall even uh I had a principal come in to watch for an observation once, and I said, My goal, and this I want to look like the laziest teacher in the building while the students are in the classroom and the hardest working one the moment they leave, said, When you walk in here, I am going to try for 45 minutes to not say a word. They know what they're supposed to do. They will come in, they will get in groups, they will start to teach each other, they will talk about where they're where they're struggling and where they're not. And if you can build that community of learners together, you've really got something special. And it took a lot of training to get them to that point, a lot of guidance. But by the time we were done, those teams of independent learners were just awesome. There is not they may take over the world someday.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

So AP Physics 1 versus AP Physics C, a lot of families don't understand the difference. Can you break down which one is the right for a student?

SPEAKER_00 17:55

I can. I will say that I uh as I answer this, that I have a personal opinion where I really like one of those courses much more than the other. Uh AP Physics I is algebra-based. It doesn't use any calculus, uh, which only allows you to go so deep in a physics course. So AP Physics I is kind of a not nearly as focused on math, but on theoretical concepts, and it's a survey course of a bunch of different subtopics in physics, as is AP Physics II. They're both algebra-based. AP Physics C has two different courses, AP Physics C mechanics and separately, AP Physics C electricity and magnetism. Those use calculus for their mathematics. So you have to be, I would recommend being at least co-enrolled in calculus while you do that. And I think it's great to be in a calculus class while you're taking that AP Physics C course, because now you know why you're learning that stuff in math. And what I truly love about the AP Physics C course is you really start to see the beauty of nature. Or if you hear folks talk about when you really go and study science and math and you see the patterns that make you think there may be a higher power, when you start to see that that same pattern, that same description of how the world works, from a leaf flapping in the wind to a spring, to an electron spinning around a nucleus, all of these things have the same basic mathematical fundamentals. I think you start to get into the really neat questions of philosophy and even theology potentially. But seeing the beauty of how that comes together in AP Physics C really makes it my favorite. If you have a student who is also in calculus, from my perspective, there really isn't a choice. It's going to the calculus-based one.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

And what are the most common mistakes you see when students start to prep for these exams?

SPEAKER_00 19:53

Oh dude. I took your book, Dan, and I I read it every night. I read it cover to cover, I read it over and over, I took notes on it. I grabbed these review books for the exam. I read them over, I took notes. Physics is not something you know. You can study it, you can know all the facts all you want. Physics is something you do. It's how you take those fundamental tools and apply them to new and unique situations. I don't ever want to see students studying by just reading a book. You need blank paper, you need something to write with, you need to be solving problems, practicing how you get from here to there and working through a solution and doing that again and again to build up the experience, the confidence, how to go about solving problems and building those transfer skills. It's got to be an active endeavor.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

And you said the failure is necessary for growth. That's gonna take some that's gonna make some parents uncomfortable and it takes some time to like actually realize that. But unpack that for parents. Like, what does productive failure look like in AP physics?

SPEAKER_00 21:07

Yeah, in AP physics, and I think anything in life, I think that failure starts with a really, really uncomfortable, sick feeling in your gut. Oh my goodness, I screwed up. When you walk out of an exam, and I'm sure we've all been there, or some other place, and you go, I was not prepared for that. Whether it's my own fault, not understood, something happened, I could have done better, and this is gonna be ugly. And it keeps you up for a couple days. That's not a terrible thing because it helps you remember what am I gonna learn from this about what can I do differently? Number one, it's that self reflection of what happened, what could I have done? Not it was an unfair test, not the teacher didn't talk about this topic. I was had that discussion with my daughter the other day. You didn't missed a class a couple weeks ago, you didn't know that material, you didn't check, you didn't go learn it yourself from the book. What could You have done differently. So that reflection, what could I do differently? And then how do I get caught up, which is awfully tough. Carving out time to go meet with the instructor, to go meet with other students in your class, to work through it, to find a way to be successful, even if you aren't able to go and redo all that material like you would from sitting in class the first time. The nice thing currently is our kids now have a zillion resources at their fingertips with the internet, with all of the terrific physics instructional videos and written web pages and books and even AI systems that can help you create practice problems, test your practice problems. There's no lack of resources to help you get there. But I think it's that resilience of number one, understanding what you could have done differently, which can be awfully tough to have with yourself, and then going about and doing it.

SPEAKER_01 22:56

So as we move into lightning round real quick here, what do people in educational technology, especially in leadership such as yourself, see that most families miss?

SPEAKER_00 23:13

I think the biggest thing that comes to my mind, which has especially been in the past few years since COVID, which really forced so many of our districts into a one-to-one technology situation. Sure. Is that you can't use technology just for technology's sake. You have to have for success in a classroom, you need to have the purposeful integration of technology. If you're using a computer, a website, a an interactive simulation, all can be fantastic tools. But the question I would always be asking myself, both as a student, a parent, and an instructor, what is it the technology does that augments this learning experience for the student? What makes it better than if I gave them a piece of paper, a book, sat them down to figure it out on their own or collaboratively? That technology piece has to have a significant value add, or I think in the long run it really detracts from the overall learning dis experience because it becomes, at least to some extent, slightly distractive.

SPEAKER_01 24:13

All right. Well, we're gonna move in the lightning round. Just first thing that comes to your mind, no explanation needed unless you want to. All right. Here we go. Most overrated AP physics study strategy.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

Cramming. Reading the book, not using a pencil and paper while you do it. Sorry, lightning, short. Gotcha. It's hard. It's complex. It's a smarty subject. We do physics every day, every single one of us.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

One thing parents underthink.

SPEAKER_00 24:55

Executive functioning and organizing skills. Hard to give just one. The Colorado Fed Simulations, Greg Jacobs, if you do want a review book, A Plus Physics is not review books, not meant that way. Greg Jacobs, Five Steps to a Five series of books are fantastic. Not quite free. Flipping physics videos, MIT physics videos, veritassium, physics girl. There's tons of great free stuff out there.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

How about if you could go back and tell first-year Dan teacher one thing, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 25:32

Oh, you might need a cattle prod because I was pretty dense and thought I knew what I was doing. But I would say don't teach the students, learn with the students.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

One sentence you wish every parent of an AP physics student heard.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

Oh, boy, is this a tough one to internalize? But I would say grades are just a silly letter on a silly piece of paper that tell you a little bit of data about one specific circumstance at a specific time and place. There are much more important things in life to worry about.

SPEAKER_01 26:04

And um, as we close it down, what is something you wish I asked you, but I didn't? We didn't get a chance to.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

My, you know, the one that I might bring up is I would love the chance to tell a quick story about the power of teachers and how careful we have to be in the ultimate responsibility. One of the things that hit me the hardest, and I still don't know the lesson to learn from it, is my giant takeaway. But every year at the end of the year, kids would ask me to sign their yearbook. And with a hundred students all graduating roughly the same day, getting their yearbook on the last day or two, I could never do that. So I started writing for each of my students a short couple sentence blurb for them to take with them on their last day, uh goodbye. Something special about them, something that I loved, sometimes improvement opportunities. And I remember one student frustrated me all year. I couldn't get him to engage, did not have an interest, didn't do the work. I could tell he was smart. And when we got to the point at the end of the year of writing that, I chose honest, not nice, and I shared, I am so sorry that that I failed you this year. I tried so hard to engage with you. I I absolutely hate that I need to give you an F for the course. So sorry you failed, but please, I want you to know that that F is not a reflection of you or your capabilities in any way. That's that we couldn't get you to engage. You are capable of so much more. The story that comes back to me is it must have been about three years later. Students sometimes come back to visit their teachers. He came back, walked in my classroom, and it was a student I thought I would never see again. He came over and said, I want you to know that I have been ticked off for years. Let me open my wallet, pulled out that sheet of paper I had handed him years ago, and said, This had me so angry, I was determined to prove that I could do this. Uh want you to know I am going into my senior year as a mechanical engineer. I'm doing great. Thank you so much. You were the teacher who cared enough to fail me. And I'm not sure if that tore me up, if that was I did something well, if that was a, oh my goodness, what was I thinking moment, but boy, did it reinforce to me those little things you say, little things you do, you never know what's going to stick with the student. And that is an awesome responsibility, an awesome power, and a terrifying one, too. So that's one story that sticks with me in just always trying to be cognizant of what you say and communicate, because it can do great things. And boy, do you have the power for damage as well.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

Well, Dan, this has been incredibly valuable. For parents, students, and educators who want to go deeper, and what's the best place to find you and your resources?

SPEAKER_00 28:45

Well, the aplusphysics.com site is free on the web. Uh, has a ton of good things there, but I'd also say there are tons of great physics resources outside A plus Physics. Find what works for uh for works for your for your kids, for your students, and uh just keep telling them it's okay to fail. As long as you learn from things, you're growing. It's not about the grade that's on that piece of paper.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

All right, we'll put all that information in the show links and the description below. And uh thank you again, Dan, for your time. And thank you for joining the Supported Learning Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

Absolutely a pleasure, sir. Thanks so much and make it a great day. See you next time.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

Thanks for joining us on the Supported Learning Podcast. If today's conversation inspired you, challenged you, or sparked a new perspective, be sure to subscribe and share with a fellow change maker. We'll be back soon with more voices, more insight, and more ways to elevate the future of learning together. Until then, keep learning and keep pushing the conversation forward.