The evaluation of most course reforms typically rests heavily on teacher and student evaluations; I’ll argue that this is unwise. In contrast, I’ll discuss course reform MIT style: select objectives, adopt metrics, experiment, and evaluate; recycle until objectives are achieved. Tellingly, educators call this “backward design”.

The MIT approach requires us to first discuss what should students learn? I’ll then describe our flipped classroom designed to teach strategic thinking and other expert traits in introductory physics. Three lines of evidence of success will be presented and one of failure.