When the "for teachers" courses were first introduced at San Diego State University (SDSU) by Frank Stites in U.S. history and Ross Dunn in world history in the 1980s, they represented pioneering efforts to augment the History faculty's commitment to training K-12 teachers. From the start, the courses challenged students to move beyond the content of typical surveys and engage with historiographical debates, primary sources, and probing questions. They were lecture courses, but they required reading outside of the textbook, along with substantial writing to be compiled in a portfolio at the semester's end. "U.S. History for Teachers" was divided fairly traditionally into two semesters, covering Contact to Reconstruction in the first "half," and Reconstruction to the Present in the second. Then, a course that was difficult for students and faculty became all but impossible. About a decade ago, in response to an external review of the Social Science program, the two-semester "U.S. History for Teachers" sequence was collapsed into a one-semester course. In this article, the author describes how she restructured her "U.S. History for Teachers" course radically, jettisoning well-crafted lectures in favor of an extended "flipped" class in which the students would create four separate lesson plans and present them to their colleagues for comment and critique. This new structure had several advantages over the traditional mode of instruction in the "U.S. History for Teachers" course. It gave pre-service teachers a taste of the future, as they experienced the joys and difficulties of creating and presenting lesson plans, individually and in groups, most for the first time in their careers.