Using “Flipped Learning” in a School’s Professional Development Initiative:
Engaging Teachers and Support Staff in Outcome-Based PD—Even in a Virtual World
Dear Colleagues,
Introduction
This past month, I began an 18-month professional development (PD) contract with the largest virtual school network in a specific mid-Atlantic state. Consistent with all of their virtual work, my PD with their district and school leaders is also, naturally, virtual.
Critically, the focus of our work is to bring their multi-tiered service and support (MTSS) system up to the next level of excellence. Thus, many of our discussions center on their preschool through high school students’ academic achievement, and their social, emotional, and behavioral skills and interactions at the Tier I virtual levels of general education “classrooms.”
But these discussions also necessarily move quickly to how to select the “right” supports and interventions when students are academically struggling or presenting with significant social-emotional challenges.
Significantly, the Network’s leaders want to address their students’ needs, while also training administrators and related services leaders in how to deliver the same PD that I am providing to them. In this way, the leaders believe that they can sustain the integrity and intensity of their upgraded MTSS system long after my contract with them is over.
A Professional Development Reboot #1
Today’s Blog discussion perfectly follows the four-part Series that we concluded in my last Blog (May 27, 2023). The Series discussed the Four Pillars of Teacher Preparation and Proficiency. . . as we systematically dissected how districts and schools can improve their teacher recruitment, selection, professional development/training, evaluation, tenure, and continuing appointment processes.
[See the Last Blog in the Series that summarizes all Four Blogs:
“Ensuring that Post-Tenure Teachers Remain Actively Engaged as Collaborative Contributors in their Schools: Aligning the Seven Areas of Continuous School Improvement to Teacher Leadership and Advancement” (Part IV)
_ _ _ _ _
Throughout the Series, we encouraged districts and schools to replace the unsuccessful, long-standing, and narrow “job performance” approach to teacher evaluation with a “professional development and growth” perspective.
This perspective reinforces interactions where teachers continuously (a) upgrade their instructional practices—aligning them with the most-current research, content, and application; while simultaneously (b) demonstrating their dedication to students, colleagues, schools, and communities through scaffolded training, coaching, consultation, and evaluation activities that emphasize their professional and personal growth, effectiveness, and—eventually—leadership and specialization.
We also encouraged schools to make PD a conscious and continual presence by establishing a Professional Development/Teacher Support and Mentoring Committee as one of six permanent school-level committees.
A primary activity for this Committee would be to oversee its school’s multi-faceted PD process and goal of maintaining, increasing, and sustaining staff knowledge and understanding, skills in instruction and intervention, and confidence and independence in three academic and social-emotional areas: (a) Research and Curriculum Development; (b) Instruction and Student Learning; and (c) School, District, and Community Service.
All of this is geared to creating a school culture of staff self- and peer-accountability. . . and a climate where everyone recognizes the importance of professional growth and proficiency.
A Professional Development Reboot #2
Relative to the specifics of the multi-faceted PD process, another past Blog noted that districts and schools need to avoid the simplistic (and largely unproductive) approach to PD that consists largely of fly-by, “spray and pray,” or awareness-only “training.”
[See our May 14, 2022 Blog:
“Reconceptualizing Professional Development for the Coming School Year: Moving Away from Fly-by, “Spray and Pray,” and Awareness-Only Training”
[CLICK HERE to Link to this Blog]
_ _ _ _ _
Instead, PD should be conceptualized as a series of scaffolded in-service and demonstration, then coaching and practice, then implementation and evaluation, and always feedback and mastery activities.
Embedded in these activities are three interdependent components:
- The Learning, Understanding, and Mastery of the targeted information, content, and knowledge related to a specific professional development area or initiative; that transfers over time into. . .
- The effective Skills and Application Expertise needed to sustain the initiative and make it successful with students in a classroom or other school setting; that results over time in. . .
- Individual and collective Staff Competence, Confidence, and Independence because the information, skills, and applications have been implemented many times, under different conditions, and with a wide variety of students and needs.
Clearly, this means that, while PD may start with an in-service presentation, it does not end until—with additional training and experience—staff can (a) teach the content themselves, (b) coach other colleagues relative to implementation and application, and (c) evaluate implementation efficacy and impact for themselves, their mentees, and their students.
This brings us back to how I needed to structure the virtual MTSS PD initiative for the state-wide Virtual Network I am currently consulting with.
Using Flipped Learning as the Primary Instructional Vehicle for the Virtual Network’s MTSS Initiative
Flipped Learning Defined and Analyzed
As I analyzed the best ways to deliver the MTSS content and skills during my 18-month Virtual Network contract, I began “with the end in mind.” That is, I re-considered the two primary PD and training goals, and worked backwards to determine the delivery methods needed.
Once again, the outcomes desired by the Virtual Network were:
- To bring their multi-tiered service and support (MTSS) system to the next level of effectiveness relative to their preschool through high school students’ academic achievement, and their social, emotional, and behavioral skills and interactions; and
- To train the Network’s administrators and related services leaders so that they can (a) provide the same PD that I am providing to them, and (b) sustain the integrity and intensity of their upgraded MTSS system over time.
After some research and planning, design and development, and scenario-testing and analysis, I decided on a new, PD-oriented use of education’s Flipped Learning methodology.
That is, I decided to implement the Flipped Learning approaches typically used at the secondary and post-secondary levels to virtual professional development with adult educators. To my knowledge, this may be the first time that this Flipped Learning application has been discussed in educational circles.
Going “backwards to go forward,” Patricia Roehling and Carrie Bredow discussed the “typical” secondary and post-secondary use of Flipped Learning in a September 28, 2021 Brookings Institution blog article. The anchor to their recommendations was a meta-analytic study that they completed where they combined the data from 317 studies involving 51,437 students in higher education to combine the effectiveness of flipped and lecture-based courses taught by the same instructor.
They began their article by describing Flipped Learning:
"Flipped learning is an increasingly popular pedagogy in secondary and higher education. Students in the flipped classroom view digitized or online lectures as pre-class homework, then spend in-class time engaged in active learning experiences such as discussions, peer teaching, presentations, projects, problem solving, computations, and group activities.
In other words, this strategy “flips” the typical presentation of content, where class time is used for lectures and example problems, and homework consists of problem sets or group project work. Flipped learning is not simply a fad. There is theoretical support that it should promote student learning.
According to constructivist theory, active learning enables students to create their own knowledge by building upon pre-existing cognitive frameworks, resulting in a deeper level of learning than occurs in more passive learning settings. Another theoretical advantage of flipped learning is that it allows students to incorporate foundational information into their long-term memory prior to class. This lightens the cognitive load during class, so that students can form new and deeper connections and develop more complex ideas. Finally, classroom activities in the flipped model can be intentionally designed to teach students valuable intra- and interpersonal skills.
Since 2012, the research literature on the effectiveness of flipped learning has grown exponentially. However, because these studies were conducted in many different contexts and published across a wide range of disciplines, a clear picture of whether and when flipped classrooms outperform their traditional lecture-based counterparts has been difficult to assemble."
_ _ _ _ _
After describing their meta-analytic study, Roehling and Bredow presented their Flipped Learning (versus lecture-based) conclusions, as well as the educational settings where Flipped Learning appears most successful.
Students in flipped classrooms performed better than those in traditionally taught classes across all of the academic outcomes we examined. In addition to confirming that flipped learning has a positive impact on foundational knowledge (the most common outcome in prior reviews of the research), we found that flipped pedagogies had a modest positive effect on higher-order thinking. Flipped learning was particularly effective at helping students learn professional and academic skills.
Importantly, we also found that flipped learning is superior to lecture-based learning for fostering all intra-/interpersonal outcomes examined, including enhancing students’ interpersonal skills, improving their engagement with the content, and developing their metacognitive abilities like time management and learning strategies.
Flipped learning was shown to be more effective than lecture-based learning across most disciplines. However, we found that flipped pedagogies produced the greatest academic and intra-/interpersonal benefits in language, technology, and health-science courses. Flipped learning may be a particularly good fit for these skills-based courses, because class time can be spent practicing and mastering these skills. Mathematics and engineering courses, on the other hand, demonstrated the smallest gains when implementing flipped pedagogies.
_ _ _ _ _
Finally, Roehling and Bredow discussed their research outcomes relative to designing an effective Flipped Course:
When designing a flipped course, the conventional wisdom has been that instructors should use pre-class quizzes and assignments to ensure that students are prepared to participate in and benefit from the flipped class period. Surprisingly, we found little support for this in our analysis. While using in-class quizzes did not affect learning outcomes, using pre-class quizzes and assignments to hold students accountable actually produced lower academic gains.
It’s unclear why this is the case. It may be that pre-class assignments shift the focus of student preparation; rather than striving to understand the course material, students focus on doing well on the quiz. This suggests that, to hold students accountable for pre-class preparation, instructors should consider using in-class quizzes and assessments rather than pre-class assignments.
We also found that more isn’t always better. Compared to courses where all (or nearly all) class sessions followed the flipped model (“fully flipped”), courses that combined flipped and lecture-based approaches (“partially flipped”) tended to produce better academic outcomes.
Given the time and skill required to design effective flipped class sessions, partially flipped courses may be easier for instructors to implement successfully, particularly when they are new to the pedagogy. Partially flipped courses also give instructors the flexibility to flip content that lends itself best to the model, while saving more complex or foundational topics for in-class instruction."
_ _ _ _ _
Among many advantages, Flipped Learning approaches give students more freedom and flexibility relative to learning at their own pace and mastering targeted content. Students, for example, may pause or rewind the presentations and, thus, they can write their notes or questions in a more thoughtful way.
In addition, thought questions can be embedded within the videos so that they are answered by every student at home. This eliminates the “question-and-answer time” needed during in-class presentations, as well as the fact that most in-class questions are typically answered by only one student.
Thus, Flipped Learning provides students who need more time to digest and understand lecture material more equal access to learning. As well, teachers have more confidence that students understand the material, because they can review every student’s answers to the video-embedded questions.
Moving on: Flipped Learning approaches also “standardize” the content presented. And, as noted earlier, they allow teachers to spend more time in class applying the information to real-world situations, and students to engage in collaborative classroom discussions and projects that elevate the breadth and depth of the originally-presented information.
Finally, Flipped Learning videos help to solve the common teacher dilemma of how to simultaneously catch up students who have missed class due to illness, emergencies, or truancy, while maintaining the instructional pace for students who are consistently in class and engaged.
Applying Flipped Learning to My Virtual Network’s MTSS Initiative
Given Roehling and Bredow’s elegant research, and the Flipped Learning advantages detailed above, the decision to use a Flipped Learning approach for my MTSS training and consultation with the Virtual School Network was ”virtually” (sorry. . . pun intended) automatic.
Much of this was accomplished:
- By using a series of MTSS on-line/on-demand modules where everyone had access—on their own time—to the same content.
- The Network’s MTSS Leaders watched the assigned video modules on their own and in small study groups, digesting the critical information independently and through group discussions.
- Next, we analyzed and discussed the information in each Module in separate virtual PLC meetings attended by all of the MTSS Leader cadre. I facilitated each meeting, but the bulk of each meeting involved a Leadership dyad presenting the most important information from each module in a PowerPoint presentation (see the schedule below).
- In this way, the Network’s Leaders not only began to master each module’s content for themselves (Note the maxim: “If you can teach it, you must first understand it.”), they began the training process that would eventually result in their ability to competently present each module to their schools and colleagues.
- To facilitate this latter goal, we had separate sessions—later in the PD and consultation contract—where each Leader did a full presentation of each module with critical feedback from both peers and me.
- Finally, all of this PD was virtual—thus making these sessions both time- and cost-effective.
Moreover, the training and support approaches described above maximized the potential that the PD would successfully translate (a) Learning, Understanding, and Mastery into effective (b) Skills and Application Expertise into (c) individual and collective Staff Competence, Confidence, and Independence.
_ _ _ _ _
One of the essential take-aways here relates especially to the fact that many districts and schools have significantly cut the Professional Development Days out of their annual calendars. And yet, well-designed and implemented professional development is a primary and necessary way for schools to improve the science-to-practice instruction, pedagogical effectiveness, and multi-tiered intervention skill of their staffs.
To this end, the Flipped Learning approaches above may “soften” the decrease of districts’ and schools’ formal PD days, while still providing the PD/PLC sessions that facilitate staff growth and enhanced instructional proficiency.
Where Did the Virtual Network’s Flipped Learning MTSS Modules Come From?
As many of you know, I often write multi-year federal (and other) grants for districts and schools across the country when they want to implement my (a) strategic planning and school improvement, (b) academic and social-emotional learning, and (c) differentiated instruction and multi-tiered intervention model (Project ACHIEVE; www.projectachieve.info). When awarded, these grants fund all of my on-site and virtual training and consultation services.
For example, I am currently the National SEL/PBIS Consultant for multiple districts in three areas of the country (New Jersey, Michigan, and Oklahoma), supporting three separate five-year U.S. Department of Education School Climate Transformation Grants.
During the first year of these Grants (which started in October 2019), the Pandemic closed down the world in March, 2020. But the Grants did not shut down. . . their implementation (as with everything else) simply went 100% virtual.
It was at this point that my professional development and consultation services needed to “pivot with the Pandemic.”
And so, I modified, upgraded, and “re-packaged” the three most important PD elements of the Grant into on-line/on-demand courses:
- Course 1: Teaching Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Skills to Improve Student Engagement, Behavior, and Achievement: Usingthe Stop & Think Social Skills Program as an Exemplar [16 modules]
- Course 2: Coping with Stress in a Stressful World: Teaching Students How to Manage Their Emotions, Thoughts, and Behavior [4 Modules]
- Course 3: Designing and Implementing Effective Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports: Academic and Social-Emotional Prevention, Assessment, and Intervention [9 Modules]
These courses are now available to anyone.
They come complete with on-demand video sessions, handouts, additional readings, supplemental resources, quizzes, and certificates of completion.
Each course also has a free 35-minute Introductory Webinar that not only discusses the major components and approaches for each topic, but also provides an overview of the Course Syllabus (which also is available without charge).
If you would like to view one or more of the Introductory Webinars, the Course Syllabi, or additional descriptions:
[CLICK THIS LINK for INFO on these THREE On-Line COURSES]
or see the additional information below.
_ _ _ _ _
When the Virtual School Network approached me for the PD described above, their Leadership Team had already completed an independent study with the MTSS course (#3) above.
Given this experience, they wanted to work with me to maximize their understanding of the information in the Course and, once again, to prepare their MTSS Leaders to implement the field-tested and proven MTSS procedures with their schools and colleagues.
Relative to the latter, we trained the Virtual School’s MTSS Leaders to present the same PowerPoints that were in the Course modules.
As above, the training began by having a Leadership Dyad present the most important information from each MTSS Module in their own PowerPoint presentation during separate PLC sessions.
Once the Dyad presentation was concluded, the rest of the session used the following template:
- I discussed any important information or skills that were missed by the Leadership Dyad from the MTSS Module presented.
- Questions about critical information in the Module were asked and answered.
- A group discussion regarding the school, staff, and student implications of the Module was facilitated with a focus on how to upgrade the schools in the Virtual Network’s current practices.
- A group discussion occurred addressing “effective practices” in presenting the information in the Module during a virtual in-service presentation for any school staff.
Summary
In an ever-changing professional world, educators need to continuously (a) upgrade their instructional practices—aligning them with the most-current research, content, and application; while simultaneously (b) demonstrating their dedication to students, colleagues, schools, and communities through scaffolded training, coaching, consultation, and (self-) evaluation.
The primary vehicle needed here is Professional Development (PD).
And while PD may start with an in-service presentation, it does not end until staff can (a) teach the content themselves, (b) coach other colleagues relative to implementation and application, and (c) evaluate implementation efficacy and impact for themselves, their mentees, and their students.
This is accomplished by teachers’ (and others’) engagement in scaffolded activities geared to three interdependent components:
- The Learning, Understanding, and Mastery of targeted information, content, and knowledge related to a specific professional development area or initiative; that transfers over time into. . .
- The effective Skills and Application Expertise needed to sustain the initiative and make it successful with students in a classroom or other school setting; that results over time in. . .
- Individual and collective Staff Competence, Confidence, and Independence because the information, skills, and applications have been implemented many times, under different conditions, and with a wide variety of students and needs.
_ _ _ _ _
This Blog described the application of this information to an 18-month PD contract with the largest virtual school network in a mid-Atlantic U.S. state. Consistent with all of their virtual work, my PD with their district and school leaders was also virtual—focused on helping their Leadership Team bring their preschool through high school multi-tiered service and support (MTSS) system up to the next level of excellence.
After analyzing the best ways to virtually deliver the MTSS content and skills desired by the Network, and reading a 2021 meta-analysis of 317 higher education studies involving 51,437 students (by Patricia Roehling and Carrie Bredow at the Brookings Institution), we decided to use a Flipped Learning PD approach.
This Flipped Learning approach used the nine modules from a comprehensive on-line/on-demand course,
Designing and Implementing Effective Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports: Academic and Social-Emotional Prevention, Assessment, and Intervention
to train the MTSS Leaders in the Virtual Network in how to upgrade the MTSS services and supports across their schools and colleagues, while also preparing them to be the primary PD-providers for this initiative.
The Blog describes the characteristics and advantages of Flipped Learning with adult learners, how it was applied to the PD for the Virtual Network’s MTSS Leaders, and how the MTSS Course was designed and modified for these Leaders.
As many districts and schools cut Professional Development Days out of their annual calendars, this Flipped Learning methodology has the potential to become the “standard” approach to helping staff and schools maintain their research-to-practice edge—facilitating staff growth and sustaining instructional and intervention proficiency.
_ _ _ _ _
Congratulations to everyone for completing (or near completing) a successful school year!
As you move into the Summer, I hope that this Blog provided some useful information and recommendations as to how you will approach PD during the new school year.
Know that I am available to you throughout the Summer.
If you or your colleagues need my assistance—to discuss ideas, consider new solutions, focus attention to proven and results-driven practices—please feel free to contact me at any time. The first consultation, as always, is free.
Best,
