Flipped professional development: An innovation in response to teacher insights

Hardin, B.L., & Koppenhaver, D.A. (2016). Flipped professional development: An innovation in response to teacher insights. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 60(1), 45-54.


After experiencing a disappointing lack of teacher participation and engagement in professional development efforts, these two researchers were looking for something different to try. After reviewing literature on effective professional development, and then surveying teachers about the kinds of professional development they thought might be helpful, Hardin and Koppenhaver decided to try a “flipped” approach.

The article presents what may be one of the clearest definitions I’ve seen for the concept of “flipped” instruction: “ . . . instruction where students watch or listen to lessons at home and engage in learning in class while receiving guidance from instructors” (p. 47). In this case, three courses were designed, all three about various content literacy teaching topics that teachers had indicated interest in. The courses all followed a format that began with six hours of online instruction that the teachers completed independently, followed by one two-hour face to face session that focused on demonstrations of literacy strategies by the instructors with the teachers experiencing the strategies in the role of students. A two-hour segment, in which the teachers independently completed a project applying what they had learned to their own classrooms, concluded the course.

Evidence is presented indicating a modest level of success in some aspects. The teachers who took the courses were surveyed, and their survey responses were mostly favorable. They liked the content and the delivery, and seemed to find the flipped professional development more useful than the professional development they had been offered in the past.

Though the flipped approach looks promising here, two things gave me pause. First, though 580 teachers in this district were sent the surveys, and 267 responded (not a bad response rate), in the end, only 36 teachers actually took any of these courses. That may be better than the response to earlier efforts at professional development, but the modest participation reported here is not a strong endorsement for the model. One might say that these 36 teachers were highly motivated to learn, and that might account for their high ratings of the courses. If you go into a course wanting to learn, needing to learn, and expecting to learn, you are perhaps more likely to be satisfied with the result.

Another problem area is that all the data are survey data from the teachers. The classroom projects they built, and the impact of those projects on their students’ learning, could have been powerful evidence about the effectiveness of the flipped approach to professional development, but those projects were not examined here, no instruction was observed, and no data on the teachers’ students or their learning were provided. The authors do mention that lack of data in the article’s conclusion: “We have no data with which to argue that the flipped PD model offers superior learning opportunities to more traditional methods of PD; we studied neither the learning outcomes of participants nor their students in this initial trial” (p. 53). As I read, though, I had to ask myself, why were these data not collected? Maybe surveys are enough for an “initial trial”, with the idea that more work is yet to be done, but the study would have been much more valuable with more data to support it.

Though the study reported here does not provide strong support for the flipped approach, it was helpful in showing how a flipped professional development course might be designed. The authors also provide a couple of helpful web sites that I will bookmark and refer to. One site, the Flipped Learning Network site created by Jonathan Bergman and Aaron Sams, provides a good introduction to the concept of flipped instruction and what it might look like in practice. “Flipping” is an intriguing concept that I’ll continue to explore.