A reflection on: Hague, C. (2024), “Fostering higher-order thinking skills online in higher education: A scoping review”, OECD Education Working Papers, No. 306, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/84f7756a-en.
There’s been a bit of online chatter this week that suggests this particular scoping review was in some way damning of flipped learning approaches. That puzzled me so I took a closer look. Far from a condemnation of the ineffectiveness of flipped learning, Cassie Hague’s OECD working paper, Fostering Higher-Order Thinking Skills Online in Higher Education, is quite optimistic regarding the potentiality of flipped approaches. Those ideas have been sitting with me this week.
Hague’s scoping review cuts through much of the noise surrounding online and blended learning. While acknowledging that fully online models still underperform in many contexts when compared to in-person learning, she makes space for pedagogical nuance. What matters, she insists, is how technology is used – not just whether it’s present.
The Flipped Model: A Case for Human Time
This echoes something I wrote recently in Slow Teaching in a VUCA Age.
“Technology is not an add-on or distraction; it is a force that exposes the cracks in education’s factory-era foundations.”
One of the most affirming threads in Hague’s review is her view of the potential of flipped learning.
This isn’t surprising.
My own flipped classroom experience – where students engage with my teacher-made videos before class and use in-class time for sense-making and collaborative inquiry experiences – has become a pillar upon which my proposal for a slow teaching history pedagogy is built.
Hague writes:
“Flipped learning has been associated with some positive skills outcomes… Some studies suggest that this way of organising teaching time also provides more opportunities for active and collaborative learning” (p. 20).
This isn’t just about shifting where content gets delivered. As I’ve argued before, flipping is not about offloading content – it’s about reclaiming the classroom for the human.
In flipped spaces, the History classroom can become a space for complexity, community, responsiveness, and slow thinking. Students arrive prepared for rich learning experiences with some grounding in the topic and spend their time with me engaging, questioning, extending. In this way, we move away from coverage and into connection.
Hague’s review identifies studies that found flipped classrooms improved not just academic performance, but creativity and metacognitive skills. This, too, tracks with my lived experience.
In my own classroom, the flipped model has created space for deeper questions and – crucially – more time to coach students on how to think with and through AI tools rather than outsourcing their thinking to them.
“The effectiveness of online learning environments for the development of creativity, critical thinking and other skills depends not just on whether learning takes place online but also on how the online environment is used.” (p. 22)
Slowing the Flip
What Hague doesn’t say – but which I believe is essential – is that flipped learning best supports higher-order thinking when it’s part of a ‘slow teaching’ pedagogy. Not slow in the sense of being unstructured or meandering, but slow in its intent: purposeful, reflective, humane.
In Slow Teaching in a VUCA Age, I describe how flipping allows me to move with the seasons of learning. Historical thinking doesn’t unfold on a conveyor belt – it moves in cycles. By frontloading foundational content, I can create time and space for students to be present to their learning, mull over tricky concepts, sit with ambiguity and complexity, and revisit ideas. As I wrote, “Students don’t learn in perfectly ordered steps; they dwell, get stuck, surge ahead, and circle back.” We need a pedagogy that supports this process.
Flipped learning supports that rhythm. It gives us time to pause, to coach AI ways of working, to unpack and support the development of digital literacy skills, and to wrestle with ill-defined problems. It’s a design move that – when paired with intentional pedagogy – opens up the possibility of meaningful presence in a VUCA world.
Flipping Toward the Future
Hague is careful not to overstate her case. The research on flipped learning, she concedes, is still “patchy” and often “context-dependent” (p. 21). But what she does provide is a set of directional markers – a way of saying: this might just be one of the more powerful tools we have for fostering higher-order thinking in a digitally disrupted world.
I’m convinced. Not because I read it in a paper, but because I live it each day.
A flipped, AI-infused model of teaching – grounded in Universal Design for Learning and attuned to the rhythms of slow pedagogy – offers a way forward. It is a model that doesn’t reject technology, but invites it into the classroom with care. It is a model that utilises flipped learning approaches to that students can be seen, not as containers to be filled, but as thinkers to be challenged.
Disrupted History 