The problem with volunteer leadership training is that it often doesn't give volunteers much of a chance to lead.

That was a problem that Corrinne Fisher, senior learning designer at NAFSA: Association of International Educators, noticed about three years ago. Volunteers in national and regional leadership roles (though not the board) would head to Washington, DC, for two and a half days of orientation. Often, though, those meetings would be little more than 101 lectures about what their roles were, with very little time to spend time with colleagues and work in earnest on putting their work plans into practice.

"We were really thinking about what they need to do as leaders," says Fisher. "It started with us just asking the question, 'What do our leaders need to know? How does that change or shift through their term?' What we were realizing is that even if somebody were the chair of one our knowledge communities or a regional leader, chair, or running a conference for one of those regions, there were a lot of similarities in how they needed to gear up for their role, how they needed to execute their work plan, and what they should do to strategize to put their learning forward."

The flipped model means the details about NAFSA's strategic plans and volunteer duties don't swallow up orientation time: A one-hour seminar is now a 30-minute recording that volunteers listen to beforehand.

So, NAFSA decided to shift its volunteer training to a "flipped" leadership model, in which people are trained on basic concepts on their own time, freeing up meetings for more strategic and collaborative work. Fisher, along with Carol Hamilton, former senior director, program and service development, at NAFSA, created online learning modules for various skills relevant to the volunteer leaders—"Building a Future Vision," "Developing Structure," and so on—which they identified during an initial self-assessment.

NAFSA kept costs low by working with some training modules it already had on hand, and it didn't require a substantial investment in technology. Adobe Connect's web conferencing software allowed NAFSA to create and present skills training, and it already had a license for an learning management system. And the presentations weren't always tech-heavy—while webinars and videos were part of the training mix, so were white papers and tip sheets.

Ultimately, the flipped model means the nuts-and-bolts details about NAFSA's strategic plans and volunteer duties don't swallow up orientation time: A one-hour seminar is now a 30-minute "NAFSA 101" recording that volunteers can listen to beforehand. "We don't have to spend time talking about what the leadership skills are. We're spending time applying the leadership skills in this cross-functional group," says Fisher. "When we talk about strategic skills, instead of saying, 'Here's our strategic plan,' that's pushed online. Now we're saying, 'Here are the strategic goals that your community has identified. Now you're going to talk to somebody who's in a different leadership role, and you're going to look for alignments.'"

The process has helped NAFSA systematize the key points it wants to educate volunteers on from year to year and track their progress. And it has benefits for the volunteers too, beyond just making those first meetings more productive: It allows them to identify the leadership skills they're looking to learn in their day jobs as educators and show their supervisors that they're achieving them. "Now more of the leaders that are coming in are seeing NAFSA as the entry gateway, so there's more disparity in what they were prepared to do, and so we needed to have something that would help them be prepared," Fisher says.

Though the flipped leadership model is still new, Fisher sees evidence that NAFSA's approach is working. "This year, their work plans were set, their calendars were set, they were ready," she says. "They identified two areas they wanted to work on, so the time we spent together was working on onboarding, comparing onboarding plans, and role development and refinement. If you think about it, that's really finite, as opposed to, 'What am I supposed to do?' They have their strategic goals already set."