Build an Expansive Digital Library of Exemplars While You Supervise

A digital library of exemplary practices, available to show what it means to demonstrate a standard of practice in the field, has been long sought after as resource for teaching others. It's easy to understand why. When you are in the field observing you see amazing work being done. We often resolve to telling the anecdotal story of what happened, explaining in words as best we can, how someone is putting into practice what others are struggling to understand. Often this is done in our next cohort or individual meeting. You can just imagine the level of descrepancy between what really happened, how we describe it, and what the person listening to us is interpreting through thier own mental model. Digital video technology such as the digital video camera, video streaming, and online mass storage (now cloud computing) made digital libraries within reach. As the technology became ubiquitous, the idea of amassing cases of 'what works' and 'best practices' to share with teachers everywhere seemed obtainable. In fact, the US Department of Education funded several Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to use Technology (PT3) initiatives from 1999 to 2003 to gain an understanding about how to harness this technology to build clearinghouses of effective practice. After more than decade of work we can attest to the following:

* People learning to teach want to see video of other teachers actually demonstrating the standards in practice. It's easy to dismiss the over-produced or commercial quality videos as not being authentic. Sharing video of actual teaching and learning events increases the credibliity of the content.

* Capturing video of exemplary practices during supervision and observation is a natural outcome, you repurpose video evidence from the observation as a learning tool. It is efficient, it is inexpensive, and you can establish a cycle of supervision data (video of practices) informing future learning about the standards you are measuring. Going into the field thinking you can capture 'effective practice' on any given day is expensive, inefficient, time consuming, disconnected from context, and often an extra burden on the teachers and learners. 

* Technology affords us the opportunity to build systems for the supervisor to supervise/observe, assess practices, and then repurpose smaller, more manageable segments (video clips) that can be understood even by the most novice learners.

* Cloud computing and Web 2.0 interface design permits the secure sharing of these videos with multiple experts who may review and rate the practices -- increasing the credibility and accuracy of the collection. Furthermore, frameworks of teaching standards can be used to organize the videos. Through the web interface supervisors can populate with exemplars as those learning to teach access select a standard and see through streaming video a peer demonstrating classroom practices.  

Video analysis tools converge several technologies to help us deliver the story of expected outcomes, meeting standards, and high quality practices through a digital library. We use these technologies so we don't rely on our own recollection or someone else's personal interpretation. We can simply show the event as it actually happened. The standards frameworks help us point to and explain the nuances and intracacies of some of the most complex events we could expected people to know and understand -- teaching and learning. After more than a decade of work (one could argue the work actually began in the sixties), video analysis technology is delivering a much sought after resource.

 

New system launch! Evirx Portal and VideoWurks tool

This weekend we launched the Evirx Portal and VideoWurks (our new analysis tool that replaces the Video Analysis Tool) at http://evirx.com. There are many new features and functions within the system including the following:

VideoWurks (replacing the Video Analysis Tool)

• PC and Mac compatible
• Multiple browser support (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer)
• New video uploader with faster upload times and resume feature (for dropped transfers so you don't have to restart from the beginning)
• Discussion feature (have a threaded discussion along side of the video clips)
• All new interface (all functions are in one place now)
• Video portfolio manager (create a portfolio and evidence of your practices)
• Digital library (exemplars of practices are readily available and already aligned to frameworks for teaching)
• As before you may still upload video of any format from any video capture device and there is no limit on file size

Evirx Portal

• We can customize the system to your needs (your organization's graphics and custom functions)
• Ability to create public or private communities
• Integration with existing systems (for example your learning management system like BlackBoard)
• Functionality to integrate collaborative environments to share resources and materials
• Social networking functions that can be integrated into the community space
• All new web interface
• New online resources (documents, FAQ, etc..)
• Users manage their accounts and passwords
• much more...

We invite you to see the new site at http://evirx.com. See the links to request a live web-based demo, request free pilot accounts, or download one of our whitepapers.

Video Analysis and Standard Supervision

Traditional teacher supervision involves a preobservation conference, observation, and post observation conference. We’ve seen many variations on the use of video analysis during this process – we’ve included many examples that represent the spectrum of uses.

Use video analysis at a Preconference to:

• Revisit a previous assessment of practice and discuss what you would like to see done the same or differently.
• Show an example of practice to clearly define an expectation for what you would like to see in the classroom.
• Use video and frameworks of teaching to speak specifically about practice and what you will be looking for in the next observation.
• Have the student use the video analysis system to address specific needs, interests, or parts of practice to focus on in the next observation.
• Reflect on your mentoring and discussion with students in their field experiences and continuously improve your skills and approach to the benefit of their development.

 

Use Video Analysis with an Observation to capture the teacher’s practices:

• When you are there observing so that you have a complete recording of the events
• When you can’t be in the classroom to observe
• To share exemplars among a group of students completing their field experience
• Document progress towards standards in your framework for teaching, and
• As often as you like so that a preservice teacher can share success and areas of concern (and you can always delete what isn’t used or needed).      

Capture the students’ learning (e.g., typically the K12 student) so you can 1) see their reaction to the teachers’ practices, 2) look closely at interaction among students, 3) review interaction between students and teacher, 4) see students demonstrating knowledge and skills as a result of teaching practices, and 5) use example of student learning to discuss with preservice teachers.

 

Use Video Analysis at a Postconference to:

• Provide feedback and assessment of practices using video of actual events.
• Show to what extent practices enacted in the classroom are making progress towards, meeting, or exceeding expectations as defined in the program’s teaching standards.
• Point directly to specific instances of teaching (and/or learning) as a way to express recognition of effective practice or discuss how improvements can be made.
• Show how other preservice teachers have successfully demonstrated classroom practice and how this similar/dissimilar to this student’s enactment.
• Bring focus to the preservice teacher’s efforts to improve (e.g., a specific attribute of practice in the standards framework).
• Discuss what you will be looking for in the next observation

3 quick and easy ways to use video and improve your teaching today

 

Video is so easy to use and yet powerful in what it can show us about the classroom. Here are 3 ways to begin using video to improve your teaching today:

1. Simply capture your classroom teaching on video with any kind of video capture device (e.g., video camcorder, cell phone, web cam, digital camera), upload the video to a secure site, and share it with a mentor or other person knowledgeable about your content area. You may email questions asking for feedback or to look at a specific instance on the video. Using tools with video analysis functions you can pinpoint the time on the video where you have a question or need assistance. It may be easiest to capture the entire classtime but only a fraction of that video may contain the event you are most interested in having someone review.It doesn't cost anything if you simply delete the video on any given day, but having the video for an important event (when you need assistance) is valuable.

2. Determine a specific classroom event you want to capture on video. Student achievement data may tell you students are struggling with a domain area or you may be interested in improving a specific teaching strategy (e.g., using differentiated instruction for students learning to add whole numbers). Identify days on the school calendar when the teaching and learning will take place and capture your class on video those days. Then, you can select a mentor or knowledge person to help you review the events. This is much more powerful than trying to remember what really happened in class. It's easier than trying to explain the events to a mentor or peer. You both can watch the same event and consider ways to improve. Again, you may share this video through a secure site or watch the playback on your camera!

3. Are you curious about whether your teaching aligns with your personal goals and expectations? Write down your beliefs and expectations (e.g., I engage the students with open-ended questions, I call on different students, Student participation is encouraged and occurs at a high level, etc...). Then, capture your class on video. Compare what you've written down to what you see on the video. The extent to which you see a difference between exepctations and practice -- gives you very helpful feedback on to develop in your teaching practice.  This an activitiy you may complete on your own. Or, you may share the statements with a peer/mentor and ask their opinion.

 

Each of these activities can be done simply with any video capture device and video playback (e.g., videocamcorder or a web cam and a computer with a media player). This is a low cost and immediate solution. Video analysis systems provide secure storage and more functionality, to dig deeper into the practice, and share videos with mentors, peers, or supervisors. Some may even provide a digital library so you may see how other teachers meet teaching standards, for example, in thier classroom.

 

TPAC, AACTE, and use of video as evidence of teaching practice

An amazing movement in education is well underway ... 100 teacher preparation institutions in 21 states are working together to pilot common processes for the systematic interpretation of evidence during teacher assessment. The Teacher Performance Assessment Consortium (TPAC), lead by Linda Darling-Hammond and Raymond Pecheone from Stanford, "will create a body of evidence of teaching competence, providing a vehicle for systematically examining the assessment data to improve teacher preparation programs, provide professional development to practicing teachers and inform decisions about tenure of individual teachers."  One form of evidence they are using is video. All teacher candidates will capture a 20 minute video -- thus providing the potential to systematically deconstruct practices and learning events highlight exemplars, and provide very concrete feedback for improvement. Our work in the Learning and Performance Support Lab showed that video is a powerful medium for showing what actually happened in the classroom. It also helped the supervisors convey needs for improvement and to explain why (using frameworks of teaching standards). It will be interesting to see how data from the TPAC initiative furthers our understanding about how video informs decisions to support growth and development in teachers.

 

Read more at the link below...

http://aacte.org/index.php?/Programs/Teacher-Performance-Assessment-Consortium-TPAC/teacher-performance-assessment-consortium.html

Teachers beliefs and actions: Using video analysis to see the difference

An activity for helping novice instructors see the similarities and discrepancies between beliefs and action:

Before the field experiences began, prospective teachers wrote a narrative that focused on their vision of teaching science and on their beliefs about science teaching and learning.  They described how they saw themselves as teachers and their beliefs about: (a) how students learn (b) the role of the teacher in the classroom, and (c) the role of students in the classroom.  The vision and beliefs statements were used in conjunction with video evidence of practices that the student teachers recorded.

Over the next four weeks each prospective teacher progressed through multiple stages of reflection, two of which (evidence collection and analysis) were instantiated in the VAT tool (see Figures 1-4).  Each prospective teacher used VAT to analyze their practices, generate reflections about issues of teaching and learning, and open opportunities to discuss these issues with peers and teacher educators.  In general, analysis involved the user employing a combination of web-based functions (e.g., video playback), time coding video into segments, and associating the segments with a lens.  Because the task of analyzing their practice as well as VAT itself was new to the students, we predetermined a lens for analysis. 

Framing issues of practice.  Prospective teachers often have a very broad conceptual understanding of practices and student learning, but little experience from which to examine or understand their meaning. To address another common barrier to using video analysis (inability to identify and frame issues in teaching and learning), we assisted students in identifying issues of practice to frame by providing the prospective teachers with questions purposefully designed to use as a lens for analysis, to encourage a comparison of beliefs and practice, and more specifically to identify consistencies and discrepancies between beliefs and actions: (1) From evidence in your teaching practices, find instances/examples that you think resonate with or illustrate your current beliefs about science teaching and learning.  Explain why you think these episodes resonate with or illustrate your current beliefs; and (2) From evidence in your teaching practices, find instances of your teaching that you think contradict your current beliefs about science teaching and student learning.  Explain why you think these episodes contradict your current beliefs.

5 ways to use video analysis for teacher reflection

Video analysis technology is an easy to use but powerful tool to promote teacher reflection. Here are five ways to use it in your school or program:

1. Watch Video through Common Standards Frameworks.

Use the standards for teaching or other observation instruments to look at pre-existing video of practice (not necessarily your own practices ...they could even be commercial videos). The frameworks help to focus the discussion and develop an understanding of the critical attributes that make effective practice. It is recommend practitioners preselect from a small subset of standards and avoid a "fishing" expedition of trying to find many at once. Can you find the standards in practice? Are they occurring as expected? A next step could be to capture your own practices to compare and contrast to what you see in the pre-existing videos.

2. Compare Written Belief Statements to Video of Practices

Have teachers write belief statements (or expected outcomes if you prefer) about their practice, attributes they expect to be demonstrating, and have them capture on video instances where these beliefs should be apparent. Have the teachers compare the statements to what they see on video. What are the differences and similarities?

3. Video Capture Practices Demonstrating Standards of Teaching

Begin with a framework for teaching, teaching standards document, or other instrument defining high quality content knowledge, pedagogy, or pedagogical content knowledge. Ask the teacher to capture the standard in practice. Can they capture it? When? And, what does it look like?

4. Share Videos of Your Practices and Reflect with Others

People enjoy getting feedback that helps them grow professionally -- especially when the opportunity is provided outside of the required evaluation. Capture video and using a video analysis system you can share what you've been experiencing in the classroom or share your reflections on success and areas needing improvement.

5. A Learning Community of Reflective Practitioners

A learning community can form around the use of the video analysis of practices. Select a focus, capture video of your practices and either reflect and share about practices invidually to the group or as a group review practices and provide feedback. Again, it's helpful to use standards frameworks and assessment instruments to guide the instructional and keep it centered on growth and development.

All of these activities are easily integrated into your preparation program or school based initiatives (e.g.., mentoring, instructional lead teacher efforts, even the evaluation). The vide analysis tools help desconstruct the teaching and learning events and make it manageable to discuss success and improvement in way that gives the practitioner a sense of direction along their career continuum.

Standards frameworks as a lens to assess videos of teaching

In the United States, the standards-based reform movement in science education has generated many national and state frameworks delineating expectations of classroom practices and student learning, for example the Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS, 1993) and National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996, 2000). Working from the metaphor of a lens, such frameworks can help to magnify a focal point for analysis while simultaneously suppressing the distractions of other events (Hill, Hannafin, & Recesso, 2007). Even a series of purposefully designed questions may serve as a lens for analysis; for example, a science teacher educator designs a series of questions to guide her student teachers’ analyses of practice. In the complex environment of a classroom, lenses facilitate the analysis of practice. Adding a continuum of discreet stages of development further enhances the utility of a lens to define growth and needs for support. A faculty supervisor and a preservice teacher individually or collectively may apply the NSTA Standards (1998), for example, as a lens to interpret the evidence linked to teaching and learning events. Through the lens they are able to focus clearly on a specific attribute of the preservice teacher’s practice (e.g., uses open ended questioning strategies in inquiry based practices). During the process of interpretation, they generate an explanation about how the evidence that they
have marshalled supports the claim that they made about a specific attribute of practice. In essence, the fine-grained attribute of practice is separated from the complex events of the classroom and then purposely deconstructed, making it manageable for one to more clearly construct solutions or alternatives to issues of teaching and/or learning.

Integrating the standards framework into a video analysis tool merges two powerful tools. The framework can now be placed along side the teaching events, as they happened, and without interruption we can rewind and playback while aligning practice with a level of performance on the scale. The evaluator (e.g., faculty, mentor, school leader) generates feedback using the common framework and the teacher (inservice or preservice) sees their practice and the assessment. Both can see through the lens progress being made towards the expectations defined in the framework.

Adapting Video Technology for Assessment and Reflection

We have talked about the benefits of recording teaching with a simple camcorder at the back of the classroom. To make such video capture even more useful, educators have developed a number of ways to extend the technology or enhance its discussion.

Video Clubs At Northwestern University Dr. Miriam Sherin has been refining an informal approach to teacher learning through the use of video. Video clubs designed by Sherin and Elizabeth van Es have opened dialogue about how teachers make sense of their mathematics teaching. Teachers in local schools capture student learning in the classroom using video camcorders. All video is reviewed by the teacher for a post-teaching event reflection. Teachers then arrive at the video club with particular video segments in mind to discuss. Together, they forge an understanding of how the students are making sense of the mathematics through the teaching. Over time the researchers have seen an increase in the sophistication with which the teachers talk about student learning (Sherin & Han, 2004; Sherin & van Es, 2005).

Dr. Miriam Sherin at Northwestern

http://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/profile/?p=84

Related Video Research Projects by Dr. Sherin

https://arc.uchicago.edu/reese/projects/understanding-role-video-teacher-learning

http://drdc.uchicago.edu/what/video-research.html

http://www.professional-vision.org/

 

Using Video Technology to Collect Evidence Of Practice

Evidence capture devices are becoming more widely available, less expensive, and less intrusive all the time. The most complex devices are ones that your school or district must buy and set up for you; but there are many simpler devices that you can supply on your own.

Video Capture

Video has proven to be a powerful tool for capturing direct evidence of classroom events. Student teachers have been bringing camcorders into the classroom to capture themselves and other teachers for more than twenty years.

             How the technology works. Quite simply, you can set up a camera in the back of the room and capture the events. Latest improvements in even the consumer line of video camcorders allow you to zoom, adjust the quality of sound capture, and even label the events. New “pro-consumer” cameras even store to hard drives rather than tapes. You can now buy a video camcorder such as the JVC Everio that fits in the palm of your hand, zooms great distances, and captures hours of video and/or audio on a hard drive. No more tapes! You don’t even need a VCR for playback anymore.

              Typically, software comes with the camera so you can offload the video from the camera (even if on tape) to a computer for playback or editing. Mid-range camcorders come equipped with viewfinders so you can watch the playback immediately after the event, without processing the video.

            What the technology produces. With a simple camcorder setup, you can record evidence of your actual classroom teaching as well as student reactions to various parts of the lesson. You can capture your practices over multiple sessions (to see how your teaching approach is evolving), or you can single out very specific events within a single lesson.

            Most appropriate applications. The camera provides an “external” perspective on your teaching. It can help you distinguish what really happened from what you perceived was happening. For lessons in which you stand at the front of the classroom, you can also set up a camera behind yourself to capture student reactions that you may not notice while the lesson is in progress.

 

            What the technology helps explain. A video record can help you understand:

• Your actual practices as compared to recollected or intended practices
• Very specific events that occurred in the classroom
• Your use of various strategies in class, and your interactions with learners as you employed those strategies
• Learners’ response to teaching
• Students’ interactions during classroom events
• Students’ construction of knowledge while engaged in hands-on activities

Video Analysis Tool cost savings on supervision of student teachers

We developed the Video Analysis Tool for many reasons including increasing contact with field experience placements, providing detailed feedback, aligning assessment with standards frameworks, among others. Several of our customers have found the Video Analysis Tool (VAT) also helps reduce costs of supervising student teachers. One customer conducted an initial study during Spring 2010 and found they spent (on average) $190 per visit to observe a student teacher with an average 4 visits (sometimes up to 6 visits are required) for a total cost of $760 per student teacher. This college places more than 225 student teachers each academic year for a travel and observation costs of about $171,000. During the initial development 8 years ago, we never thought of VAT as a tool to cut costs but in this current economic climate we see higher education using VAT to give very specific feedback about how to improve practices and identify exemplary classroom teaching and significantly reduce the costs of observing student teachers. The immediate costs savings, in this case, would amount to more than half of the education field placement observation budget ($85,000). They implemented a “blended” approach of visiting student teachers and using VAT for observation and feedback. Therefore, they did not eliminate face-to-face but used VAT as an enhancement that still helped them realize a huge cost savings in one year.

 

Pronouncing the name Evirx

We are often asked if there are a few vowels left out of the company name (Evirx). Absolutely not!  It’s prounounced …uh-vair-ix… and I came up with the name thinking about the topic of interest (evidence) and developing technological solutions (borrowing from Pharmacy prescriptive solutions as in Rx). Maybe that helps with the dilemma of few vowels.

http://evirx.com