Optimizing the Use of Video for Online Teacher Education
Video has a variety of features that make it a promising tool to mediate teacher learning in online environments:
- It captures the authenticity of classroom practice, bringing to life the work of teaching for careful study;
- It enables teacher educators to slow down and zoom in the work of teaching, thereby helping novices see the concrete ways that teachers enact particular teaching moves and the consequences for student’ opportunities to learn;
- It affords novices the opportunity to see the detailed ways that classroom life unfolds, what is often difficult to see in actual classroom settings;
- It can capture images of possibilities in teaching. It is well documented that field placements do not typically represent the image of teaching advocated by recent policy and reform initiatives. With video, teacher educators can provide novices with representations of ambitious instructional practice.
- It captures and represents the work of teaching in different grain sizes – small group interactions, whole class discussions, an entire lesson, or a collection of lessons over the course of a year with each of these representations providing teachers opportunities to see the multiple layers of the work of teaching.
Building on existing research evidence and our own research and teaching experiences, we offer the following guidelines to optimize the use of video in online teacher education. We also share a list of available video resources and a few concrete examples of activities that you can utilize in your online teaching.
As you plan for using video, it is important to consider four aspects:
Additional Resources
References
Kang, H., & van Es, E. A. (2019). Articulating design principles for productive use of video in preservice education. Journal of Teacher Education, 70(3), 237-250. https://escholarship.org/content/qt68z7z76c/qt68z7z76c.pdf
Santagata, R. (2014). Video and Teacher Learning: Key Questions, Tools, and Assessments Guiding Research and Practice. Beitraege zur Lehrerbildung, 32 (2), 196-209.
van Es, E., Tekkumru-kKsa, M., & Seago, N. (2019). Leveraging the power of video for teacher learning. International Handbook of Mathematics Teacher Education: Volume 2: Tools and Processes in Mathematics Teacher Education, 23. https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004418967/BP000010.xml