Using video to see and analyze practice

Using video to see and analyze practice allows novice teachers to…

• See multiple ways that a practice can be enacted
• Repeatedly view the same enactment to develop a clear understanding of the practice
• Have a shared vision of and language for teaching practice
• Closely examine their own teaching to notice their use of teaching practices and name explicit areas for improvement

Using video to see and analyze practice allows teacher educators to…

• Select the content and practices that novices see and analyze
• Focus novices’ viewing and analysis on specific teaching moves
• Frame the viewing and analysis of others’ practice in ways that attend to strengths and attend to the complexity of teaching and in-the-moment decisions
• Support novices in developing schema for analyzing their own practice in ways that attend to content knowledge, teaching practice, and patterns in interactional work

Video can be used to broaden novices’ visions of teachers, students, teaching, environments, and learning. Video is a unique medium for investigating teaching practice in that it allows novices the opportunity to see and value a variety of teacher identities, personas, and ways of enacting practices alongside a variety of classroom contexts. When strategically selected, video can broaden novices’ views of children and classrooms beyond their own experience in school and their clinical placement.

Also, activities that use video to see and analyze practice can build novices’ skills of noticing specific teaching moves and how teachers can either reinforce or disrupt racialized or other inequitable patterns in classrooms. Analyzing one’s own video can begin to build novices’ analytical lens for noticing, naming, and intervening on these patterns in their own teaching.

Challenges with using videos of others’ teaching:

• Identifying video: Curating a set of video that focuses on important content while also demonstrating skilled teaching practice and providing a broad range of teacher and student identities and contexts can be time consuming. There are increasing numbers of resources available, including the Teaching & Learning Exploratory, where TeachingWorks has begun to gather a set of resources aligned to high-leverage practices. However, it can still be challenging work to identify a set for use in your own context.
• Framing the viewing: Second, the use of video to analyze practice requires meticulous framing to focus novices on specific moves of the teacher. Without meticulous framing, novices are left to rely on their own schemas for teaching and learning and are unlikely to see and name the specific parts of the practice that we intend. More information about the challenges of this framing is included in the sections that follow.
• Managing and countering biases: Third, without careful work on the part of the teacher educator, novices’ implicit biases about racial groups and what teaching and learning look like can be reinforced.

Challenges with analyzing novices’ own videos of practice:

• Knowing the context: The first, and often most challenging, is that teacher educators must often rely on novices to do the work of naming specific interactional patterns of the classroom in which they are working and to appropriately name student strengths. Teacher educators are often unfamiliar with the students in the classroom, the context of the school and community, and sometimes the teacher at the clinical site. While there are ways to learn more about each of these, it may not be reasonable for teacher educators to do so and clear questions must be provided to novices in order to gain insight into these classroom features.
• Focusing excessively on reflective writing: Secondly, analysis of one’s own video, unless well designed, can run the risk of focusing on writing rather than building skill with the analysis of teaching that can be transferred to their full-time teaching practice. Teacher educators must carefully balance building these habits and asking for the appropriate amount of written work to allow insight into the metacognitive work being done by the novice. Fortunately, video tagging tools and well-designed analytic tools can support this work.

Because using video to see and analyze practice is intended to give novices experience with noticing and naming components of practice and patterns in classroom interactions, either in others’ practice or in their own practice, it is typically paired with interactional practices, including the following:

1. Leading a group discussion
2. Explaining and modeling content, practices, and strategies
3. Eliciting and interpreting individual students’ thinking
4. Implementing norms and routines for classroom discourse and work
5. Building respectful relationships with students.

For example, a teacher educator may use a video to supporting novices in seeing the areas of work and teacher moves in leading a group discussion. The practice is complex and involves several areas of work that overlap and are often difficult for novices to notice when observing live instruction. For example, when leading a discussion in mathematics, a teacher must keep accurate, visible, and well-organized records of student thinking and strategies in the public space. When observing instruction in a live setting, novices are more likely to focus on the student contributions themselves than to see the careful work that the teacher is doing to make those contributions available to others. Video of such work can allow teacher educators to focus novices on noticing the work necessary to record such ideas.

A teacher educator may also have novices examine their own video to analyze the accuracy, visibility, and organization of their records of student thinking in order to develop reflective habits and specific areas of improvement. Finally, a teacher educator may use a video of a teacher recording student thinking during a discussion to assess novices’ ability to analyze such records for areas of improvement.

The learning cycle is a sequence of activities that develop novices’ understanding of and skill with a high-leverage practice. Pedagogies have been selected to fit novices’ likely level of experience as they are first introduced to a new practice, then prepare to enact it, enact it, and finally analyze their enactment in order to learn from their practice (McDonald, Kazemi, and Kavanagh, 2013; Lampert et al., 2013). Because using video to see and analyze practice offers opportunities to notice and name teacher moves and analyze the use of those moves, the pedagogy is typically used during the “introduce” and “analyze” phases of the learning cycle. During the “introduce” phase, teacher educators guide novices in developing a deep understanding of and vision for the enactment of a particular practice. To accomplish these aims, teacher educators use video alongside decompositions, viewing tools, and careful framing. During the “analyze” phase, teacher educators provide novices with well-designed questions and tools to support them in examining their own enactment of a practice. These questions and tools are designed to build reflective habits that are specifically tied to teaching practices.

A framework developed by Shaughnessy, Garcia, and Ball (Shaughnessy & Garcia, 2018; Ball, Shaughnessy, & Garcia, 2017) guides our design and enactment of teacher educator use of video. The framework identifies the areas of teacher educator work.

This guide outlines considerations for each area of teacher educator work.