Optimizing the Use of Video for Online Teacher Education
By Rossella Santagata
March 30, 2020
The UCI School of Education’s Center for Research on Teacher Development and Professional Practice (CRT) fosters collaborations among faculty, students, and practitioners on projects focused on a variety of aspects of teacher development and learning and on the study of teaching and teacher professional practice and of the systems in which these are embedded (including school and district leadership).
To assist K12 teacher educators in the transition to online learning, the CRT assembled a helpful guide to optimize 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.
To read more, please visit the CRT website, here.
Rossella Santagata is a Professor at the UCI School of Education. She is a founding faculty and current director of the Center for Research in Teacher Development and Professional Practice.