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Teachers love visiting other teachers’ classrooms, yet this is
not often something that fits into a professional development program.
Currently, I offer professional development in strategies to work with
English learners (ELs) to teachers from prekindergarten to adult
education programs in Stamford Public Schools (CT). Our district has a
population of 13% identified EL students and 42% of students speak a
language other than English at home (Connecticut State Department of
Education, n.d.). Work has been ongoing in the district to provide
teachers with support in using Sheltered Instruction Observation
Protocol (SIOP) model sheltering strategies in their classrooms, no
matter their content area (Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2010). In
my work, I often saw how much teachers learn from each other. Classroom
observations, however, are hard to arrange; substitutes need to be
hired, and that negatively impacts learning. So, to show what other
classrooms look like, I scoured the internet to find videos of teachers
in classrooms using the strategies and techniques that I was teaching in
my professional development. I found some useful videos that I’ve
included in my presentations, but, more often than not, I observed
teaching during my peer-coaching work in my district classrooms that was
better. I could also imagine that teachers would have an easier time
connecting what they saw in a video from a Stamford classroom to their
own classroom in Stamford.
I started thinking about how useful it would be to videorecord
Stamford teachers and use these videos as a teaching tool. I began to
identify the steps it would take to do this recording and present the
recordings to school buildings as a teaching tool. Much of teaching and
observation can be subjective, so to develop a strong product I created a
committee to create and edit the videos and design the teaching tool to
go with the videos. When I thought about afterschool staff professional
development meetings, I knew the videos had to be succinct and
meaningful to have impact on teachers. I also envisioned them being
presented with a discussion guide, summary of the class, and lesson so
that the video could be used as a teaching tool without my being present
to guide the discussion.
I was able to find a dozen teachers to voluntarily open their
doors to allow me or a committee member to videorecord them. The goal
was to be unobtrusive, so we used iPads as our recording tool. This came
with the benefit of easily transferring the videos to Apple computers
and using the preinstalled movie-making software for the editing
process. Although I would videotape a full lesson, I thought carefully
about how it could be edited to show a salient EL-teaching strategy. At
least two committee members would watch the same videos to make sure
that we were in agreement about EL-teaching strategies being used and
deciding which one(s) to focus on. Each final video clip is 5–10-minutes
long, focusing on one or two strategies. For some classrooms, the
committee created two separate 5–10-minute videos to isolate several
strategies. I wanted to keep the videos fairly similar in structure for
all classrooms so that no teacher felt judged differently. Editing
videos is not a simple task, and our end results are certainly not
professional movie-making materials. However, the somewhat raw aspect of
the videos makes them look real instead of like staged
classrooms.
Because the plan was to use this EL Video Series as a
professional development tool even when I am not there to guide the
discussion, I created a Google slide presentation that can be used as a
template to create a presentation for all of the videos. The edited
video is inserted into this Google slide presentation, similar to a
PowerPoint, with an overview of the classroom to provide some context,
items to look for while watching video, and a postwatching discussion
guide (see Appendix A). I told administrators in our district that the
presentation is structured so that it can be presented without my
presence.
Administrators were happy that the EL Video Series came
discussion guidance so that they could make sure to answer certain
questions appropriately. I gave all administrators access to a shared
Google folder that has these Google slide presentations with embedded
videos in them. On that shared folder, I control the sharing settings so
that they cannot edit, download, or copy the files. This allows me to
have some control over how the videos are used and distributed. Our
school district uses Google for much of our collaboration, which allows
for easy access for all administrators to this EL Video Series. They can
then use the videos during their staff or professional learning
community meetings for discussion about EL strategies and how they might
look in a classroom. Because students are in the videos, it is also
nice to have these videos stored in our closed Stamford Public Schools
Google account. I did, however, collect waivers from students for
several of the classrooms so that it would be possible to share these
more broadly. Another option would be to put all of the EL Video Series
on a flash drive and disseminate the drives to appropriate teacher
leaders who want to use the series as a professional development
tool.
The EL Video Series has been a great tool to expand our
district’s conversation about English language learning. It is useful to
instructional teams when they work in their data teams, especially when
they are focusing on EL-related data. I have used one of the video
presentations when presenting to the Stamford Board of Education in
order to get continuing support for and understanding of our programs.
Most important, the EL Video Series is a wonderful way to celebrate the
high-quality teaching that is already in effect in our district and
helps other teachers to move in the same direction.
References
Echevarria, J. Vogt, M., & Short, D. (2010). Making
content comprehensible for elementary English learners: The SIOP model.
Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Connecticut State Department of Education (n.d.). Profile and
performance reports, 2016-2017. Retrieved from http://edsight.ct.gov/Output/District/HighSchool/1350011_201617.pdf
Appendix A
Monica Lahiri Hoherchak is a curriculum associate
offering professional development for EL instruction in the Stamford
(CT) Public Schools. She has been an ESL teacher in K–12 and in adult
education programs. As an immigrant and language learner herself, she
has always been intrigued by language acquisition, leading her to a
master’s in applied linguistics and a current pursuit of a doctoral
degree. |
