PAIS Newsletter - March 2018 (Plain Text Version)
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USING TEACHER VIDEOS AS A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT TOOL
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. |
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