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=Digital Video for Professional Development=
=Digital Video for Professional Development=
{{adaptedfrom|Using Digital Video in Professional Development|CautionaryNote| '''‘Good pedagogic practice’ is not a stable entity. What counts as good practice is contested, variable, irreducibly situated in a specific context. '''
Digital video footage does not show anything: it always has to be interpreted. But this is also the case with any other form of classroom observation: the observer never merely observes what is happening, because any act of observation is also an interpretation. The meanings that are attached to classroom observations depend on a number of variables:
* the purposes of the observer;
* the focus of the observation;
* the observer’s knowledge of the contexts of these interactions;
* as well as what happens in the classroom.
Observation provides an opportunity for the observer to render explicit the criteria as well as the values, assumptions and prior experiences that shape and inform the act of observation. Because observation necessarily involves interpretation, different observers will disagree about what they are observing. Student teachers will not see a lesson in the same way that experienced teachers and mentors will see it – and what a student teacher can see will change rapidly during the course of their education.}}
== Identifying Digital Video Clips of Good Pedagogic Practice ==
=== Why use digital video footage? ===
{{adaptedfrom|Using Digital Video in Professional Development|Teachers analyse and reflect on their own practice in order to improve learning and teaching. They seek to improve their practice through professional development including engaging with and contributing to the development of new knowledge and ideas.
In recent years the field of education has been characterised by innovation and change. Teachers use their experience and professional judgement to assess the benefits of adapting their practice through critical analysis of any innovative pedagogy, strategy or theory. In the context of new professionalism teachers find themselves increasingly both developing their skills as coaches and mentors, and benefiting from the coaching and mentoring that they receive.
Within this context, I want to suggest that the use of digital video footage of classroom interaction offers five main benefits:
=== 1.1 It provides a window on other classrooms ===
As teachers and teacher educators, we are always wrestling with the problem of particularity. We teach and we observe others teaching in very specific contexts – particular schools, particular classrooms, particular classes taught at particular moments of the school day. Digital video provides us with the chance to see inside other people’s classrooms, to learn from others’ practice, to make comparisons about teaching and learning across different sites. (Of course, the window of DV provides a particular perspective on these other classrooms: we don’t get to see everything, and what we do get to see has been framed in particular ways. I will say more about this later.)
=== 1.2 It enables us to review what happens in the classroom ===
Classroom interaction is evanescent: it happens in time, and then is gone. Digital video gives us a way of capturing the complexity of these myriad interactions as they unfold in any lesson, so that we can observe them again and again. DV footage provides a means for us to check our impressions against the evidence, to confirm or refine our judgements by looking again.
=== 1.3 It brings a multimodal lens to the analysis of teaching and learning ===
… classrooms are places where communication extends far beyond the modes of spoken and written language; they are multimodal sites, sites where meanings are made through many differing means, and where resources such as gesture, gaze, posture, and the deployment of visual objects are crucially important to meaning-making. … In other words, to understand English in its full dimensions, and to understand the ways in which it creates new kinds of identity for students and teachers, we regarded a multimodal approach as essential
(Kress et al., 2005: 13-14).
In the classroom (as elsewhere), meanings are constructed and negotiated multimodally. Classroom interaction is embodied: how the furniture is arranged and what is displayed on the walls, where and how teachers and students stand or sit, their movements and gestures and facial expressions, as well as what they say and how they say it – all of these resources contribute to the semiotic work that is carried out in a lesson. Digital video enables us to attend to any and all of these modes as they are deployed in the classroom, to consider how each contributes to, or detracts from, or is in tension with, the pedagogic intentions of the lesson.
=== 1.4 It encourages discussion about the criteria used to interpret and to judge ===
When we carry out classroom observation, we don’t always see the same thing. We can reach different conclusions about what is going on. In real-time, in-the-flesh observation, however, it is rare (and problematic) for more than one or two people to observe the same lesson. Digital video footage enables large numbers of observers to see the same lesson. Hence, in sharing their analyses of what they have seen, the observers are obliged to render explicit what they bring to the act of observation: the assumptions they have made, the values that underpin their judgements, the criteria by which they are operating.
=== 1.5 It can focus attention on the importance of other forms of evidence, other kinds of knowledge ===
The most productive question to ask of a piece of DV footage is, ''What else do we need to know to make sense of this?'' Digital video allows us into other classrooms (though only virtually, and only in the two dimensions of the screen – it cannot place us there, ‘in the round’). And what it cannot provide is a historical perspective – a sense of how the interactions we see are products of the (shared and separate, individual and institutional) histories of the participants.
For example:
In '''''Teaching Talking 2''''' (see below, [http://www.ite.org.uk/ite_topics/identifying_digital_video_clips_of_good_pedagogic_practice/005.html see also Section 5]), we see a Year 8 student make a one-word contribution to a plenary. But the significance of this contribution cannot be understood from the video clip itself. It is the teacher, Kate, who provides the information that Paula, the student, is a newly-arrived beginner bilingual, a Portuguese-speaker who has never before contributed to whole-class talk in her English lesson. Knowing this history, we can begin to appreciate the utterance as an important moment in Paula’s development and as evidence of the effectiveness of the collaborative group work that had preceded the plenary.}}
=== How to use digital video footage ===
===== Some guiding principles: =====
==== A little goes a long way ====
{{adaptedfrom|Using Digital Video in Professional Development|HowToUseDV|Footage of what happens in a classroom is rich, dense material. Tiny fragments of lessons are worth analysing in detail. Concentrate on small episodes – generally only a few minutes is plenty.
=== 2.2 A clear focus for the observation ===
What do you want (student teachers) to look at?
* Classroom management?
* Pedagogy?
* Language?
* Gesture?
* Orchestration of feedback?
* The layout of the room?
* Student interaction?
* Evidence of learning?
=== 2.3 What don’t we know? What can’t we see? ===
Be explicit about the limitations of our knowledge about the data and about the limitations of the data themselves ([http://www.ite.org.uk/ite_topics/identifying_digital_video_clips_of_good_pedagogic_practice/001.php#1_5 see also Section 1.5]).
=== 2.4 What issues does this raise for your practice? ===
What have the student teachers learnt?
==== Some possibilities… ====
* Show the same footage more than once, with a different focus each time
* Provide transcripts of the footage – either before or after showing – or (more arduous but worthwhile) ask student teachers to transcribe a brief episode themselves: suggest that they indicate facial expression, body posture and gesture as well as language, and note the different kinds of contributions made by individual pupils
* Run the footage without sound
* Allocate different foci to different observers, such as:
** selecting a particular pupil to watch during a sequence (so that a group of student teachers would be watching different pupils in a group);
** observing the teacher’s gestures as well as the language used;
** noting the board work/materials used (this would help in the discussion about differentiation);
** noting the questioning – both teacher’s and pupils’…
==== … and some prompt questions that might help to guide observation ====
===== The learning environment of the classroom =====
* What do you notice about the classroom – about layout, displays, resources?
* What evidence is there in the classroom about learning and the learners, about the subject, about values and relationships?
===== How does the teacher organise, shape and structure the lesson? =====
* How does the teacher manage the class?
* How do we know that the lesson has started?
* How does the teacher explain the task(s)?
* What do you notice about the teacher’s and students’ use of language in the opening stages of the lesson?
* How are transitions from one activity to the next signalled and managed?
* Is there any sign of resistance from the students? If so, how does the teacher react?
* How is the lesson brought to an end? Is anything said about future lessons?
===== Language and learning =====
* What are the students learning, and how?
* What tells you that work has started – the nature and level of talk, the posture and physical attitudes of students, reading and writing activities?
* What do you notice about the students’ language in different parts of the lesson?
* What is language used for?
===== Differentiation =====
* Is the learning the same for all students? If not, how is it different?
* What has the teacher done to make the lesson accessible to all the students?
* What resources assist in the process of differentiation?
* What obstacles are there to participation and understanding?
* Do you notice any differences in the ways in which different students understand and make sense of the lesson?}}
{{adaptedfrom|Using Digital Video in Professional Development|CautionaryNote|
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