Thank you for taking the time to watch our video. Our research team would be interested in your feedback, especially in regards to the following questions.

1) What factors do you think could impact teacher engagement with and learning from classroom video?

2) As a teacher, PD provider, or researcher, what do you take away from our results?

Hi, 

   Thanks for an interesting presentation of work in progress.  As someone who's been around "teacher reflection online" projects for rather a long time, I am aware (I think) of the complexitiies of your challenge. 

I was curious about a couple of things.  First, you ask how to support teacher learning and reflection "at scale." What do you have in mind by "at scale," and why do you think it's a need to be met?  I ask because it has seemed to me over the years that teachers (or anyone) are more likely to  'talk' in depth on line with people they have come to know in other contexts.

   Second, I was struck by the mention in your abstract about hoping to foster or support on line reflective exchange without a live facilitator.  What is the thinking behind this element of your "design problem"? It occurred to me as I watched the video that you are doing a fair amount of facilitation, unobtrusively, in the selection of prompting questions and video materials to view -- which I am sure helped spark the discussions!

Congratulations on developing the platform and providing teachers with a great resource for viewing classroom video. Thanks for including some information about your research in the video.
Does your platform provide teachers with a framework for analyzing the videos? Are there specific pedagogical moves that you hope teachers will recognize in the video and reflect in their responses?

Hi Cheryl and colleagues. In response to your question on teacher engagement, I was wondering if you had considered using teachers own work (i.e., videos of their teaching and student work) on this platform? If so, what would it look like?  

Hi Brian,

These are important issues, so thanks for asking these questions!

First, we are interested in "at scale" for several reasons, including pragmatic, equity, and economic reasons (and these often converge, or at least overlap).  For example, imagine that you're in a school district that cannot afford to send you to (an expensive) professional development (PD) training; with this website, available to all, anyone can access PD.  We don't want PD to be accessible only to those who can afford it.  Also, imagine that you've been to a PD training, but either the training or you missed something that you now know you need; with PD available asynchronously on the web, you can access what you need, when you need it.  By providing PD at scale, we hope to reach teachers who need and want PD, when they need it.

Second, how nice of you to notice that the prompts and choice of video might act to facilitate reflective engagement with the videos on the website!  That is exactly we are hoping to accomplish through our experiment, by testing which prompts and conditions are related to teachers' highest reflective commentary.  However, this is done without a *live* facilitator.  Related to the reasons we are interested in having this PD at scale, if the PD is available online and asynchronously, and it works well to support teacher learning, more teachers should have access to these resources than if a live facilitator were necessary to guide the teachers through the PD.  We have learned a great deal from expert, live facilitators and we are experimenting to learn which of these features can be transformed to an online, asynchronous space. By understanding which features best support teacher learning on our website, we may even be able to inform in-person PD, by disseminating and sharing these features widely.  

Again, thank you so much for your thoughtful questions!

-Michelle

Thanks for the video! I love this idea and as a teacher would love to see it used in schools for PLCs and PD.  

Sorry for submitting this as a post, rather than as a reply to Brian Drayton's question!

Thank you for sharing your work! What a great resource to have as a teacher. As someone who is currently working on an online platform for teacher professional development, I am curious about a teacher's participation in the asynchronous portion. Have you found a platform and/or strategies that help to increase this?

Thanks for sharing your video. I agree that well-articulated prompts are key to supporting teacher engagement with and learning from video. Over years of face-to-face work, we've been able to get better and better and crafting these prompts. Like yours, our project of converting face-to-face materials for use asynchronously on-line offers the challenge and the opportunity to work more on enhancing the quality of the prompts to focus interaction and learning.

Thank you for sharing your video!  This is very interesting as we are doing similar work.  In our US Dept of Ed i3 project, the Rural Math Innovation Network (RMIN), a group of 30 Pre-Algebra and Algebra I teachers in rural Virginia are collaborating in a virtual network. The are working with peers to create lesson plans that incorporate growth mindset and self-efficacy in mathematics. When the lesson is taught, teachers video record themselves and share those videos with peers to observe and provide constructive feedback.

We are using a platform by the name of Torsh Talent.  What is the name of the platform you are using?  I would be interested in taking a look at it to see how it works compared to what we use.

Please take a look at our video "If You Give a Teacher a Network" to learn about what we are doing.

 This is great!  Thanks for sharing.  I also love the idea promoting meaningful reflections.  I'm curious about the teachers' use patterns of the site.  For example, do teachers primarily visit for themselves and not interact with other users versus teachers contributing to discussion boards and actively engaging with site content and other users.  I also found myself wondering if teachers interact with each other more/less/same after reflecting.  It seems there could be a lot of potential for rich discussion with micro-groups of teachers who watched the same video within a certain time frame.  This interaction with other teachers about the videos/their reflections could push teachers to reflect more.  What a great project!  

Very interesting work- thanks for sharing! The flexibility of asynchronous PD is very valuable. However, there are a number of teacher-learners who more deeply engage in PD when a time and place has been set aside to do so. Have you tried a "hybrid" approach where live facilitators guide participants through your online model?

Hi Sandy and Courtney,

Thank you for viewing our video.  We are glad you find our work interesting.  In regards to your platform question, we have created our own platform for our VLC. We worked closely with developers in our center to do this. Please take a look at it here. You will need to join the site to have full access to our resources and discussions. There is no fee to do this. 

Regarding member usage, our members regularly use the discussion boards and frequently download different “teacher shared” resources. The discussions generally center around curriculum/content issues. Teachers watch the videos for different reasons including to watch a model lesson, to learn a game, learn math content, etc. Teachers rarely engage in rich discussion around the video. We are hoping that with this project we will find out which prompts push teachers to engage in rich discussions. 

To encourage teachers to remain an active site user, each time a new discussion post, or new resource is added, teachers receive an update.  If nothing is posted, a regular update goes out once a week.

Cheryl

One thought I have about factors that might impact teacher engagement with and learning from the videos is a hypothesis that, like many other types of professional learning, the ability to learn from videos might itself be something to be learned. So, to that end, I have a couple questions (not necessarily for you to answer but just ones that were raised for me as I watched your video and considered your discussion question):

• What sorts of training, practice, background experiences did the teachers who participated in your experiment have?  Did that make a difference?
• What kinds of professional learning help prepare teachers to watch and learn from classroom videos? (Based on some interviews my colleagues and I did, we found that teacher educators and professional developer do quite a bit of work to prepare teachers to watch, discuss, and learn from videos — however, I’m not sure what sorts of things really make a difference). What might this look like in an online, asynchronous setting?

Other things your video and this discussion sparked for me:

• I’m intrigued by Meg’s comments about how your findings are guiding a rewrite of the prompts on VLC — can you provide an example of this the changes you are making?  A before and after? Or perhaps how your findings led to one change? (I know I will probably have to wait for the paper but it doesn’t hurt to ask :)
• Have you considered creating a mini-course or activity with your videos that helps teachers develop some facet of their practice (perhaps with “Noticing” or identifying [insert something] in student talk? I’ve often longed for small video-based learning opportunities that would help me get better at some practice by engaging with the videos.... (Meg’s description of the early goals for VLC re-surfaced this old longing...)

Thanks for the very generative video and discussion here — as always, you do such important and interesting work that gets me thinking...!