Teacher Education

Boost edTPA Scores with Video Assessment

A webinar featuring Dr. Kirsten Koetje from Seattle Pacific University

Dr. Kirsten Koetje, Assistant Director of Graduate Teacher Education at Seattle Pacific University, explains why video analysis is an effective active learning strategy for preparing teacher candidates.

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Hillary Gamblin:

Hello, thank you for joining today’s workshop on boosting edTPA scores with video-based assessment. My name’s Hillary Gamblin. I’m a GoReact employee and the host of the Teacher Education Podcast. Today I’ll be interviewing Kirsten Koetje. Kirsten do you want to introduce yourself?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Sure. Yes. As Hillary said, my name is Kirsten Koetje and I’m the Assistant Director of Graduate Teacher Education at Seattle Pacific university. I bring 10 years of teaching high school, English and French to my teacher educator role at the university. I also taught in Peace Corps, Mozambique, and I’ve taught in public and private schools. I feel I’ve had a wide variety in the K-12 world. I’ve been preparing teachers now at SPU since 2013, and I also oversee some of our online programs and the growth of those online programs. I live in Tacoma, Washington with my husband and three school-aged children.

Hillary Gamblin:

Thank you. We’re excited to chat with you today. For those of you who are new to GoReact workshops. Let me outline how we have structured these virtual events. For the first 20 or 30 minutes I’ll discuss with Kirsten, her research and experience with video assessment and certification. Then after that interview, we’ll then do a live Q&A for about 15 minutes or so. If you have a question that you’d like to submit for the Q&A, there’s a tab just below the video feed. If you see a question that someone else has asked and you’re like, yes, I want that also answered. There is an [OP 00:01:25] app the feature that you can use. Then don’t forget the chat feature, which is located on the right side of the video feed. That attendees can discuss ideas, share resources, share personal information so they can get in touch after the workshop, a lot happens here. Don’t miss out.

Hillary Gamblin:

Right next to the asking question is actually a polling feature. We’d like to start off by getting to know our audience a little bit better by asking questions. If you can click on that poll, the question is, does your state use the educator teacher performance assessment, edTPA for teacher preparation? There are four options there. I’ll give everybody about a minute to answer that and we can see what our audience says.

Hillary Gamblin:

70% said it’s required. That’s quite a bit. Fantastic we will talk about, edTPA quite a bit in this and also talk about people that are not using that edTPA. We will get everybody in our audience, we’ll get some information to you. That’s fantastic. That’s great to know. In this webinar, we’re going to share some compelling evidence about using video based assessment for teacher candidates. We’re hoping that everyone from this workshop can at least take away one tip or strategy to more effectively leverage video assessment tools and their courses and programs. That’s the goal and we’ve covered the technical details and we’ve got to know you a little bit better. Let’s get started. Kirsten in your dissertation, you conducted a quantitative study of video analysis. Why were you drawn to the topic of using video at teacher preparation?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Sure. As I mentioned in my introduction, I work at Seattle Pacific University and I started there as an adjunct instructor and a field supervisor for student teachers. As I was growing my role in teacher preparation, I thought, what is really valuable? What are some valuable strategies for developing teachers? I went through my own program and I had my own critiques of course, and my own things I was really thankful for. But as we’re going through the literature, I was reading, it’s really these active learning strategies, like micro-teaching video analysis, child observations. I thought, video analysis, that overlaps my role.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

I was tasked with doing some online oversees observations of international schools. The only way that I … Unfortunately, Seattle Pacific, wasn’t going to pay my way to [Sarajevo 00:04:18] where I had a student teacher intern. We had to like required. This is before COVID video analysis. I thought, hey, but this is actually showing up as a really positive as a strategy for developing teachers. I thought this overlaps my job. It’s a promising practice. Let’s look at this. I really wanted to get evidence that was quantitative. Just because I wanted to see the numbers so to speak. It was a correlational study.

Hillary Gamblin:

Your dissertation, as you mentioned, it already joined this rich conversation about video analysis and teacher preparation. Some of our audience probably hasn’t had the time to dive as deeply into all of that literature. Can you give us a quick overview of what the research has found about the role of video analysis and teacher preparation? Just the highlights.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Sure. Jordan, if you can put up slide two, that would be great because I’ll start working from a few of my slides. One of the things that I was curious about as I started reading in the literature about video analysis is, who should be in the video? I quickly came to the conclusion that, I’m not talking about best practice videos. There’s a lot of literature on that too, but I’m not talking about watching veteran teachers or best practices I’m talking about watching yourself or watching similar others. That’s on my slide and you can see those articles. I have a slide that shows those articles in full with their titles, but really, I was concerned about looking at yourself in the video. One self-teaching and similar others who I would call peers in the program and the teacher preparation program, or colleagues, or your mentor teacher.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

One thing that they were saying again in these studies is that when you watch others, there’s more of an ability to be critical. There’s just all this psychology that’s going on when we’re watching ourselves. Jim Knight says, “No one watches themselves on vide,” and says, “I look thinner and younger.” There’s just all these psychology things about video. When someone else is watching it, that can be beneficial too, because the other thing is they just add insight that you maybe didn’t otherwise notice. Really both I found were important. Jordan, if you can advance to the next slide. The other thing that came out of a lot of the literature I was reading is, the benefits of video analysis are that you get multiple viewings. You can watch the same video five times for five different reasons and multiple viewers.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Let’s say I’m looking at it for my discussion questions. How long am I waiting? What questions are there higher order? I can choose a focus. I’m on my slide three, which should say benefits of video analysis. You’re also removed as the teacher from that immediate emotion and stimulus of the classroom. There’s so much going on in a teacher’s day. You’re getting that bird’s eye view, something that you maybe didn’t see the first time when you were actually in the classroom, you didn’t notice that pod in the back. You don’t have to rely on subjective memory recall. This is a really big thing when you conference with supervisors, what we call field supervisors and interns, rather than saying, this is what happened. I think this is what happened.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

This is what I remember. When you watch the video together that is taken away. You just say, tell me more about that. Why did you decide to do that? Or what led you there? The other thing that really came out one of the large critiques of teacher preparation, and this was honestly a personal critique, is that it can be too removed. It’s theoretical. We talk about research, but it’s not really necessarily applied or practical in the classroom. Video analysis is that bridge of here’s my classroom. Here’s the theory. One study in particular found that teachers really found video analysis, motivating 64% and authentic. That was a big one.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Yes, this actually is what I do every day. 91% had reported that it was authentic. That particular study, the Sydel study, it was actually a European study, but it compared physics teachers all teaching the same curriculum, a first-year curriculum, either watching themselves or watching their peers, their physics teacher peers, and both actually had really positive impacts. But the watching yourself was even more motivating and authentic. If you want to see Jordan, if you advanced to the next slide, slide four, that shows some of those articles in full. But I’m happy to share more resources if people want to reach out after this.

Hillary Gamblin:

Brilliant. Thank you for sharing that. How did you want your dissertation to add to this conversation about these, the video on teacher prep? I know you mentioned a little bit earlier, but if you can dive into that.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Like I said, I really wanted some quantitative evidence and it’s true that correlation is not causation. Certainly I would love to see some more causal experimental studies done. But I wanted to see, again, this was a positive practice I was seeing in the literature, although some of the literature wasn’t necessarily about pre-service teachers. I really wanted some quantitative evidence that said, does video analysis help teachers and how could we measure that?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

I teach in Washington State and Washington State is, what I’ll call a high stakes edTPA state. I’m like, okay, we do have this measure and I’m not going to go into … edTPA is a different subject we could talk on. But it does give me a measure. I wanted to say, hey, are the students that are doing more of this voluntarily because we’re giving them this platform, but we’ve changed our system throughout the years in terms of how much video analysis they’re required to do. Are those that are choosing to do more are they doing better? Are we seeing these results? The answer was, yes. I really wanted, like I said, that quantitative evidence to see if this was more than just we think it is.

Hillary Gamblin:

Now, before we jump into those findings about video, one of the most surprising findings of [inaudible 00:09:59], wasn’t about video at all. It was about writing. Can you talk a little more about this unexpected results?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Jordan, if you can take me to my slide five. I was going to do what’s called a logistic regression because I had assumed in educator preparation, we talk a lot. The edTPA is a big writing task. 60 to 70 pages of writing. We just assumed that strong writers, those may be even that are endorsing an English language, arts or Social Studies are going to do better on the edTPA. Originally I was going to do in a logistic regression my first variable was going to be, how well did you do on our standardized writing test? In Washington State, we do the West E for writing, excuse me, West B basic for basic skills, the West B for writing. I thought does video analysis or the quantity, the amount of video analysis that someone is doing add any additional, explain any additional variants and edTPA performance.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

I was going to put an academic writing in their West B test scores first. Well, it became clear if you’re looking at my slide in my data, which was not a huge set because I just had these two cohorts and some students, if they have certain SAT or ACT writing scores, don’t have to take our West B writing. But there was, if you can see my correlation, my Pearson’s R was actually slightly negative. It was basically zero. There was no correlation at all between standardized writing score and edTPA performance. I threw out my logistic regression and I just did a pure correlation.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

But for me that wasn’t aha because it was an unsupported assumption. We went around saying, we know this is true, better writers do better on the edTPA. Some of the proponents of edTPA say, actually, no, it’s a teacher performative assessment. You really don’t have to be as strong of a writer. You really have to answer these prompts. This data suggests, hey, there is some more validity to that argument that the edTPA is a teacher performance. Now, again, there are other arguments and we’re not going into that today, but this was an interesting response. An interesting finding that I wasn’t expecting.

Hillary Gamblin:

I want to touch on that. I’m a former university writing instructor. That was really fascinating for me to look at that. While you didn’t find a correlation between writing skills and edTPA scores, you did find a correlation between the number of video analysis conducted by teacher candidates and their edTPA scores. Can you share your findings of with us about that?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Yes. Again, Jordan, I’ll have you go to my slide six, which was really the bulk of my finding. Again, this is correlation, so there are definitely limitations. What I did is I went into GoReact, we were using the GoReact system for video analysis. I looked at two years of our online cohorts. These are all students who are doing our program online, but they were teaching in person. It wasn’t COVID. They were teaching in person and their videos were in brick and mortar classrooms. I looked at total number of videos, but then I also looked at the number of videos that the candidate self critiques, they were watching themselves teach. Then I counted how many videos did they watch of their peers or some, or maybe mentor teachers, but others in their discipline.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

I broke it out by task and you can see the correlations here and so on. I’ll just point out that all of them are positive, although they’re relatively small, but you can see that I did get statistical significance over in task three, which if you’re familiar with edTPA is assessment. For the ed TPA, that is student teacher interns looking at K-12 student work samples, that’s assessment. The highest correlations were in task three. Now, again, my hypothesis was incorrect. I thought the highest correlations would be with task two, which is considered instruction. That has to do with video analysis. That’s what that task is. Students are recording themselves, teaching, and then they select clips of their teaching to analyze. I thought, well, that’s what they’re practicing with GoReact that’s what they’ll be better at. A little bit, not really, this is a very small correlation, but it was really in task three.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Again, another surprise. But you’ll also notice that it was number of others critiqued that had a stronger correlation in this data set and the total videos critiqued. It wasn’t actually self, it was others and total. The strongest correlation of all of them was the number of other videos that they analyzed critiqued or analyzed I’m using those synonymously and their total score. On task one, two and three, and that was 0.367 which I would consider a small to moderate positive correlation. But again, task three, there’s a pretty good positive correlation there and in the total score. Here’s another thing that I was really excited about with this information and dis-aggregating it. Is when you do look at edTPA or the California performance assessment, which they call the PACT.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

I didn’t get that acronym. But they call it the PACT was the precursor to edTPA. There was a study showing students who performed well on the PACT specifically in academic language and in assessment. Those are the ones that we were seeing K-12 students have a slight bump in their performances. Again, standardized tests, aren’t the end all be all, but it is helpful to have measures. We really want to be better about helping our intern candidates be good at teaching academic language and assessing students. When I saw that, oh my goodness, it’s actually better, even, though it’s not what I was expecting. That students are doing better with task three assessment, because that’s where I think there’s more of a, I guess, bang for your buck in terms of being a teacher.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

I’m theorizing that. Hypothesizing, I think that’s because students were getting better at looking at rubrics. Because when we have them video do video analysis in GoReact we have them use a rubric, either our internship rubric, or we have them use edTPA language, for example, task two. It’s getting them used to using a language and giving feedback to someone else in a thoughtful manner. I think that’s part of why task three had that. But again, we need more studies to tease that out, but those were my results.

Hillary Gamblin:

To just build off of that, I was telling you earlier when we were working on this together. That one of the people using and GoReact at I think it’s Austin, Peay State University. They have specifically, I think starting to use, GoReact to focus on task three for edTPA, because they can see how it benefits their students and can raise their scores. Just another outside, source showing that video really is helpful for task three specifically. Now your research suggests that video assessments help teacher candidates raise edTPA scores. At the end of your dissertation, you call out and getting more research and how to structure and leverage video analysis for maximum instructional benefit. As a veteran user of video, you probably have a lot of insight of what has worked best for you and what has worked best online for the program SPU. What are three things you would recommend for instructors to get the most out of video analysis in their courses and programs?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Jordan, if you can go to slide seven, excuse me, slide seven, three takeaways for structuring. As we’ve been doing this SPU for a few years now, and as I’ve been reading the literature, there are a few things that stand out. My three main takeaways for structuring are number one, there has to be a focus. The field supervisor, the intern, the peer reviewer, whoever’s watching this video has to choose a focus. Now you can choose multiple focus and go back and watch it again. But there’s just too much going on. I know that our, we call it the internship performance criteria. It’s based off of Danielson, but there’s 32 criteria. Even eight is just too many. I like to give this analogy. If I throw you gently one tennis ball, you will likely catch it.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Now, picture a different image. If I fill up a bucket full of tennis balls and I throw that bucket at you, you’re probably going to not catch any. Maybe some of you athletes will, but there’s too much. We need to give targeted and specific feedback even to ourselves. Focus have a rubric, have a checklist, but a way to focus your attention on what you’re watching. One of the studies showed one of the meta analysis of video analysis said that they actually found a higher effect, size, a stronger effect when whatever rubric or thing that you were looking for was positive in nature rather than negative.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

For example, you’re looking for respect and rapport and deeper questioning rather than nervousness or negativity in your demeanor. It should be positive. Then what they call Mueller. It was actually micro skills were also positive. For example, if you were counting, how many higher order questions did you ask that would be a micro skill, but they said there was an even higher effect size for Mueller ratings. That’s typically a lot of our evaluations in teacher ed are this Mueller rating in terms of basic proficient, distinguished. It’s not really that you’re counting, but you’ve got a scale. They actually found that that it’s effective to use a rubric that has what they called a Mueller rating or a scale.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

The second big takeaway is, you really should do both peer and self review. Sharon and Venice are two researchers that do a lot of research on video clubs with current practicing teachers. That’s basically what they do. It’s like, hey, here’s our videos let’s share them together. That goes with number three, collegiality. These should really be used for growth and improvement and not evaluation and harsh conversations. Now if there are red flags, of course, we want to bring those up and teacher education. But there was one study of reading teachers that I was doing, the literature that when I just watched the videos and they wrote a reflection, they didn’t really change their negative disposition towards video, just that discomfort of watching their own videos. It wasn’t until they were actually collegial about it, that they were talking about it. They were open and vulnerable with each other, that it really turned the tides, that it was a useful tool. Those are I guess my three takeaways for structuring video analysis.

Hillary Gamblin:

Thank you. Those are great. I’m so glad we have a slide with those three on, so people can refer back to those. Now, as I said, we are going to talk a little bit about edTPA specifically. You were able to look at edTPA in your study. How did you incorporate edTPA standards into any of the video assignments that you have with your students complete?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Jordan, that is my slide eight, if we can go to slide eight. One of the marker sets that I created aligned with task two. Again, if you’re not as familiar with edTPA, task two is called instruction, and that is the task where interns have to upload videos of their classroom. You can see on the screen, this is my GoReact screen, this intern’s classroom. If you can see those marker sets, they might be small, but the lavender one is LE for learning environment. EN the red one is for engagement. The yellow DE is for deepening understanding and teacher questioning. Then one of them, the green one at the end is subject specific. Now it says that because it is subject specific. For example, I work a lot with the world language endorsers, oftentimes, and for that particular rubric subject specific it’s about comparing cultures.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

It depends on what you’re teaching are you teaching math or world language? This was a marker set that we have students can upload and watch themselves, but it’s also a peer review assignment. We put them with like endorsements. For example, world language students, and they mark each other’s videos using this rubric language. They don’t score each other. They just say, I think this is evidence of this. They might say, I think this would be proficient. But they might just say, how can you do this? Or I noticed you did this. They just talk about that alignment to the rubric. It gets them familiar with the rubric as well. Again, they’re graded on doing the assignment. They’re not graded on their video or their analysis of this.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

These are not their edTPA videos. They’re just practicing again, using that language of the rubric and looking for it with each other. Because frankly in world language, that can be something that they don’t show. They’re like, my video didn’t have me comparing culture. It’s like, well, guess what, you’re going to get on that rubric a one, because you have to show it. That makes them understand, I have to choose a video where this is in it. It just is good practice for them. This is not our normal marker set. Our typical marker set, follows what I call our internship performance criteria, but I do have different marker sets for different activities that GoReact has allowed me to create.

Hillary Gamblin:

Fantastic. Now your research has focused on edTPA, but do you think that the benefits of video assessment are limited to those that are using edTPA for certification? Because as we know about 30% of the people joining us it’s not required for them. Does this relate to them?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Absolutely. Like I said, I got into this in terms of my dissertation. I have a PhD in Education with an emphasis on teacher preparation and I chose it because it kept coming up as an effective strategy for developing teachers. I just chose the edTPA because we are an edTPA state and so that gives me actual data. That I can do these quantitative analysis and use these tools, but video clubs, like I said, Sharon and Venice are two researchers in this field who talk a lot about video clubs with current teachers and it’s a popular form of professional development. There’s a lot of articles that you could see with them and probably others, but also for example, national boards, they do the same thing. I have a colleague who works at the state level, who is a national board teacher and used to work for the NDA as well.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

She would train people using video analysis in Japanese lesson study. I think there’s really actually, if that edTPA goes away we will still use video analysis because we are convinced that this is an effective tool. Like I said, in that earlier slide, it’s authentic tool. Interns tend to like it, no one, I shouldn’t say no one, but most teachers or interns, don’t say, what does this have to do with me? It’s your classroom? It’s your students. They know it’s authentic. They know it has meaning. It’s a bridge between theory and research that we’re teaching in classes and their classroom and where the rubber meets the road.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Even if we do have some of those hesitant and it can be hard to watch video, they tend to say, you know what, though it was good for me. I learned a lot from that. It’s definitely a powerful tool. Not just for teaching, I’ll throw that out there. I’m sure most of us are teacher educators, but they use it in medicine. They use social work counseling. This is not the only place that obviously GoReact I’m sure has other clients that we’re not the only profession using it. I think we can use it better and strategically.

Hillary Gamblin:

Well, thank you, Kirsten. You’ve answered all of my questions and your research is particularly valuable for those that are trying to prepare their teacher candidates for certification and just providing evidentiary support to faculty that there are benefits in using video assessment tools. Now we actually would like to take some time to do a Q&A. If you have questions, please submit those. I have some colleagues that are monitoring the questions. We’ll take the next 10 to 15 minutes or so, and Kirsten, we’ll answer your questions. The first one is Dr. Koetje, thank you for the presentation. This is Tanya from Central Washington University. I would like to ask you, when you ask your teacher candidates to write, do you have any good strategies to teach students how to write an evaluative or reflective way?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

We do actually with our internship. They’re required to have about give or take 10 less than … If they weren’t videoed, when we were going into the actual classroom about 10 observations and of those 10, we ask that they write three reflections and if they have video evidence, we ask that they timestamp. Again, we use a Danielson framework for our internship performance criteria, but let’s say they’re taking, for example, learning environment, which is our standard five or criteria five. They’re looking specifically at transitions, they might say, hey, I’m looking specifically at this criteria and we give a student sample of one where we think they did well. We have a student sample of a reflection and we’re saying use time-stamped evidence, focus, choose a criteria. I’m looking at transitions.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

We wasted so much time. I noticed that it took us 98 seconds to do from this activity to this activity. I want to or, hey, I implemented this new technique. We sang a song and the students were back to their next task in 28 seconds. This is better than our former time. We ask them to really be specific. In my phrase is Lala language, take out the Lala language and be specific. What did you see in your video, timestamp it and align it? Which means, I think I said we have 32 criteria. They’re writing three. They’re writing three internship reflections. They’re doing a lot more writing in our program overall, but they’re writing three that are specifically about internship. They’re going to choose three of 32, but we think that’s better learning to focus again and get specific details than to have all the tennis balls drop, to go back to my other analogy.

Hillary Gamblin:

Excellent. Question number two. How do you deal with video permissions as students can change faces or change the view to only include themselves and slides and to skirt this and still benefit?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Sure. That is not an easy question and we’re right in the thick of it with COVID-19. I’m going to answer this two ways prior to COVID, when we were brick and mortar, we sent out usually paper consent forms that families would bring back. If a student did not give consent for the intern to be observed for internship purposes, we worked with our legal department to create a consent form. If those students did not have consent, we told teachers, hey, seating chart B or seating chart C, and put these kids over here in the potter, angle your camera over here, but just be creative, because they’re not recording every day typically. That’s how we handled it when they were in schools. This year, everybody in Washington State, almost over 90% of our schools are entirely online.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

We’re not back in buildings for the most part. They’re recording on Microsoft teams, they’re recording on Zoom and t’s really hard. They can do a couple things. Now we have a digital consent form. We send out our digital consent form on a Microsoft forms because SPU is a Microsoft school. Our interns can create their own Microsoft form and see which parents have turned things in. Again, we just transferred that language and we also have six translations of that consent form in the top six languages of Washington State. Spanish and Russian and Vietnamese and parents can fill those out on smartphones. If they don’t get that back, the Microsoft consent form, then what they’re supposed to do is remind those students to turn off their cameras and turn off their microphones.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

If they can change their names, now we’re considering names, like, directory information. If their name pops up in a chat again, it’s going to GoReact, which is credential secured with their SPU credentials. They’re not publicly disseminating it. Our interns also have to sign a consent form saying, I understand SPUs privacy policies. I will not publicly post any of these videos. Our intern sign something, parents and guardians sign something, and then everything is secured in GoReact. We also encourage breakout rooms. If you only have these students that have signed a consent form for your development purposes, put them in a breakout room and record that. They can use their phone to record the screen of the breakout room if they need to. That’s how we’ve handled that.

Hillary Gamblin:

The breakout room idea that’s really simple, but really effective.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

I mean, if you are the teacher of record, that’s harder if there’s no one in the … But yeah.

Hillary Gamblin:

Question three. How did you scaffold the academic writing in the video analysis?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

We do a couple of things. One, when I was talking about the reflection, so one of the things that goes with that peer review assignment of looking at each other’s videos. For example, I gave the world language example. If I had three world language teachers looking at each other’s videos, they would then write a reflection again, they would choose a focus and they would write a reflection on it. Then we do peer review of the reflection as well. Not just the video, but the written part. This is in a methods class. Part of our methods class is peer feedback, teaching their students to do peer feedback. We teach our teachers to do good and constructive feedback. That’s part of the scaffolding is peer review.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Part of it is the sample. We give them a work sample and I do common misconceptions. One of them is Lala language. Don’t say, I’m going to differentiate. Great. How? For who? What’d you do? I’m going to differentiate for this student who has this English level. I gave them this close notes and these visual, be specific. I think those three things, student work samples, peer review, and starting with common misconceptions and I’ll show them examples. One of my beginning tasks for one of the classes that I teach in that methods class is, which is better and why? I give them to students, examples of writing about a reflection from this video analysis, which is better? One has timestamps and one has evidence and one says, this was a good class. I felt good about it. It feels so generic. You’re like, what are they saying? They typically get it with that. But then they get it and they go, okay. I think I might be guilty of this here and there.

Hillary Gamblin:

Perfect. Can you share … This is the next question. Can you share an assignment that you used in class that integrates edTPA and GoReact?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

That one that I just talked about was they are given an assignment … Most of our assignments in GoReact are private. Meaning only the field supervisor or instructor can see them. Peers cannot see them, but we do have some strategic peer review assignments that are marked for peer review. Students know, hey, your peers are going to see this one. One of them is in that methods class where they are told you’re going to record yourself and it can be a twofer. They can use it for their field supervisor and they can use it for class and their faculty instructor. But the assignment is to record themselves. They’re put into a group again with endorsement and they have to watch each other’s videos and they have to give feedback on those videos.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

That would be an example of using the assignment … That particular assignment has edTPA markers, meaning it aligns to the task to rubrics. That’s how we’re incorporating the edTPA practice, practicing using the language and looking for evidence and it’s a coursework assignment as well. Again, they turn in a reflection. That it has similar questions to the edTPA prompts. They’re not the same, but they’re similar to get students again, looking for similar evidence and using that language and the academic language of the edTPA itself.

Hillary Gamblin:

Thank you for sharing that. This is our final question. It’s how does your teacher ed program align coursework and field work in terms of assignments that include video analysis and areas of focus?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Can you read that one more time?

Hillary Gamblin:

How does your teacher ed program align coursework and field work in terms of assignments that include video analysis and areas of focus?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

That was one example that I just shared. We have a year long internship for the program that I oversee. We do have an undergraduate program, but I’m mostly involved in the graduate programs and the accelerated programs. For the most part, we also have a two year program. There’s a 14 week internship. But our main programs, the most students are full year so that’s for us end of August through mid June. They’ve got internship assignments for their internship grade, which again are those 10 or so lessons that they teach, but they also have video journals. For example, one of our criteria is families and community. That’s not going to come up in a video, probably. A classroom video, how you’re communicating with families. We have our eight criteria. Again, we use the Danielson framework that has eight criteria, and we align those reflections that I talked about, the three reflections from internship have to align with those three criteria. Their conversations when they record a lesson and they talk to their field supervisor about it they’re talking about one of those criteria for internship.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Our coursework is the same. We’ll use the assignment that I just told you about. What’s another assignment? I know our reading teachers, I’m not the reading teacher. I know that they they’ll teach a specific strategy about decoding or looking at words and how you can help in small groups. Then they’ll say, okay, I want you to go deploy this, go do this in your classroom. Then let’s go back and talk about what you did in your classroom. They’ll align what they’re doing in the classroom, give them an assignment to do it in their K-12 classroom and then talk about it. We’ll do that in various areas. Another example would be again for world language, we’ll talk about, hey, it’s really encouraged to do 90% in the target language.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Where do you think you’re at. Some of us, honestly, I couldn’t do that now. I haven’t taught French in a long time. If I’m at 50%, can I get to 60%, but we can watch, again, that video take a chunk where I think we’re really mostly in the target language, so Spanish or French, and just every 15 seconds, you can watch it on double time. Tally, how often do you, at 15 seconds, at 30 seconds, at 60 seconds what language are you speaking in? Then get some real data and then talk about that in your university coursework. Again, you’re aligning it with what’s happening in the K-12 classroom. We have a lot of assignments that are integrated like that because they’re in internship all year. Right now I’m in classroom management and we do a problem of practice.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

I know right now a problem of practice is getting kids to use the camera, get on the camera in Zoom. They’re recording their lessons and they’re looking okay, how many kids are on the camera? They’re making smart goals based on, okay I have two kids who got on the camera for one. Can I improve that to five? We haven’t done that assignment yet, but it’s my classroom management class. They are making goals that are based in internship. They haven’t necessarily, I’d say about just over half of students have actually gotten in their first videos because of the consent issue and going online. What’s in getting all of that settled. Even frankly, just finding internship placements has been more difficult this year with COVID. We’re just beginning the year with video analysis, for the 2020, 2021 year. That’s really our program goal is to integrate really everything that we’re doing with coursework and internship.

Hillary Gamblin:

I’m sure other people are probably experiencing that too with COVID as well. Thank you for all those examples. We don’t have time to answer everybody’s question, but we do these workshops every month. If you have more questions, you can always bring them on to our next workshops. Please join us there. Kirsten, thank you so much for sharing your research and experience with us today. You did this workshop voluntarily and we appreciate taking your personal time to share strategies with your fellow teacher prep professionals. Before we conclude Kirsten what will be the three takeaways you’d like participants to remember from this?

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Well, thank you. I really appreciate being here because it’s exciting to have a wider audience for your dissertation. Jordan, if you could go to slide nine, that’s my final slide. These are my three big ideas. I think your slide might have a typo that should have ideas on there. But for me, one is this, that video analysis is a bridge. It is a bridge between what we say are evidence-based practices, effective practices, theory, and the actual classroom. It’s context specific. It’s really eyeopening when my students see each other’s classrooms and go, oh, because we do have an online program, the rural side of the state does not look like the Microsoft Amazon pocket in near Seattle. Yes, guys, it looks different. What we’re talking about in class is going to look different for your context. Video analysis is that bridge.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

It’s like, hey, these are good ideas, but what does it look like in your classroom? How can you do this? That’s one big idea is just, it provides this authentic and motivating bridge. That to help us with that critique that teacher preparation is removed, quote unquote from reality or where the rubber meets the road. That’s one big idea of video analysis. The second big idea that I want people or that I’m starting to understand better and better is that ultimately video analysis is dealing with human beings. It is dealing with the teachers being human, the students being human, the reviewers and the interns being human. It is complex and it needs to be collegial over evaluative. Yes, in teacher preparation, we are evaluative. That’s true. However, if we can approach it, if there aren’t red flags, if we can approach it from a supportive and an inquiry-based and a wonderment and students can lead to andragogy tells us that adult learners really want to have relevance and meaning for their job and what’s important to them.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

We do let interns lead the way I told you, they choose their three reflections. What’s important to you? What do you want to focus on either as a big success or improvement? Choose that, that we will see more improvement, more engagement again, that motivation. To really treat video analysis collegially, and really to train our interns to be kind but constructive with each other to be specific. Then the third one is just that there really is it’s not just that we like video analysis or that it’s required now because we can’t get into brick and mortar rooms, but that there really is quantitative and qualitative data out there to support its use and its effectiveness.

Dr. Kirsten Koetje:

Now with the ubiquity of smartphones and recording technology, there’s really no reason to not have this be a widespread tool. One of the tools we have other tools. But definitely has, I think some evidence and a growing body as we all do have recording capability in our pocket. There’s more and more research out that is showing that it’s helpful. I can’t say more than that it’s something’s helpful because education is complex and there are no magic bullets.

Hillary Gamblin:

Thank you for those three. I think those are really important and a great way to end this. We know this workshop will be particularly valuable to our participants. We’ll be making a recording of this available as soon as possible. If you’ve registered for the webinar, we’ll send you an email with a link to the recording, along with the caption version, and also today’s slide deck. Watch for that in your inbox, but that is it for today. Thank you to those who are participated, those who are behind the scenes making this work. Of course, to I guess Dr. Kirsten Koetje and we will see you next time.