Elevating Teacher Induction With Video Coaching

PRESENTER

Sean McCarthy

Sean is the Coordinator of Instructional Support, Staff Development, and Induction for the Murrieta Valley Unified School District. In this role, he facilitates the district’s clear credential and internship programs for newly hired teacher candidates. His mentors and leadership team utilize video observations through GoReact to provide ongoing feedback to candidates, who also use the platform for their Exit Interviews. In addition to his work with new teachers, Sean is a certified restorative practices trainer and mindfulness teacher. A former high school English teacher, he has maintained his status as a National Board Certified Teacher since 2000.

TRANSCRIPT

Michael Campbell:

Awesome. Give this about a minute for everybody to join. I’ve got a new kitty over here, so if I randomly jump up, it’s because she’s scratching my leg and climbing me, but she’s asleep, so I’m okay for now. Give us about 30 more seconds just for clean edits to our recording and we’ll get started. Everybody can open up their chats and say hello. Make sure you change that visibility to everyone as Aaron mentioned here in the chat. Alright, hello everyone and thank you so much for joining us for Reaction. I’m Michael, I’m a member of our client services team here at GoReact and welcome to today’s session, elevating Teacher Induction with Video Coaching. Just a few housekeeping items to get started. As you may have seen in the chat already, please introduce yourself, share any thoughts that you may have during the presentation and share resources here in the chat window.

Make sure that you change your message settings to everyone so that we can share it to the group. If you have any questions for our presenter, use the q and a window. If you see a question there you’d like answered, click that thumbs up button to up, upload it. We’ll make sure we answer as many questions as we can here at the end of our time today. And without further ado, I am pleased to introduce Sean McCarthy, who’s a high school English teacher turned coordinator of instructional support staff development and induction of the Murrieta Valley Unified School District in California. And I will turn the time over to you. Sean, go ahead.

Sean McCarthy:

Alright, thank you so much. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. Hopefully you’ll all be able to see the presentation now. Let me know if there’s any issues with that, but I really appreciate you joining me to hear a little bit how we support teaching and learning through GoReact Observations here in the Myriad Valley Unified School District induction program. I will let you know, just a heads up, I have to end this a little bit early so you get a little bit longer break before your next section. So I’m going to go pretty quickly through a few of the slides and then spend a little bit more time hopefully with some of the notes and bolts of how we’re utilizing our observations. A little bit more about me, I’ve been involved with a new teacher induction since 1996 as a mentor, and then I became the program director in 2009.

So I’ve been doing this for quite a long time. For those of you who are from California, you might remember the old days before it was induction, it was bits a beginning, teacher support and assessment. So I’ve been around for quite a while doing that. I’m a national board certified teacher, which is where I first got interested in using leveraging video to support teacher improvement since that’s a big integral part of the national board process. I’m a certified mindfulness teacher thinking maps trainer and cognitive coaching trainer as well. A little bit about our program, we served this year 65 induction candidates, 12 interns along with 12 additional teachers ranging from tk, transitional, kindergarten, all the way through adult education in our various mentoring programs. And we train and support 94 mentors right now to provide that collaboration and support for our TK to adult education teachers and our district, our program mission is to inspire candidates to make inquiry the basis for their ongoing professional development.

And that’s kind of where our approach to mentoring comes in, that we’re really trying to elevate teacher their thinking, their ability, their capacity to make those decisions for their own professional development that are going to impact teaching and learning in whatever their context is. And there’s a ton of research, as I’m sure most of you’re aware, that tells us that feedback on actual teaching practices one of the most powerful ways for our novice teachers to improve and that’s where GoReact comes in. So we’ve been utilizing video for quite a long time as what we call a third point, which I’ll talk a little bit about more later as we get into our cognitive coaching approach. But we’ve liked leveraging video in order to help candidates see for themselves what’s happening in their classrooms so that they can make action plans that are going to improve what’s going on and ensuring that they’re impacting all students.

Excuse me. So this has been something, like I said, we’ve done for quite a long time, inspired by my national board experience going back to 2000 where I could just see, hey, the video does not lie. You might think you’re doing certain things or certain teacher moves or making an impact in a certain way when you actually watch that video and see what’s really happening. It is so incredibly powerful and that’s what motivated us to start kind of a rudimentary approach to utilizing video. Now we’ve always, ever since I was a mentor, going back to 1996, observations of our novice teachers have been integral to that support process. So we really started shifting to primarily video-based observations during the covid epidemic. That was when we really realized we had that need. And one of the things that we found was going to these video observations really did support that kind of objective authentic feedback for the teachers and our mentors found it to be a lot less threatening and a lot less disruptive to what was going on in their classroom when they could just kind of set up a camera off to the side and record what was happening.

They got a little bit more of a realistic view than when you have somebody in watching scripting what’s going on that kind of often changes the tenor of how your students are responding. We also found it really respected the time for both our mentors and our candidates while still allowing that thorough feedback that we were trying to provide. And the main reason was they didn’t have to worry about setting up subs release time, getting their schedules aligned so that the mentor was showing up at the right time to see what the candidate was hoping to receive that feedback for. And so that flexible scheduling really made a huge difference. We had so many times where a mentor would do sub plans, get the release time and go, and then things would happen that kind of prevented it from being an ideal observation. And then probably the best thing is it’s really cost effective.

We have always provided release time for our candidates for going out and observing other colleagues, which we also think is a huge part of their professional learning as well as their release time for their mentors to go in and observe them as they teach. And as we were experiencing budget constraints, this ended up being a fantastic solution so we could really kind of focus our budget toward getting our candidates out and seeing their colleagues while the mentors completed their observations via video. So it made real tremendous difference in terms of us being able to still do all the practices that we knew were important. So we’ve used GoReact to engage candidates in five cycles of video feedback each year that support what they are doing in their classroom development. And it started back in 2022 when our leadership team piloted using GoReact, and we were honestly a little bit skeptical as were some of our leadership team members, oh, is this one more thing we have to learn and jump into?

And our idea was that based on the pilot, we might get off to a little bit of a start just kind of maybe using it here and there that following year. But based on the feedback we got from our leadership team and their candidates, they were blown away. And so we went right for full implementation at the beginning of the 2223 school year for all aspects of our induction program. And we’ve been of course doing it ever since. Now the way it works is that our mentors conduct three cycles of observation every year, and then we have two additional cycles of observations facilitated by program leadership. So for example, I as the secondary member of our leadership team, I do two additional observations for every candidate who is a middle or high school teacher, and then other leadership members take care of the elementary general ed and then the special education candidates that we have.

So you can see how we’ve set it up. We have folders for each of these cycles, the assignments that the candidates are going to work with. Our year one candidates go through an initial context observation that sets the baseline for what’s going on in their classroom and what areas they might want to focus on. And then they do a cycle of inquiry into their learning environment, which for us in California relates to California standard for the teaching profession two, and then they do one in the spring for student engagement, which relates to standard number one. And then the other observation folder is where program leadership provides their feedback. And then we also use it as a catchall that if they ever have anything going on in their classroom that they need to troubleshoot, they can go ahead and record it, pop it into that folder and get feedback either from leadership or from their mentor.

We call that the just in time mentoring component in our induction world. So it’s beyond their long-term analysis of teaching practice and just that need for instant feedback. And they kind of repeat the process in year two. Again, they check out their context, what’s going on, and then they do a cycle of inquiry around instructional design, which we connect to our standards three and four in California. And then assessing learning, which is standard five. And then again, program leadership also conducts two observations with feedback. And again, we feel like the more eyes we get on their teaching practice, the more feedback they can receive, the higher impact things have on teaching and learning for those candidates. We’ve also used it for exit interviews. We’re shifting away from that a little bit and going down a little bit of a different approach. But our exit interviews were really wonderful in GoReact.

We tried using our learning management system canvas. We tried using things like Flipgrid, of course that’s gone away, but we struggled a little bit with it when we switched to having the candidates record in GoReact, it just made the whole process so much easier. They were already well accustomed to what they were doing with the platform from their own observations. So the way we roll this out, and we kind of repeat this process a little bit each year as we get a new class of candidates who come in and join our program, we first start with an initial GoReact training for all of our new mentors. And as you’ll see in a second, we tie that in very closely with the cognitive coaching training that our mentors receive. And then our candidates get trained and coached during their orientation. And then we have a September network meeting where we kind of walk them through that process.

We have them practice uploading videos, we make sure that they’re very uncomfortable, I’m comfortable using the platform that they are thinking about things like how are we placing our cameras in the classroom to capture what we want our mentors to actually view. We’ve also created a Canvas support page. We use our district’s learning management system to support all of our candidates and our mentors and that has all sorts of tutorials, screenshots. We link to both the GoReact tutorials on how to use the platform as well as our own tutorials that we’ve created to walk them through all those steps, especially different scenarios they might encounter if they are struggling with bandwidth with their wifi or different things like that, troubleshooting particular issues. And then all our mentors go through a mid-year follow-up training where we revisit how we’re using our video observation platform. We troubleshoot things and then they just collaborate on best practices.

And we found that has really helped because they often see things in the field that we don’t, that they need to focus on and develop. And then we keep office hours as well so that anytime a candidate or mentor is struggling with any aspect of using GoReact or really anything in our induction program, we can follow up with them and provide a little bit of additional support. So what we found, and we’re always evolving, always trying to improve. This is our best practices. We always train our mentors to engage in a pre-observation conference every time before the candidate does that video observation. And what we found is this really helps ensure they’ve kind of identified a tight focus and timeframe and optimal camera placement based on what the inquiry is going to be about. We’ve struggled with that in the past before we really coached up our mentors in doing this because sometimes the candidate would record something that wasn’t really relevant to the inquiry that they were doing and didn’t really give the mentor any useful information to help support their growth and development.

And they focused these feedback by letting the inquiry question that they’re working on. So if they’re doing learning environment, an inquiry question might be, how can I improve my procedures to ensure appropriate student behavior? Or if it’s engagement, how can I engage my students and higher level number talks in my math classroom, that type of thing, as well as the California Standards for Teaching Profession, the specific elements that they want to focus on. And by going through and having that discussion, they can also ensure that their observation is going to be very relevant and that feedback is going to be useful to what they’re working on. We also coach our mentors on making sure their comments are as useful and relevant as possible, that they try not to overwhelm the candidates by sharing everything that they’re seeing going on in the classroom, but they really focus that specific comment, those specific comments related to whatever the inquiry focus is.

And we kind of tell ’em no need to comment on everything, less is more. In fact, we found that some of our mentors who have just unleashed a ton of feedback, it kind of becomes a little overwhelming and even sometimes crushing to those candidates. The biggest thing we do, which again is going to be kind of my focus here, is we focus on utilizing our cognitive coaching strategies with each of these observations. So we’ve been coaching our mentors for years on the idea of using things like open-ended questions, notices and wonders rather than just exclusively saying, Hey, you did this really well, you need to work on this piece. Because what we find is when they really integrate their cognitive coaching strategies effectively, then it’s more effective in elevating the candidates thinking about their practice and improving the quality of the reflections that they engage with.

We also talk about our post observation preparation because this is really the key that we coach our mentors in how to go through ensure that they are providing that feedback, that they’re tagging their comments to the California standards for the teacher profession. And we have all six of those tagged within our platform so that they can show whether it’s a question or a comment where it connects to a particular standard. And we also encourage the candidates to take a look at review and look at the commentary prior to going into that post-observation conference. And then that’s the final step. They engage in the post observation conference where they facilitate a real time learning focus conversation based on commentary. This is something we found is really important. There were a few as we were experimenting where the mentors would do the feedback, the candidate would do the feedback, and they would never really meet in person necessarily to kind of talk through and have that learning focus conversation, which is so important to building that capacity in our teachers. So we emphasize this as that final essential step to have that real time in-person conversation about the video.

We, as I mentioned, try to integrate this with our cognitive coaching approach. And the primary resource that we utilize for our cognitive coaching training is Laura Lipton and Bruce Wellman’s Mentoring Matters, which some of you may have heard of in the past. We sprinkle that in with other resources from Jim Knight, Elena Aguilar and that type of thing. But our primary driver for over 20 years now has been mentoring matters. And our mentors are basically trained to use cognitive coaching strategies during their weekly collaborations with candidates. And again, they’re taught how to do that primarily through this text. What we wanted to make sure we did was integrate what we were already practicing with our GoReact observations, not supplanted or not making it this additional piece. So that is really where our primary training comes in. And one of the things that’s part of our Mentoring Matters programming is this kind of template for coaching.

I’m not going to spend too much time on it, and a lot of you may be familiar with it already, but it’s just that idea that on the coaching spectrum, you can go from where the mentor is doing most of the work and the collaborating or consulting stance to where the candidate is doing the bulk of the cognitive work in the collaborating or ideally the coaching stance. So we encourage our mentors to stay on more of a coaching stance where they’re more focused on asking effective questions rather than giving direct statements or telling the candidates what they need to be doing or improving because again, that elevates their capacity to problem solve. And this template that we provide gives them some effective tools for being good listeners, for asking questions. We have question stems, and then there are also outlines for the three types of conversations most mentors engage in.

It’s usually either a planning conversation with the candidate, a problem solving conversation or a reflecting conversation depending on where they’re at in the inquiry process. And it just reminds them to do things like, okay, activate and engage the candidate. Then you’re going to explore and discover, and you always want to do this piece at the end where you organize and integrate the conversation so that you’re doing something with it. There’s some kind of follow up, Laura Lipton says, if you don’t include this step, then it’s just an episode. Nothing may come of that conversation. It might be a great conversation, but how are they going to use this exploration of their video to actually make a difference and to move forward in their practice? So the video observation supports this process by providing what I alluded to earlier as the third point. So you have the mentor and the beginning teacher.

The third point is this outside focus that we encourage our mentors to provide. They kind of takes the conversation out of just that mentor candidate relationship and what we find, and we’ve used many types of third points, we’ve used scripting of an observation, we’ve used seating charts where they are tagging which students participate or they track the movement of a teacher in the classroom. All of those can be great. They look at data, student work samples. But the video third point has been, without a doubt, the most powerful because it’s kind of set aside, the candidate and mentor just both look at it together and see for themselves what’s happening. What we find is that kind of lowers that defensiveness. It opens the candidate to exploring because it’s not the mentor telling them, Hey, I noticed a lot of students weren’t engaged in your classroom.

As soon as a candidate hears that, they often get a little defensive or they might shut down or worry about things. But when the mentor is just watching the video with them and asking questions, what are you noticing about student engagement here? What are you noticing about your movement in the classroom? What do you wonder about with this group of students and how they are engaged in their collaboration? We find that that opens the candidate up a lot more to being willing to kind of explore and investigate and check out how they might be able to improve what’s going on in their classroom. Wow. Boy, this is a little bit out of order. I have no idea how that happened. And again, I apologize everybody. So the way it looks in practice is our candidates either record themselves, occasionally the mentor or one of our program leaders will go in and do that recording after going through that whole process of the pre-observation, figuring out the focus, figuring out camera placement, doing all those pieces.

And then the mentor goes through and provides the comments and they do two things, and hopefully you can see this on this little smaller screen here with the PDF. But basically they tag the focus standard that they are observing. So in this case, standard one for us is engaging and supporting all students. Standard two is creating and maintaining effective learning environments. So when they see things connected to those standards, they use the tag. And then you’ll see most of the comments are not comments directly on what they were doing, but they’re questions. So what are some things you’re noticing about the level of student engagement at this stage in the classroom? What are some ways providing sentence frames supported your student responses? And again, it gets the candidate then ready to have that conversation with the mentor so they can kind of talk about it.

And if it’s a positive thing, then what it does is it reinforces, well, I really noticed using those sentence frames, I got much better responses from my students when they actually began the conversation, when they began their writing assessment or when you’re asking about student engagement, then the candidate for themselves can say, well, I am noticing that I have a few students engaged, but this student was on her phone, this student had his head down on the desk, all things they might not have really been aware of while they were teaching. And that helps, again, build that capacity for making a difference. We also, as you can see, will encourage our mentors to do recordings or even videos for their feedback. And a lot of them leverage that really effectively, particularly when it’s something they need to be able to explain or articulate in a little bit more depth.

And they want to be able to share that comment with the candidate. And again, here’s another example. This is from a special education classroom, and again, it’s tagged. These are primarily first year teachers, so we’re focused on standards one and two. So you can see how they have tagged those particular standards, whether it’s something that they’re seeing that’s effective or something they’re seeing needs work. The candidate can kind of focus in on exactly what it is that they need to be working on. And again, you’ll see some of the comments if it’s hard to read these, what are some things you’re noticing about your movement in the classroom and how it impacts student engagement and behavior? And again, that question might be just for them to be aware. Oh, I noticed when I moved to this quadrant of the classroom, I helped students kind of stay focused and the behavior improve.

But I also noticed I almost never went to this part of the classroom. I primarily moved to these same locations, these things that sometimes we’re not conscious of in our practice, and we can kind of bring that to the forefront for the candidate. And again, the mentor asking that question as opposed to making that statement, Hey, I noticed you’re only getting to this part of your classroom, what might that do? Well, that might create a little bit of defensiveness or a little bit of fear in the candidate in terms of being judged about that movement. But if they can notice these things for themselves, then they’re more likely to embrace how they might make a difference. And then the other thing that we try to do in that process is follow that notion is at the end we have all our mentors do a summary statement for the inquiry.

And that is that organizing and integrating stage of our different cognitive coaching situations. Again, whether it’s the reflecting, the planning or the problem solving conversation, we ask ’em to always kind of make that summary statement at the end that involves, okay, where are we going from here based on all this feedback we’ve received this conversation we’ve had the things that we’ve noticed, the things that we’ve explored, what’s coming next? So at the end of this particular conversation with the teacher since they were doing centers and they noticed some things that they wanted to improve in terms of how they were managing the different centers and working with the different itinerant in the classroom. I know it’s probably hard for you to read, but the mentor said, I’ll connect with teachers at Rail and MVES to schedule observations next week to view how they manage their centers.

Please be sure you develop your focus question and identify the focus student prior to the collaboration next Monday. So that way we know that something is going to take place as a result of this video observation. They’re going to do something with it. They’ve identified an area to work on and they’ve initiated a plan to make that happen and to improve what’s going on in the classroom. So we have really found that this has made a tremendous difference. Our mentors are really positive about it. We were worried. We’ve had resistance in the past, as I’m sure some of you have encountered when you try to introduce something new. But this just took off. And I mean we’ve had so many observations completed and we get such feedback. These are just a few that I gathered. One mentor said one of the most beneficial aspects has been the ability to review videos multiple times, allowing for more precise progress tracking and targeted support.

Another said GoReact has been a valuable tool. It gives the mentor an opportunity to identify a specific aspect within a lesson and ad commentary that can be labeled with a specific standard. And then this mentor, this one’s really interesting because this mentor mentors both for our program and for an outside consortium and said, I wish I had this tool to help support my candidate who is in this different program. I appreciate the flexibility it offers. I can easily get feedback regarding practice and the California standards for the teaching professions. It’s a great springboard for meaningful conversations. So we gather this feedback as we survey our mentors midyear and end of year, and we do the same thing for our candidates. And we always worry, is this a burden? Is this one more thing that you are struggling with? But we’ve gotten really nothing but positive feedback.

One candidate said, I think the process of reflecting, implementing strategy and reviewing the results on the video with my mentor has been the most effective part of the program so far. Love that comment. The GoReact, video observations, comments are helpful for reflection on identifying areas of improvement. And then this candidate said, tracking my progress and observing myself through GoReact videos has really put into perspective the growth I have had in just a few months. And I would not be as aware of how I’ve grown as a teacher without the program. And we love that. We see that as well. I love when I’m looking at a second year teacher and I see what they’re doing on the videos and I can go back and look at a video from their first semester and it’s like, wow, you can really see that dramatic improvement. And I think that makes such a huge difference for both our mentors and candidates to have that powerful evidence right in front of them of their growth as well as those areas that they want to improve. So thank you so much for listening. I’m ending, as I said a little bit early, but I have a about five minutes to answer any questions that have arisen. I think I closed my chat window when I was troubleshooting here. Anything, Michael that I need to

Michael Campbell:

Oh, no questions so far. We do have one in the chat. I think it might be worth asking if you do have an answer. How does your school fund GoReact and mentor training?

Sean McCarthy:

Ah, yes. Well, we fund in California, we have LCFF funding. So we put this the local control funding formula. I believe that’s what it stands for. And so we have to build this plan every year of how we’re going to utilize that budget, what we call the LCAP budget that’s connected to that local control funding based on priorities in our district. And one of the goals, one of the priorities is professional development. So our induction program falls under that particular priority. And so we include that as our goal and our metric for making sure that we are utilizing induction as well as our intern program and our general mentoring for any other teachers as one of those goals. So that’s how we have been funding our entire induction program. And GoReact falls within that, and we have been able to keep leveraging that, particularly as I alluded to earlier, since we’re no longer spending as much on release time.

So even as we’ve had some budget cuts over the years, we’ve still been able to maintain our funding for GoReact because it’s so much more cost effective than providing release time for our mentors to go out and do these three observations a year. And I see this question about legal issues with videoing in the classroom. We don’t, and we actually have talked about this quite a bit because we have had to have video release forms for other types of video observations. Like our national board candidates all have to get video release. Our college candidates, those who are interns and are having to videotape for their universities, have to take care of that release because it’s going outside. Since this is kind of closed and the only people who see the video are the mentor and the candidate or one of the program leaders and the candidate we’re able to use that video because we don’t use, in fact, you kind of see, even when I do screenshots, I’m really careful about blacking out names and blurring faces of students and that type of thing because that’s kind of how we’ve worked it out with our district leadership in terms of being able to do these observations without any of that.

We actually coach both our mentors and candidates in letting being upfront, whether it’s with students and where it also becomes an issue sometimes, or with our aides, because aides will sometimes worry, okay, can this video be utilized as part of the evaluation process and that type of thing. So we actually give them a script to share with anyone who might have those kinds of concerns outlining the only ways the video is actually able to be utilized in the classroom. And then it’s even our videos with our candidates. We don’t consider them evaluative. We consider just feedback that’s for the candidate. And all of our mentors, program leadership candidates, we all sign an MOU on confidentiality, so we can never share, the mentor can never share anything that they see on the video with any outside entity, an administrator, another teacher, or anything else like that. And we really hammer that point home and thankfully we have not had issues as a result.

Michael Campbell:

That’s great. Well, thanks Sean. It looks like that is all the questions here, but man, your experience, it’s super valuable. The way you’re able to create an entire process and put it all into one platform. GoReact is amazing. Nobody could have done it better. The whole process from the top down, you’ve made it so seamless and so simple. That’s probably why we haven’t had so many questions. The explanations, it’s all just great. It’s perfect.

Sean McCarthy:

Well, thank you. And again, I apologize. I went through that whole presentation this morning just to double check. So I don’t know, I must’ve deleted something or been a little bit careless. I have no idea what happened to those slides. No

Michael Campbell:

Worries.

Sean McCarthy:

Oh, well I’m glad I didn’t find out like 10 minutes before I would’ve really been panicking. At least I was able to find the pdf.

Michael Campbell:

No, you’re great. Cool. Thank you, Sean.

Sean McCarthy:

Thank you. Thanks everybody.

Michael Campbell:

That does wrap up our session. So to close out, we will all take a quick 15 minute break before the last session the day begins. If you haven’t already, be sure and bookmark the session that you want to attend. You can see those on my itinerary. And from there you can add them to your calendar so you don’t miss anything. Stay informed during the event by checking the lobby. Chat for announcements during breaks, and we will see you at the next session. Thank you.