Effective Strategies to Enhance Professional Learning with Video Feedback

Sarah Webster:

All right, well, I think we will go ahead and get started. My name is Sarah and I am excited to welcome you to our webinar today. We’re thrilled that you’ve joined us and I think you’ll leave with some great ideas on how go GoReact can help you simplify and accelerate professional learning to address staffing challenges and provide growth opportunities for both new and experienced teachers. For those of you not familiar with GoReact and why this topic is so important to us, we’re a video feedback solution with over 10 years experience helping higher ed institutions with skill development and we believe this technology can also help school districts support their teacher growth and so we’re working with dedicated administrators to make that happen. Before I begin and introduce our presenter here today, I want to do a couple quick pieces of housekeeping.

Today’s event will last about 45 minutes. That will include about 30 minutes of the presentation and then 10 to 15 minutes at the end for Q and A. We are recording the session today, so if you need to hop off before we’re done or if you want to share the recording with a colleague afterwards, we will email that as soon as the webinar ends. We do want the presentation to be as interactive as possible, so throughout please participate. We’ll have a poll question. We’d love to have lively discussion in the chat and then prepare your questions for Bill. You can submit those using the Q and A function and then if you see a question from another attendee you’d like to have answered, you can up vote it there so we can try and prioritize those and answer them first, and we’ll get to as many questions as we can in our time today. And then finally you’ll see a chat function, so make sure to set your visibility to everyone.

Then send a message to introduce yourself and let us know what school you’re with and what your role is and share any links or relevant resources you think the audience might find helpful that relate to our discussion today. If you experience any technical difficulties, you can inform us of that by changing your visibility to hosts and panelists and sending us a message again in the chat. And now for our presenter. Today, it’s Bill Maurer. He is my colleague and he has over 15 years experience in K12 professional development. He’s worked with some of the most recognizable names in education from John Hattie, Doug Fisher, Nancy Frey, John Elmaroad. I’m sorry, Bill I’m going-

Bill Maurer:

It’s okay.

Sarah Webster:

… to murder that one. Mike Mattos, Luis Cruz, Peter Dewitt, Jim Knight, the list goes on. His focus has been on research based best practices in the classroom and the impact that great teaching has on students. He is super excited to host today’s webinar, so without further ado, I will turn the time over to Bill. Go ahead, Bill.

Bill Maurer:

Thanks Sarah, appreciate you, appreciate your help. Again, I’m Bill Maurer. I’m the K12 specialist here at GoReact, and we’re going to spend some time today to talk about best uses of GoReact in the K12 space. You may also meet my dog if the UPS guy shows up, so be prepared for some barking. Anyway, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go ahead and I’m going to share a PowerPoint presentation. I’m going to walk through that. Then I’m going to ask you a couple questions and then if you have some questions, you can go ahead and present those to us and then we’ll go into the actual platform of GoReact to show you how it’s used in the K12 setting. GoReact’s been around for over 10 years. It started out as a higher ed teacher prep program used to support teachers to get their certifications.

We’ve also been in the medical field and doctorate and nursing programs for them to improve their craft and if you’re a sports fan, you’re probably aware that sports, they’ve been using video for over 50 years to improve their craft, so why haven’t we been using it in the K12 setting? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about best uses and how others are doing it. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen and we’re going to go ahead and we’ll go through this PowerPoint presentation and then we will get some questions from you. So here we go.

All right. Today we’re going to talk about effective strategies to enhance professional learning. GoReact is a video-based feedback platform used to grow teachers. That is the main premise of the program of GoReact. A 2022 survey of National Education Association members found that 55% of teachers plan to leave the field sooner than had planned. If you’ve been in education for a while, you’re probably familiar with the previous MET study that also said that teachers leave the profession because they don’t feel they’re supported or they have the tools to succeed in the classroom. We’re here to help that. We’re here to provide tools for teachers to improve instruction in the classroom. What is GoReact? Well, there’s multiple uses of GoReact, but the main basis of GoReact is for professional development, to provide timestamped feedback using video. It’s a cloud-based application. You don’t need an app.

You don’t need to upload or download or update an app. If you have internet connectivity, you have access to GoReact. We connect to any web enabled video camera. What do I mean by that? Everyone these days has a video camera in their pocket, so it’s as simple as using a webcam, a laptop, an iPad, a cell phone to record a lesson in the classroom, so you don’t need any special technology to be connected to GoReact and provide feedback to teachers. What’s GoReact used for? Is used to support teacher growth. There are many uses of professional learning using GoReact in the K12 setting, and we’re going to go over some of those today. It provides you enhanced opportunities for practice. We can use it for modeling, self-reflection, collaboration. It’s really used with PLCs. PLCs is, it’s really hard to go deep with PLCs, but to be able to share those successes across the school district is really powerful and you can do that with GoReact.

How’s GoReact used? Well, it’s used to encourage teacher engagement with more opportunities for peer review. You can personalize professional learning by leveraging feedback and student data. You can promote collaboration with video sharing and asynchronous group reflection among team members. Who is using GoReact? New teachers, induction programs, all teachers, professional learning, unlicensed teachers of record, Alt Cert teachers, instructional leaders, coaches, mentors, principals, anyone that’s observing teachers in the classroom can use GoReact and are using GoReact to improve instruction. And then peers. There are a lot of times in the classroom when a teacher’s teaching lesson, they want feedback from their peers. GoReact’s a great tool for that. Videotape a lesson and then ask a peer, “Hey, can you provide me feedback on how I’m doing or what do you do?” It’s also used with lesson study. If you’re familiar with that term it’s a group of teachers in the same content area getting together and sharing what works best in the classroom. It’s all about the students. It’s all about raising those grades and GoReact’s a great tool for that.

Why use GoReact? What are the benefits? Well, here’s four of them. Funding. Any type of educational funding is available to use GoReact because GoReact is an evidence-based instructional strategy platform from title dollars to ESSER dollars to grants, and it’s super affordable and we’ll go over what super affordable means at the end. It’s a time saver. What do I mean by a time saver? Well, how often have you struggled to get into a teacher’s classroom that you’re supporting because you’re either in your own classroom or you’re leading the school or you’re in someone else’s classroom. It’s a time saver. You physically do not have to be there. You can video record that lesson and provide timestamped feedback after the fact. It’s a great tool when you can’t be in two places at once. It’s all about the learning. It’s all about teacher growth.

We are growing teachers exponentially using GoReact because when you use timestamped feedback, the teacher now has a situational awareness of what they were doing when you provided that feedback. Research. We are research based. Let me show you something. This is, this slide talks about the research from Professor Hattie. Professor Hattie is the number one educational resource researcher out there in the field of education and he’s been doing his research for over 20 years. In those 20 years, he’s come up with 20 influences that either increase student achievement or degrade student achievement. On this slide, you see four of those influences that can more than double the rate of learning. If you’re not familiar with Professor Hattie’s work, a 0.40 is a year’s worth of growth for a year’s worth of teaching. Microteaching, 0.88 effect size. That can more than double the rate of learning. Jim Knight talks about microteaching.

John Hattie’s done many studies on microteaching, videotaping yourselves so that you can improve in the classroom. Remember I talked about athletes and how they’ve been using video for 50 years. That’s how teams compete. They’re not just videotaping themselves, they’re videotaping their opponents. What are they doing? How can we defense against that? In teaching we haven’t really used it, although Jim Knight and John Hattie have been talking about microteaching for many years. It is a great way to grow your staff. Effective feedback and influence that has a 0.92 effect size. Effective feedback is just in time just for me. This tool provides you timestamped feedback so you can see what you were doing when that feedback was provided to you. 0.92, again, can more than double the rate of learning and it works.

Self efficacy. Self efficacy is a term used in K12 about teachers wanting to be the best they can be, has a 1.02 effect size that can almost triple the rate of learning. And collective efficacy. Collective efficacy is coming together as a group and collaborating around learning. That has one of the highest effect sizes in Hattie’s research at a 1.36. Very powerful, can more than triple the rate of learning. These are four focuses that GoReact is specifically targeting in this tool, microteaching, effective feedback, self efficacy and collective efficacy.

So this is the GoReact platform and this is the landing page and on this landing page, if you can tell it’s kind of a Google file set up and this is all customizable, so everything you see in here today will be customizable. We provide you the shell to provide great timestamped feedback along with resources for teachers, for teacher growth. In this case, I’ve got four examples of some areas and let’s say I’m a K12 school and in my K12 school I have an elementary folder, a professional learning folder, a mentoring folder, and a coaching folder. If I go into my GoReact elementary folder. I now have my grades inside my elementary school, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth and kindergarten. These are my activities. With these activities I can then go in to one of my grades and then I will have the teachers that I’m supporting with GoReact.

In this case we have Mrs. Jones here. She’s a kindergarten teacher and I want to go ahead and provide her feedback. I’m the principal in this scenario and I’m going to provide her some feedback on her lesson. So I click on her video and I’m going to turn her off. So I turned the volume off, so doesn’t interrupt with us. So on the left hand side you actually have the video of the classroom and this classroom it looks like the camera is stagnant, it’s in one place. It could be an iPad, it could be a webcam, it could be a cell phone. Again, we’re hardware agnostic, so any piece of hardware that’s web enabled will work. On the right hand side you have the comments pane. In the comments pane you now can provide feedback to this teacher as you’re watching this and let’s say this is an asynchronous scenario. The teacher hit record and then they recorded this lesson. Now I’m the coach or principal… Sorry, forgot I was a principal. And I’m going to now provide feedback for this teacher.

In the bottom right hand corner there’s an add a comment. You can add a comment three different ways. It could either be text, video or audio. In this case I’m going to provide a text piece of feedback here. If you notice, as soon as I hit that first letter, it pauses the video. The reason for that, and of course this is asynchronous, if we were live I couldn’t pause real life, but in this case it pauses it so I can now formulate a really great piece of formative feedback for this teacher. Great use of visuals is my feedback. As soon as I hit enter, it timestamps my feedback. The importance of that is now this teacher, when they go back in to watch this video, they can actually just click on the feedback piece and it takes them to that point in time, so now they have a situational awareness of what they were doing when I provided that feedback. So I click it. If you notice, it took the video back five seconds before to a minute three, so now that teacher understands what they were doing when you provided that feedback.

Now, great use of visuals isn’t exactly a formative piece of feedback, but I think you get the point in terms of it being timestamped. Remember the old days of providing observations in the classroom using pencil and paper. You fill out the observation or maybe the look fors. You hand that to the teacher as you’re walking out and they look at it and go, “I don’t remember doing that,” or “I’m not sure what they’re talking about.” This way they now have that situational awareness of what they were doing and that’s really where the growth takes place. You also have the option of markers and you mentioned that you’re already using markers. In this case, looks like this is the Danielson marker set and instead of providing text feedback, you actually can go ahead and select a marker and it automatically, again, it timestamps it at that point in time at two minutes and seven seconds. If I wanted to go back and take a look at that, I just hit that marker. It takes me back to that point in time.

Really great use of look fors, competencies that you’re focusing on. If you use a… I know you’re using the California model of teaching. Everything in here is customizable, I mentioned that at the beginning. So you could customize this marker set specific to the California standards or Ohio standards or Tennessee, whatever state you’re in, very customizable. We also have an option in here for a rubric, so if you’re doing a self-reflection piece, you can create your rubric in here. And this example, this example’s actually Tennessee’s version of their teacher standards and you can go in and this one is actually scored, so if you wanted a scored model, you could do that and I’ll show you example of the non-scored model as well.

All right, I’m going to exit out of here. Please hold your questions to the end and we’ll definitely debrief after we go through this. Want to show you some other best case uses of GoReact. I showed you the elementary school. Let’s go into the professional learning. There’s a lot of uses for professional learning for GoReact. If you can use video in the classroom to improve instruction, you can use it for best practice. You can use it for self-reflection. If I go into this best practice scenario here, I can actually, I’ve got a teacher here who’s fantastic in classroom management and I want to share this with the rest of my school or I want to share it with a group of new teachers on what really good classroom management looks like. I can go ahead and videotape that. I can videotape that teacher and do a professional development opportunity using this teacher in this video in the classroom.

What I’ve done here is we can do a peer observation. I could get my group together, whether it’s a group of new teachers where I’m sharing it with the district and we can provide an opportunity for them to collaborate around, “Hey, what is this teacher doing that I don’t do? What are the great techniques that he’s using?” We also have an option here in the rubric builder, it’s not a rubric, but we actually created some prompts. So if you wanted to use this for professional development, hey, watch this 20 minute video and answer these three questions. What was your biggest takeaway from the observation? What will you use from this lesson in one of your future lessons or what part of this lesson mirrors what you do in the classroom? Again, customizable. Okay, you won’t have access to this specific one, but you can create it or you can create your own. The rubric builders very flexible, allows you a lot of opportunity for activities to be able to grow your teachers however you would like to use it.

Again, we’ve got markers down here as well. In this case, it’s a different marker set. You know we’re watching this. Maybe we’re focusing on these four competencies. You know what? I really love his use of formative assessment here. If you are using it in a collaborative setting, someone else could also chime in and say, “Love his classroom management.” Again, everything you put in here is timestamped. All right, let’s say I’m an elementary school and I want to focus on reciprocal teaching for this semester. Reciprocal teaching is something we really want to roll out on the district and we’re going to focus on our elementary school. You can upload a video from YouTube if you prefer on reciprocal teaching and tie it into the same type of professional development learning that we did in our last video. In this case, it’s an outside source, but you could say, “Hey, school, let’s watch this eight minute video on reciprocal teaching and answer these questions.” It’s a great professional development tool.

You can also provide comments, feedback as well. Inside our professional learning, we also have a self-reflection piece very similar to the videos we just showed. We click on it, we’ve got this same kindergarten teacher and now this teacher’s going to provide feedback to herself so that now she can work with a coach. So very similar. I think Leanne, you mentioned that as well, and what you’re doing with your induction program and your mentors. In this case, I’m this teacher. I can go in and say, “You know what? Promoting critical thinking, I see that indicator there,” or, “You know what, planning instruction using assessment data. I thought I used that really well,” or can provide yourself a response.

“I could have asked that question differently.” This is the formative part of really the program. As you’re working with the coach, how would you have asked that question differently? Your coach can now chime in. How would you have? And you now can have a two-way conversation on that question that you said, “You know what? I could have asked it differently.” So forth and so on, so it goes back and forth. Again, it’s timestamped. We want to go back to that point in time. There it is. That’s the self-reflection piece. I think pretty straightforward, pretty simplistic. If we have a mentoring folder, Leanne, you mentioned you have mentors that you’re using video with. In this case, I could click into my second year teachers and if I want to provide feedback on one of those teachers, I now can provide feedback for this teacher.

Now, I’ve also tied a rubric to this. This rubric is actually San Juan Unified’s, their version of California Teacher Standards. They’ve tweaked it a little bit and these are the markers that go along with it. So in this case, I’m coaching this teacher, I want to say in this area she’s approaching, in this area she’s meeting the standards. You know what? She may not be meeting the standards in this area. Gives you an opportunity for coaching and mentoring for this teacher, but you can also use these indicators as well. Great use of assessment data, so forth and so on. There’s one more thing in here that I haven’t shown yet and this, I’m going to show one other thing, but I really want to show you the library function in GoReact.

The library function allows you to provide resources for this teacher when they need to improve in a certain area. Let’s say she’s struggling with student engagement, you could click on that and you could provide them a video on student engagement. This can be an outside source or it could be one of your master teachers that’s fantastic on student engagement. Maybe you videotape them for 10 minutes to really show what good student engagement techniques look like. You would just select it and it populates it in that pane. So now not only does the teacher have feedback from you, but now you’ve provided them a resource as well.

This library is put together by you. We do not provide content to our users. We provide you the shell to be able to provide your own resources that you’re currently using for your teachers, you can just put them in one place. You would build that out. One more thing I want to show you, I want to go ahead and show you inside of our coaching folder. This is how some schools or districts are using this, they’re using it for lesson planning. Let’s say you’ve got a teacher who’s getting ready to teach a lesson on Thursday. Today’s Wednesday. I’m a teacher. I’ve videotaped me going through my lesson plan to work with my coach to get feedback to see if I’m ready to teach this class tomorrow. I’m going to go ahead and click it.

Speaker 3:

“Today, what I want to go through…”

Bill Maurer:

This is an option on lesson planning. This teacher’s going through this. I can now provide feedback to this teacher. Now, this teacher, as soon as your comments are finished and you exit, this teacher will actually get an email and that’s how all the feedback works in the system. You’ll get an email saying, “Hey, so-and-so’s provided you feedback.” You just click on the link, this pops up. Now if I’m the teacher I see, “I think you have a good grasp of learning target.” I can click that. Again, it’s timestamped. It takes me back to that point in time. All right, time for some questions.

Sarah Webster:

All right, well, we don’t have any yet, but I thought maybe you could talk to us a little bit about teacher hesitancy to videoing, what you’ve heard on that front and how leaders overcome that.

Bill Maurer:

Yeah. I first want to apologize to Leanne. I kept calling her Louanne, so I apologize there. I couldn’t see your name. I was just going by memory and I’m getting older, so anyway. So yeah, so a lot of times we’ve been in a lot of conference and we talked to a lot of school districts about, hey, what if my teachers are hesitant to video record themselves, and one super easy way to get over that is have them do that self-reflective piece that’s really meant for them to, hey, let’s see how you’re doing in the classroom, provide yourself feedback. You don’t even have to share it with anybody. A lot of times a teacher does want feedback and they could video record themselves and invite a peer to come in and provide them feedback. So it could be their friend across the hall, it could be their coach to provide them feedback, but doing a self-reflective piece is the easiest way to get over having that fear of videotaping yourself.

It’s funny that typically happens for older teachers. The new teacher generation, that’s our TikTok generation. They’ve been videotaping themselves for a couple years now and I want to provide another point of clarification too. A lot of the higher ed institutions are using GoReact in their teacher prep programs, so a lot of new teachers that are coming to you already have already used this tool, which is going to be really great for future generations to come. But that’s probably the main way is really doing it for self-reflection. Another way to get video into a program or school, videotape a master teacher and share it, ask for volunteers. Asking for volunteers you’re always going to get someone to volunteer to videotape themself to show what they’re doing in the classroom. Again, it goes back to that self-efficacy piece. Teachers get in this profession because they’re passionate about teaching and if they really feel that they’re a fantastic teacher, most likely they’re going to be more than willing to videotape themselves to benefit others.

Sarah Webster:

Absolutely. You mentioned early on that GoReact was super affordable. You want to provide some details on pricing and what super affordable means.

Bill Maurer:

Yeah, absolutely. So not only are we the best tool in the market, we’re also the least expensive. That doesn’t mean that we’re not the best. We are the best. We do video feedback very well. It’s a very simple tool to use and we have two different pricing strategies. One is we do individual pricing. So let’s say if you’re working with a group of teachers, maybe it’s your new teachers or maybe you’re working with the math department, the pricing for GoReact is $66 per license for any license under a hundred.

Over a hundred we offer bulk pricing and we have tier pricing as well after that. We also offer site-based pricing. So let’s say you have a school that has more than 35 teachers, it’s cost-effective for you to get a site license so that all your teachers can have access to GoReact to grow their craft. So the breakeven point is 35 users at that point, so if you have less than 35, you would want individual site pricing. If you want your high school which has a hundred teachers, you’re going to benefit from having a site price and that site price is $2,310 per building.

Sarah Webster:

Fantastic. We don’t have any other questions at this moment. We do have a couple people on, if you’ve got any final questions, go ahead and drop those in the chat or the Q and A real quick. Bill, any other final thoughts or things that you want to share in closing?

Bill Maurer:

Yeah, this is a fantastic tool. Currently, if you want to know who’s using this resource, the state of California is probably our biggest user. We have about 10 districts using GoReact right now. A lot of them are using it for teacher prep induction, but we have some that are using it for professional development as well. You will start to see GoReact more and more often. As we’re getting into the K12 space, we really haven’t focused on K12 in the past. Again, it’s been primarily a higher ed tool, but remember those teachers, when they come to you fresh out of college, they’re green.

They need to be grown, and I know most districts have instructional coaching programs, mentoring programs that get those teachers up to speed, but with teacher shortage and sub shortage, it’s really hard to get out of the classroom to go support another teacher. What a great tool to be able to videotape and then provide that timestamp feedback to those teachers when you can’t be in the classroom. This isn’t meant to replace you being in the classroom because you being in the classroom is important, but it’s meant to be that support when you can’t be there, but you still need to grow those teachers.

Sarah Webster:

Absolutely. Well, thank you Bill. There weren’t any other questions that came in, so I’ll thank you for presenting. I’ll thank our audience for being here. Because you attended live we will send you a certificate of attendance. We will also send you a copy of the recording if you would like to watch it again or share with others, and we hope to see you again on a future webinar. Thanks, everyone.