Enhancing Self-Reflection, Peer Observation, and Professional Growth

Erin Grubbs:

We are going to go ahead and get started. My name is Erin Grubbs, head of Marketing here at GoReact. For those of you not familiar with GoReact and why this topic is so important to us. GoreReact is a video feedback solution that’s taken our 10 years of experience in helping higher ed institutions with students skill development to now helping school districts support teacher growth. I’m happy to be joined today by our presenter, Bill Maurer, who’s senior executive for K 12 here at GoReact. Before I hand it over to him, I’m going to run through a few points of housekeeping. Today’s event will last about 30, 35 minutes. That includes about 20 minutes of presentation and about 10 minutes for q and a. We are recording today’s presentation, so if you need to hop off before we finish or you want to share the recording with a colleague, we will email the recording out to you.

We do want today’s presentation to be as interactive as possible, so throughout the presentation please participate in the chat function and asking the q and a to submit those questions to Bill. Please use the q and a function at the bottom of your screen. We’ll try to answer as many questions as we can in today’s session. You’ll also see that chat function. Please use it to introduce yourself, tell us what school you’re with, and if you have any links or resources that you think are relevant to share with other attendees, please go ahead and do so in that chat section and if you experience any technical difficulties, please use the chat to reach out. Without further ado, I’m going to hand it over to Bill to introduce himself and get us started.

Bill Maurer:

Thanks, Erin, appreciate it. Hi everybody. I’m Bill Maurer. I’m the K-12 director here at GoReact. Just a quick background about myself. I’ve been in K-12 professional development for 20 years. I’ve worked side by side with some of the best educational experts out there, John Hattie, Jim Knight. That list goes on and on. Really happy to share with you today about GoReact and how K-12 educators are using our platform to enhance professional development, self-reflection, peer observation, using our tool in an effective and efficient way. We know there’s budget issues out there, there are every year, but now with Esser funds going away, it’s imperative to still support those teachers but in a more economical way and that’s what GoReact is here to do and we’re here to stay. I’m really excited about this platform. The reason I came to GoReact was because this tool is, it’s a game changer.

If you talk to any of our current customers of GoReact, they’ll tell you that the platform is super easy to use, but there are so many different uses of it in K-12 that it’s such a powerful tool to use to grow teachers. If you think about video and how video is used to grow in any capacity, the medical profession, they’ve been using video for many years for doctors and nurses to improve their craft. If you think about athletes, athletes been using video for over 50 years to improve their craft. Serena Williams wouldn’t be Serena Williams without the use of video. Scotty Scheffler, the number one golfer in the world wouldn’t be Scotty Scheffler without videotaping his swing over and over again in education higher ed, they’ve been using video and actually GoReact for 12 plus years in teacher prep programs across the country to get teachers ready to teach into the classroom, but we all know once they get to the classroom, they’re still not at peak performance, so GoReact is now available in K 12 to help grow those teachers.

Let’s talk about research real quick. There’s a lot of research that supports a tool like this. I mentioned John Hattie, professor John Hattie. He’s the one that is responsible for the visible learning research. He’s been doing that research for 25 years and GoReact is a micro-teaching tool. If you’re familiar with Hattie’s research, micro-teaching has a 1.01 effect size. What that number really means is it can almost triple the rate of learning when it’s used properly. When we talk about effective feedback, this is an effective feedback tool. This tool is used to provide feedback for teachers to grow in Hattie’s research. Feedback has a 0.51 effect size, but when you add in effective feedback and the timing that feedback’s provided, that can go up to a 0.89, which can more than double the rate of learning. If you’re familiar with the visible learning research collective teacher efficacy, this is a great platform for that.

It’s used for PLCs and collaborative teams to really deepen the understanding of how to teach a standard GoReact can be used for that and is being used for that across the country. Another educational expert, Jim Knight, he actually wrote a book, he’s the instructional coaching guru out there. He wrote a book called Focus on Teaching. That book is all about using video to grow teachers by helping instructional coaches videotape a lesson and provide timely feedback for teachers. Again, this is a fantastic platform. It’s very intuitive. I’m going to walk through some scenarios and best use cases and I’m going to jump right in right now and kind of show you the platform, how it can be used. Again, I’m only going to show about three use cases, but there are so many that can be used. If you can videotape something and learn from it and grow from it, GoReact is the tool for you.

I’m going to go ahead and jump into the platform right now when I get into the platform. What you’re seeing here is our web-based application. You don’t need any special hardware. We’re hardware agnostic. Everyone has a video camera in their pocket these days. It’s as simple as using a cell phone to videotape a lesson or videotape yourself teaching in the classroom. Really simple to use this and everything you see here is customizable. This is the landing page. When you go to GoReact.com and you have a license, your screen is going to have, well, at first you won’t have anything, but once you start creating folders, again, when I say it’s very intuitive to use, whenever there’s an activity or a function that you can start in GoReact, you’ll see a big red button. In this case, if I want to create a folder, I just click that button, I label it, and now I have a folder.

Your screen would not look like this initially. You could have one folder, you could have 10 folders. This is just the organizational piece of what GoReact looks like. I’m going to go over three things in this video. We’re in this demo. I’m going to go over self-reflection, how to use GoReact as an individual to grow your craft inside the classroom. Then I’m going to talk about using it for peer observation. How do we use GoReact to share best practice? We know there’s a sub shortage out there. It’s hard to get teachers out of their classroom and into another classroom to watch a good teacher teach GoReact can be used to videotape those master teachers and then any teacher can log in and view that activity and there’s specific things that they can use to help grow their craft inside that activity.

And then the third thing I’m going to talk about really coaching and mentoring and how to use GoReact. For that, I’m going to jump into my professional learning folder right now inside my professional learning folder, I’ve got two activities, so of the three things I’m going to show today, inside this folder, there’s two of them, right? I’m first going to go into self-reflection. Now again, everything’s customizable on here, so I want to repeat that. When you go into a folder, you could have one to many activities and activities will range based on the things that you would attach to those activities. I’m going to go into the self-reflection activity and when I go in here, there’s going to be a video inside of here, and this is going to be a video of a teacher that’s now going to just use this platform without using a coach or a principal.

They’re going to use it for themselves to improve the craft in the classroom. So when I click in here, I now have a video of a teacher and this teacher, and let’s say I’m this teacher, although it doesn’t look like me, I’m going to use this to improve myself in the classroom. So here’s the setup. A teacher will set up a camera in their classroom. It could be, again, a cell phone, a laptop, an iPad, a web camera, a swivel camera, any web enabled camera works with GoReact. In this case, this teacher set up a video camera in the corner, hit record, and now once this is done, they can actually go in and watch the lesson and then provide themselves some feedback. A lot of people will use this activity and a lot of people that start with GoReact will start with the self-reflection activity, record yourself in the classroom.

Tell me two things you thought you did really well and maybe one thing that you want help on or you think you need to improve on. Some people call those glows and grows. There’s other terminology out there, but that’s really a simple way to get started with GoReact. So in this case, I’m just going to click on the video and when I click on the video, the video starts playing on the left hand side and now on the right hand side, I can now engage in feedback to myself of what I thought I did really well. I’m going to name two things. I thought I did really well in this lesson and maybe one thing I need help on. Once I do this, I can reflect on really my lesson. How did I do? Are there areas where I can improve? And then if I want to work with an instructional coach, I can actually say, Hey, I recorded my video and they can share this video with a coach after the fact if they want to. On the right hand side, I’m going to go ahead and provide myself some feedback. I like how the students are very engaged.

If you notice when I started typing the video pause, this gives me a chance to really provide myself, if this is me, a really good piece of formative feedback when I hit enter, three things are going to happen. One, the video’s going to start playing again. Two, it’s going to timestamp my feedback and then it’s also going to hyperlink this. The importance of the hyperlink is I don’t have to fast forward or rewind to go back to where I said, I like how the students were very engaged. All I have to do because of the timestamp and the hyperlink, I just click this and it takes me back to that point in time. That’s one thing I thought I did really well. Now I’m going to put another piece of feedback in here. I really like how I asked an open-ended question.

Got misspelling in there, so there’s two things I thought I did really well in this respect. Now I’m watching the video. Maybe there’s one thing I could improve on. I’m watching the video. I think I need to work on mentioning the learning target of the lesson. Now, if I’m working with an instructional coach on this video, now I can go ahead and share this video right here. I can share with my coach this video itself, or let’s say I wanted to share it with the teacher across the hall. I can use this share button as well. Alright, I’m going to move on. That’s self-reflection, a lot of great uses of self-reflection. Again, I can just record a video of myself and then hey, I can comment and if I’m working with a coach, I can share the video with them as well. All right. Now the second use case, we’re going to talk about peer observation.

Again, I mentioned inside of peer observation. I’m hearing across the country that a lot of people are having sub shortage. It’s really hard, again, to get those teachers out of the class and into another teacher’s class to watch teachers teach. That’s an important strategy when you’re growing new teachers. In this case, this teacher right here is really good on student engagement. He’s in our school district and we use this video to grow new teachers when they can’t get in there and physically watch this teacher teach. In this case, I’m a new teacher. I now can watch this teacher and I can comment based on what I saw. We can also provide a collaborative or an open peer review activity here where multiple teachers can comment by watching this teacher. I like how he did that.

Great. Now, if a teacher wants to know, well, what does he mean by that comment? They can just again, click on the hyperlink and it takes ’em back to that point in time. Again, multiple teachers can comment. Also, if you notice, I’ve got some circles down here with some letters inside it. This is what we call our marker set. Our marker set can be used to focus on certain look fors or certain competencies inside a lesson. In this case, hey, he just asked a question for the class. You know what? I could tag it with a questioning marker.

You also have the ability, again, everything’s customized here. It doesn’t come with four markers. You create these markers ahead of time. Everyone focuses on something different in the, if I really like right now, he’s talking about a formative assessment to see if kids understand. I could tag that as well or I could also type. I like how the students are very engaged. Again, everything’s timestamped. If you want to go back to one of these markers or you want to go back to one of these comments, you would just click on it and it would take it back to that point in time. Another function that we use, and this is really powerful when we’re growing our teachers in the classroom, we have a rubric button here. This rubric button can be used for multiple things, but in this case, I’ve actually, because this is, I’m using this for peer observation, I can go ahead and click on that rubric button and I have a peer observation form in here.

So if I’m a coach and I’ve got a teacher that wants to do peer observations, I can say, okay, let’s watch this teacher teach and then answer three questions on what you saw, what part of that are you going to use in your next lesson or what part of that is your aha moment? These questions, again, this is customizable. It took me two minutes to come up with these questions. It’s really simple to work with this rubric builder to add specific functions inside of here to really get the most out of trying to grow this teacher effectively and efficiently.

The last thing I’m going to go over is I’m going to talk about coaching and mentoring. So I’m going to go into my mentoring folder here. I’m working with first year and second year teachers. I’m a coach. In this scenario, I’m going to go into my first year teacher activity, and inside of here I have a teacher that I’m working with inside the classroom. Again, the setup looks exactly the same as everything else that you’ve seen so far. My marker sets a little different here. In this case, I’m focusing on success criteria, learning target, questioning, whole group, small group and student engagement. Now I’m going to go ahead. Oh, I just saw that they moved to small group instruction, so I’m just going to tag that there. All right, and now I’m going to type. I really liked how you asked that question. Again, it timestamps and hyperlinks. Everything that I do inside of GoReact, and if I’m working with a coach and in this scenario, you know what I see, she asked a really good question there, but it wasn’t an open-ended question. So now how could you have asked an open-ended question there?

Now, this teacher, she actually, we can have a conversation right inside here inside of React. That teacher could say, I should have asked this instead. In the rubric button. On this scenario, we actually have a educator effectiveness rubric inside of here. This rubric could be a teacher performance rubric inside of, here I can work with this teacher or this teacher could self-reflect and rate themselves through the elements of our education or effectiveness rubric, and again, just another tool working with the coach that we can use to help grow this teacher in the classroom. So again, real simple, it timestamps, it hyperlinks everything you have with these teachers. There’s four permissions that are set up inside of GoReact. My teacher is typically a participant. Teachers can only see their videos unless they’ve been invited in by another teacher. Coaches will typically be owners. That would be their permission. They can see teachers that they support. They can’t see all teachers in a district. An admin will have the ability to see everyone inside of their GoReact license.

I’m going to go ahead and stop sharing now. Just to recap, we reviewed self-reflection where a teacher can improve their craft by themselves by videotaping themselves in the classroom. If they’re working with a coach, they can work with a coach, say, Hey, I want you to videotape yourself. Tell me two things you thought you did really well and one thing you might want help with. We went over peer observation or sharing best practice inside of there. We can go ahead and videotape a nationally board certified teacher or a master teacher, and then our new teachers can log in to GoReact, and there’s certain activities they can do to watch that teacher teach by just staying inside their classroom. And then the third thing, I went over a coaching and mentoring scenario. Inside that scenario, there’s multiple things that a coach can work with a teacher on inside of a classroom by utilizing video. I’m going to go ahead and pause. That’s the end of the demo. I’m now going to answer some questions and see what we have here.

Erin Grubbs:

Yeah, thanks Bill. It does look like we’re getting a couple questions and just a reminder to use that q and a function so we can monitor any questions that are coming in. We have one from Jacob Lopez. He says, given budget constraints many school districts are currently facing, how does the cost effectiveness and scalability of GoReact compare to traditional in-person professional development approaches? And what do you think are some of the key in terms of ROI?

Bill Maurer:

Yeah, a really great question. It’s funny, I had a conversation with the school district not too long ago and we were talking about how the Esser funds are going away, and I said, Esser funds are going away, but GoReact is here to stay. A lot of districts have spent funding on coaches. This tool is not here to replace coaches, but it is here to help support coaches in that realm. If districts can’t support coaches, guess what? GoReact can help fill that void when we can’t hire an additional coach. This also gives principals and assistant principals tools to go ahead and support coaches and support teachers in that manner when they can’t go out and hire additional coaches, this is going to fill the void when those extra supports, they can longer function. There’s two ways to purchase GoReact. We have individual licensing and we have site-based licensing.

Individual licensing is used typically for a subset of teachers across the district. So if I’m a new teacher induction director, I’ll buy individual licenses because my new teachers are spread across the district. But if I want to use GoReact for professional development at a school, we have an unlimited site license that’s very affordable. If you have 30 or more teachers, that price goes down per teacher on our site license package. So super affordable. It’s a great support even for coaches. Again, as budgets are shrinking, GoReact is a very affordable tool to still help grow and support teachers. What else down there? Thanks.

Erin Grubbs:

We have one more. I’ll try to summarize what they’re asking. How would you be able to manage teacher to teacher relationships? Would it come across as an interference? Probably. How does that keep them maintaining their relationships, I think is what they’re looking for.

Bill Maurer:

Yeah, so in terms of staying in your classroom, I think that’s what your question means. Can we get a little clarification on that?

Erin Grubbs:

Yeah, Henry, if you got any additional clarification, that’d be great, but I’m assuming it means you’re using video, so you’re losing that kind of ability to have your one-on-one conversation. But I do think, at least from what I’ve heard with customers, you often get more of a personalized conversation during the debrief. So you provide that feedback, right, be on the gory Act video, but then it’s a more insightful and conversation following that.

Bill Maurer:

Yeah. This isn’t meant to replace the face-to-face conversation. This is really meant to enhance it. Think about the number of times that you had a scheduled observation your classroom, and I got another point I want to make to that too. But let’s say something came up and your coach or principal couldn’t make it that day, but you were prepared to teach that class. You can still teach that lesson for the day and record it, and that coach or principal can still provide you feedback after the fact. So it’s a really great support structure when we know we’re busy and it’s really hard for coaches to reach every single teacher that they support. So it’s a great tool for that as well. But think about an in-person observation as well. Anytime somebody walks into that classroom, the environment changes. This is one way to really keep that environment the same by a teacher just recording that video themselves and teaching that lesson without an interruption of a principal or additional people walking into the classroom.

Again, it’s not meant to replace the face-to-face so teachers can still connect. This is a great tool for collaborative teams or what’s called lesson study teachers that actually come together to try and teach a new standard, a different way to get more engagement to get their test scores up. Hey, let’s go ahead and record. We’re going to try it this way. Let’s record it. See how that works. Schools and districts are using this for lesson study and collaborative teams to really improve the teaching in the classroom as well. So when you’re talking about interpersonal connectivity, they’re still coming together and meeting as a group.

Erin Grubbs:

Thanks, bill. I think we’ve got time for one more question. Joe Dean’s asking about what does support look like for new users that are trying to get up there? And then I had also written down in terms of new users as they’re getting started, do we have rubrics and templates available to kind of make their lives a little bit easier than just getting right in there?

Bill Maurer:

Absolutely. So we have a super support structure inside of GoReact. Everyone has a client success manager assigned to their account. We do have templates that are already in there, rubrics that are already created or available to you inside the platform, but you’re not left. We have really good getting started guide as well to get you going, but the support structures are there to make sure you’re using the platform and you get the support you need. So you do have access to a live person throughout the inception of this licensing through the full-time of the licensing. So your client success managers here at GoReact are phenomenal and you get definitely the hands-on support that you need to get going. We help you build out your environment at the beginning so that you’re using this platform to get the most out of it. The impact here is spectacular.

Erin Grubbs:

Alright, bill, I think that’s going to conclude our webinar today. So thanks everybody for joining us for this Coffee Break webinar and thank you Bill for the excellent presentation. For those of you that qualify, we will be following up via email with your gift card later this afternoon so you can use that for your next coffee break. And thank you to all of our attendees for joining and making this an interactive session. Have a great day.