Enhancing Teacher Reflection & Debriefs with GoReact

Lindsey Wickersham:

So there’s been a lot of research on how watching yourself teach has a big impact on student instruction is actually more valuable for teachers and professional development compared to like a sit-and-get PD. So I know that if teachers are watching their teaching and they’re really reflecting, they’re going to see that thing that didn’t go right, the thing that the kids were doing in the back of the room that maybe they didn’t see when they were focused on teaching the lesson. So it makes me so happy when I record a teacher or they record their own lesson and then I look on GoReact and I can see tons of reflective feedback and comments where the teachers say, oh my gosh, I shouldn’t have done this. Or I noticed those students in the back of the room, they weren’t engaged at all. They pick up on all of those things. I don’t know another way to say it other than it’s just that thing they see it.

So then when we meet, the conversation is already there because I can say, all right, I see that you left all of these reflective comments and you caught these strategies or lessons or students that didn’t go the way you wanted, and we can plan from there. So instead of me just coming in kind of saying like, well, did you notice this? Or here’s this and me telling them everything, they’ve already self-reflected and saw it, so now they’re ready to grow and learn and we could move forward kind of at a quicker pace and dig into what matters most in instruction.