K12
Hear how every role at your school district benefits from timely, flexible observations
New teachers are more successful when mentors are fully engaged and administrators are highly trained. Hear how to do this and more with video observation.
Cindy Ross:
At K-12 level, which I am excited to hear that there are possibilities of some K-12 schools that are starting to implement the use of video and specific GoReact. We have a school in our area that just started to use it for the state teacher evaluation. And depending on your state, I’m sure that you have some type of evaluation system. Ours is called OTES. So an administrator has to go in and do a formal observation and we have a school district in our area that is using it, Go React, along with that face-to-face observation.
And interesting comment that I heard about that is that there are many times when an administrator will go in to observe a teacher and in the middle of the observation they’ll be called out because of something that’s happening in the school and they don’t actually finish the observation. But if you’re video recording it and then able to put it into GoReact for later on for self-reflection and observation, then it doesn’t feel like you’ve ruined that observation because you had to leave the classroom. So that was very interesting to me. You could also use it to help for administrators to learn how to do a formal observation, new administrators.
In the state of Ohio, we have a new teacher assessment. So first, second, and third year teachers go through quite an extensive program. We call it RESA and GoReact could be very easily used for that as a possibility to help with that process. Because again, it is an evaluation system where there’s observations and reflection and lots of details, similar to what we do with edTPA, actually.
And then any type of mentoring. So one of the things that I’ve also discovered with our teachers is that they’re assigned many times a mentor within their school district, but sometimes it’s not somebody in their same building, it’s somebody that’s across town that teaches in a different school. And for them to come over during their planning period to do an observation and to be a mentor is sometimes rather difficult to do, especially nowadays with the lack of subs. So using a tool like GoReact and video to be able to provide that mentoring really is very helpful and beneficial for a school district to be able to implement.
And then one last thing that, actually, something that I’ve done some research about is school districts that set up learning communities to improve teaching. In one specific article that I read is about a school that set up a teacher video club for a whole year, that there were seven teachers. They were all math teachers that would get together once a month and they would actually bring their videos with them and they would help each other out with observation of what was happening in the classroom. And the comment that was stated is that that teachers in the yearlong reflective video club reported learning the importance of listening to student thinking. And that was something that they never really had an opportunity to do because they didn’t have that video recording.
