Feedback and Reflection: Teacher Growth at Every Career Stage

Dr. Katina Walton:

In GoReact, what I love about it is everything is transcribed. I can go to the first five minutes and I can follow that cycle of instruction. I can tell you if that teacher is doing that bell ringer, which is your open, your pull ’em in, get their attention type thing, even down to the transitions in the classroom, the praises that the teacher gives.

So GoReact as this great recording of transcribing everything from what the teacher says to the pauses to filler words. And being from the south, we use a lot of filler words. For example, for me, I’ll keep myself in this. I use the word that a lot when I was completing my dissertation, and I didn’t really understand that. So of course, Grammarly, the first beginning of ai, it would highlight that and it taught me you’re using that word too much. I would just take them out. So let’s go to GoReact. We’ll talk about one of our new teacher who is actually in our new teacher academy. She’s the sweetest little person. She’s an ELA teacher, and in the filler word, it recorded her saying, y’all about 80 times, and she’s like, Dr. Walton. I said, don’t feel bad. I did the same thing with the word that.

So we talk about teachers allowing wait time for our students to think about their answer. We talk about think, pair, share, where they discuss with their classmates. For example, we all have two different types of points of views from anything that we read. If I’m sharing with a partner and we can discuss our comprehension, I may see something that my elbow partner didn’t see. We discuss it and then we share out. So it works very well with that. It even shows AK shows the pauses, if it was a meaningful pause, it shows the fill of words, the hedging words. So when I was using the analytics and I opened it, being a first time user myself, I was like, wow, look at this. Look at this, look at this. So in there it records the minute. If there’s a point where I want to tell the teacher, good job on praising that student Go, react has a little bubble, it’s already there.

I can type in my feedback, but the cool part, I can go in and record feedback. So it’s like they’re watching their self-teaching and they’re watching my feedback. So that was the great thing about it, and it was a way for to stand honest for teachers. I’m not just asking you to do it. I’m also willing to do it as well. When they see that you are willing to do the same thing that you ask them to do, they’re more open. It becomes more of a learning experience than, oh my goodness, I have to do this because they see me mirroring exactly the same thing that they are doing. So I go back and do the feedback in the comments by typing or recording myself, giving them feedback on what I notice, like for example, the praising, if it’s higher order thinking questions, the pauses that they allow the students to think if they are doing student centered learning, if they’re doing small group instruction, all of that can be identified and it can be used in that PLP that Ms. Ballard talked about, which is your professional learning plan, you have evidence that you have improved in student-centered learning evidence that you have improved in small group instruction.

So that is another way why GoReact is a phenomenal tool in helping new teachers as well as seasoned teachers, because you have that documented proof that I have done this, it has improved my students by this percent, as I said in my smart goal, and I’ve been observed for this 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times, and here’s proof. So in that way, GoReact has been a very valuable tool in working with new teachers from new teachers academy and seasoned teachers as well as coaches because if we’re willing to be recorded as well, everything is transparent for everybody.