The Impact of GoReact at Lexington 2 School District

Stephanie Hucks:

I would say that convenience I think is the biggest thing for teachers to, especially new teachers, not to have to schedule times for their mentors to come in or their administrators to come in. And we’ve also talked about the fear factor. I hate to say that, but first year teachers, anytime someone’s coming in your room to observe or evaluate you, there’s this fear that kind of takes over. And so this kind of alleviates that and allows the teachers to record and if they don’t like it, they can get rid of it, they can delete it, they can redo it. And so in that process there’s a lot of self-reflection, which I think is one of the best ways to grow professionally.

Bill Mauer:

No, that’s awesome. Phillip, did you want to add anything to that?

Phillip Raven:

Yes, sir. Just to kind of second that, teaching our new induction teachers to be reflective is probably the biggest determining factor on whether they’re going to be successful in a career, not just that particular year. And so with your assistance, we were able to embed our South Carolina teaching Standards 4.0 rubric, and so when our induction teachers video themselves, they can immediately go in and self-reflect for alternative pathway teachers. That might be some of the first experience they get using that rubric because they didn’t receive training on that in a college setting. And then once the mentors provide feedback, they can go in and score and it’s great practice. It also, when you do some training with the mentors, you can build the interrater reliability by everybody watching a standard lesson. We wanted to chunk it this year, and so we did a little clips at the beginning of a lesson and at the end of a lesson to kind of build some efficacy with the teachers and get their comfort level up rather than recording full long lessons.

Now in the spring we kind of pivoted and we did a larger chunk in the center of a lesson, but the collaboration has improved between mentors and induction teachers because they can dialogue back and forth. The way that GoReact is set up with the comments being layered and chronological, you really can stack some feedback if you’ve got a coach adding or if you’re using the AI feature. And one of the other challenges we really overcame was those schools where maybe it’s a small school and you only have one art teacher in that building. The travel between districts, I mean it’s one thing to overcome the logistics of matching mentors and induction teachers in the same building trying to align planning periods to go in and observe. But when you have to send teachers from one school to another because they’re in a very unique content area, this eliminates that travel the liability for the district, it just improves the overall prospects of how the observations are going to take place.