The Impact of Video Coaching

Angel Van Horn:

The video really enables us to be able to have a teacher coach, a reflective coach, join a teacher’s classroom. One of my favorite examples of that is when I had a teacher who was in Honduras, I was able to, through her iPad, really be able to join her classroom for her observations. She also was able to take her iPad, take me outside. We went on a walk around her neighborhood. I was able to see really the environment that she was living in. And so different the culture shock different from here and soldiers on the corners and just the different, we think what a classroom should look like and what it looks like in different countries. So the video really was a game changer for us and really was a turning point in being able to have online mentors.

I do remember going directly to the boss saying, “Hey, I think we need to do this induction program saying online. I think we could really do that.” We had great conversation around it and part of the thinking was, hey, people can actually meet and get married online. I think we could definitely do some mentorship online. That really was the game changer. That was about 11 years ago that we started our online program. Having video made a big difference. Then we started looking at, okay, now that we’re using video and of course having the internet and some of the limitations there, if Jaymie and I, if she’s my coach and I’m her candidate, I can’t really send my recording of 20 minutes, 30 minutes of recording my classroom to her because the size limit would be too large for the videos. Even the whole YouTube uploading things. We still do have teachers upload to video to YouTube because you can post a YouTube link to GoReact.

One of the easiest things became really just having them either do an MP4 video file or just recording directly in GoReact. We started using GoReact with our online coaches for that purpose so that they could easily observe their candidate in their classroom doing their teaching lessons.