New Approaches to edTPA & On-Campus Courses

Hillary Gamblin:

Hello, thank you for joining today’s workshop on New Approaches for edTPA and On-Campus Courses for 2021. My name is Hillary Gamblin, and I am a GoReact employee and the host of The Teacher Education Podcast. Today I’ll be interviewing Dr. Tom Fisher.

Hillary Gamblin:

Today’s topic actually was inspired by EdSurge Podcast Episode, I’d say I listened to a few weeks ago and it asked students and professors to discuss the lessons they’ve learned from the pandemic. And the summer, our customer support team that interviewed Tom about he’s experience adapting to the pandemic, so now as we’re transitioning to a new year that includes vaccines, and the promise of a slow transition to campus fingers crossed, we wanted to check back with Dr. Tom Fisher to see how he’s approaching yet again, another transition back and what he’s keeping from 2020 into 2021. So Tom, do you want to introduce yourself?

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Hey, Hillary, how are you doing? Good news is I didn’t quit, so the changes didn’t cause me to leave my job for any reason. Yeah, so I’m a faculty site coordinator at UNC Charlotte, you could see it behind me. And what that means is I supervise student teachers, I also teach in the program, and we’re going to talk about those things. I know that there was, like you mentioned that we already did a webinar this summer, I did go back and check that out just to make sure I was wearing a different shirt today. I also have with me my swag from GoReact for appearing this past summer. All right. So apparently, I wasn’t too difficult to work with.

Hillary Gamblin:

No, you were not too difficult to work with, you did such a great job, we wanted to have you back. So, for those of you that weren’t able to make the summer workshop, or haven’t been to any of our workshops before, I just want to outline how we have structured these virtual events. So, for the first 30 minutes or so I’ll discuss with Tom, how he is going to tackle edTPA, and face to face courses in 2021.

Hillary Gamblin:

And then after interviewing, we’ll do a live Q&A session for about 15 minutes, so if you’d like to submit a question for the Q&A, there’s a tab just below the video feed. And there’s a fantastic upvote feature, so if you see a question asked, and you’re like, “Yeah, I want that answered too,” you can vote for it.

Hillary Gamblin:

Also, don’t forget the chat feature it’s located on the right side of the video feed. This is where all the magic happens, it’s where people exchange information, resources, contact, a lot happens there so don’t miss out.

Hillary Gamblin:

And then right next to the ‘ask a question’ is a polling feature, and so we actually like to start today off by asking a quick poll just to get to know everybody a little bit better. So the question is, how has your teacher ed program and using video in 2020, the year of the pandemic? And unfortunately, you can only choose one because the software we’re using, so choose wisely.

Hillary Gamblin:

We’ll give you a minute to actually answer that question, and then they will share the results with me.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So Hillary, I love to try and guess what people’s answers are going to be, I do that with the Pearson webinars that I’ve been doing around edTPA, and I only want them to have one choice too so that I can guess, but because I don’t know exactly who the audiences is this could be very hard to figure out what people do and how they want to use it. But I’m going to guess, I’m still going to go with recording student observations asynchronously. So I’m going with student observations asynchronously. Let’s see if that’s the-

Hillary Gamblin:

Let’s see.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Because I can’t see this, only you can see it. I can’t see it, right?

Hillary Gamblin:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes. No, no, we can both see it.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

No, I can’t see it.

Hillary Gamblin:

They have not shared the results with us.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Okay, I thought you were seeing it as it went.

Hillary Gamblin:

No, no.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Okay, why don’t you take a guess? What do you think?

Hillary Gamblin:

I think probably asynchronously.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Okay. Which is great, but there’s a lot more things that you can obviously do with it. And we’re going to talk about that today. Also, that was a little bit of a cop out going with the same thing as me.

Hillary Gamblin:

It was, and I do not apologize for that. It sounds like we are right, asynchronously. Okay, that is-

Dr. Tom Fisher:

I am like 10 for 10 on these things. If that was a job, guessing polling questions, if that was the job, I’m going to apply for it.

Hillary Gamblin:

Well, thank you for answering that. That helps us a lot know how you’re using video currently, so that’s helpful. Ultimately the goal of today’s workshop is to provide you with some ideas of how to take the lessons from 2020 and build a better 2021, especially when it comes to edTPA and teaching On-Campus courses. So, now that we’ve covered all the technical details, learn more about you, our audience, and outlined our goals for the workshop let’s jump right in.

Hillary Gamblin:

So, Tom, a lot of your 2021 tips and insights for today, use a video assessment software. It’s not surprising because a lot of TPPs are using video during the pandemic, but you were using video assessment before the pandemic even began, what pre-pandemic problem was video helping you solve?

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Yeah, so that’s a great question. I know that if people get a chance to watch, they can see a little bit more in-depth how I go into that in the previous webinar. But to give you an idea of last fall, so fall 19, pre pandemic, we had an opportunity to pilot GoReact, and a lot of different programs, but specifically in student teaching. Because, we do have a large distance ed program.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, UNC Charlotte will work with upwards of 20 some different counties, and if they’re not within 50 miles of UNC Charlotte, they’re not going to send me… Budgetary wise, they can’t send me driving two and three hours to go watch a student teacher for 45 to 60 minutes, it’s just not a good idea in terms of time and efficiency.

Hillary Gamblin:

How to get used to resources.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Yeah, so we were using distance ed, and we were using WebEx or we were using GoToMeetings, and Google Meets and trying to do that. And when this came around, this idea that I could mark, and we’re going to see some marks in a minute. What that means is it means sort of tagging the video and using our evaluation tool.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, this was an idea that they brought to me as the lead middle secondary person, so I work with all middle and high school student teachers in our program. So, they came to me with that, because I did a lot of that distance ed.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, it was already something that I was using, but I would say I was using it with… Out of 25 people, I might have been using it in fall with six or seven actual people.

Hillary Gamblin:

Okay, so that was your use case, you were using GoReact specifically. So that was your use case for GoReact for the pandemic. When COVID struck, how did you and your program… Did you use GoReact as part of the plan to adapt to the pandemic? How did you start using video when the pandemic struck?

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Yeah, absolutely. So, the pandemic kind of hit and we were in March when it hit, and so we only had a few, maybe one more observation for our students. What we did is we had them record it, because they could load it into GoReact. Because, if they didn’t have internet… We had to worry about a lot of different… We did take into consideration a lot of variables.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, we were not heavily focused on that, we didn’t know if they were going to be teacher of record anymore. So there’s a lot of the end of this spring was a little bit lost. But what they did was they asked me in the summer to adapt it for our program. So, that means I made training modules, I made a lot of videos using GoReact so I could model how to use GoReact. And so I made those training videos, and then I would have open swims, I would walk people through how to do this, we would watch videos and see the markers. And what I did was I helped everybody build sort of their project page where they would create their GoReact observation protocols, so that they could share that then with their student teachers.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, I spent a good bit of the summer training people, getting people up to speed, we were also bringing in a new evaluation tool. But that helped because it helped us come up with the markers, which we’re going to see shortly. So, that’s what we did to try and ramp it up.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Now, also programs pre student teaching, they had to use it and I actually used that a lot in the spring with the course I taught. And again, I believe that was covered in the first webinar, but I have some updates on that today.

Hillary Gamblin:

And just to show people how it was used so much more in spring we looked and you had 577 recordings, in fall it was almost 2000 and I bet we’re still counting.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Yeah. That wasn’t all me, that wasn’t all me. I couldn’t possibly watch that many videos, but I bet I was involved in at least 300 of those fall videos between my class and student teachers. If people aren’t aware of UNC Charlotte, we are a big program in North Carolina. There’s probably only one program and teacher ed bigger than us, and we will turn out 200 plus student teachers a semester.

Hillary Gamblin:

Now, one of your areas of expertise that we really wanted to talk to you about is edTPA, and since we talked to you last summer, you’ve worked hard at capturing and giving feedback to prepare students for edTPAs Rubric nine, which can be quite a feat because it’s so content specific. Can you share with us how you’ve managed to do this?

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Yeah. Okay, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to… I think I have sharing capabilities, I do. Alright, so we’re looking at my screen right now. All right. So, what you’re going to see here is what we went through. So, here’s just some background, I knew we were going to go into this. All student teachers this past fall were remotely observed by UNC Charlotte faculty, we were not allowed to go to any schools whatsoever. And so, I am the middle secondary person that lead some of these programs.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

And so, what we were going to do is we’re going to use GoReact or we’re going to do it either live or a synchronous. So, the candidates I worked with they had a mix of hybrid or full remote, and you’re going to see a screenshot of one of those students in a minute. I had about 18 student teachers personally that I supervised to begin the semester, they have to have three formal observations with me, and that can be live, or that can be asynchronous.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

And live is the same thing, it’s really they have to initiate it, but it’s still going to look the same with the markers and the video feed. All right. And so of course, one of the things that I got to put into context here too is, we’re getting ready to talk about edTPA, but we have to have an evaluation tool. edTPA is not the only thing that student teachers are evaluated on, there has to be like a student teaching rubric. And ours is called C-PAST, and it comes from the Ohio State University education program

Dr. Tom Fisher:

And when you look at C-PAST, even though they use a little bit different terminology, their actual instruction rubrics match up really well with the Task 2 Rubrics. And if people don’t know what I’m talking about Task 2 and edTPA is the video, so video capturing of the teaching. So, the really great thing here is that C-PAST matches up really well with our Task 2 Rubrics.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

All right. So, you guys are going to see a candidate example here in a second, and she’s going to be Middle Grades Mathematics, and she was what we call a resident candidate. Other terms for that might be lateral entry. So, she was the teacher of record, she just wasn’t licensed yet.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

And so what I did was… I’m like a edTPA, like I’m a total rubric geek. I mean, I’m not going to apologize for that. I know, there’s a bunch of people out there just like me trying to find the best ways to help candidates on edTPA. And I figured, “Hey, we’re already recording. We’re recording, and candidates are going to be able to watch this video.” They’re recording it for me to watch, “Hey, they can watch it too.” And they’re going to have to watch their own videos and timestamp them for edTPA.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, I said, “Why are we doing this?” It’s such a logical thing to do, and I bet there’s a bunch of people out there already doing it. It’s not like this was my great idea.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, what I decided to do with just my candidates, mind you. I didn’t force this on everybody else, we were all using GoReact, but we weren’t necessarily using it this way, so this was my own personal pilot. 15 to 20 minute videos, because 20 minutes is the max for most programs. And what I did was, since I already met with the Math group of student teachers, all of them. I met with all of the Math student teachers once a week for edTPA support. What I did was I asked them to specifically, look at Rubric nine, write a lesson plan for an activity they could be on observation for me.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So counts two ways, here’s your observation, your formal observation that we have to do, and then, “Hey, let me look at it, like I’m looking at an edTPA video.” And I guess I should probably mention, I’m a national academy member with edTPA, and therefore, I’m an edTPA scorer for about seven years. So, I do have a background and its social studies, it’s not math, but the rubrics are very similar.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, the idea here was, “Hey, plan something, let me watch it, let me give you some feedback that you can go back and then think about before you do your real video.” Okay, so what we’re going to look at here are the markers. Okay, so markers, you guys are going to see these on the screen in a second. So, the GoReact markers, here’s the titles of them. Okay, learning target, directions, candidate, content knowledge, stuff like that. And then over here what I’ve done is I’ve highlighted in yellow for you. These are the edTPA Task 2 Rubric links.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

All right. So, these are the things that are going to happen in the video that also absolutely are things that candidates are assessed on in edTPA.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

All right. So, I know it’s going to be busy, take a second. All right, everybody out there watching, take a second to orient yourself to what you’re looking at. All right. So, we got a little bit of a split screen here, on the left hand side that is the video. Alright, that’s the captured video from the candidate. What I’ve done is because they’re actual middle grade students, that’s that round red circle.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

And then of course, I’ve got the red rectangle there also blanking out images of real students. Okay, I want to make sure I protect their identity. But Dena, my candidate, you see her name on there. She did sign a waiver, she said I could use her materials for this. All right. So Hillary, any questions for me about what we’re looking at?

Hillary Gamblin:

What’s with the arrows?

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Okay, so the blue arrows here. So, if you look it says all comments, comments and markers are the same. So, what I’m doing is I’m pointing out that there’s a comment box down here, where it says ‘add text comment.’ And then what you see here is you see eight markers. Okay. And a few of them are already used, so you can see learning targets, that means Dena addressed the learning target. She’s telling me, “Here’s where I go over what our objective for the day is.” Then you’ve got one here, this is positive… So you’ve got positive learning environment, you got differentiation here, you got checks for understanding, you have critical thinking, you’ve got differentiation, you’ve got assessment. All right, you’ve got technology. And of course, there’s lots of technology integrated here, and then you got feedback.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Alright, so these are the different markers that we would be looking for in the video for C-Past. All right, that’s our C-Past evaluation tool. So, we built that in, and then candidates can mark, and then we comment. So, you can see that I’m commenting throughout her videos, so she and I can both comment. Alright, so this is sort of a little how to on GoReact.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, this is just normal, and so what she’s showing she’s sharing her screen over here, I circled this down here so that you could see 18 minutes was the total length, so it fell into that 20. And then I circled this up here, because I want you to see when she did it. This was in September, edTPA is going to be due for her in late October. So, this was one month before she was going to have to do the real thing. All right.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So here’s the next one, this was a little bit busier. But this I think is going to help a little bit more with the edTPA. So, at the very end of the video, you can see what I’ve done at the very end, I have given her in blue, you can see, I’ve given her feedback on Rubric six, I gave her rubric feedback on Rubric seven, Rubric eight, and then Rubric nine. And now this is the one that you brought up. Hillary, you brought this up, because this is subject specific.

Hillary Gamblin:

Yes.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, what I did is I’m drawing an arrow over here, one of the big things for Rubric nine for middle grades math is the student use, students in the classroom not the candidate, but student use of math representations. And what happened here was the students were all screen sharing different ways that they came to the greatest common factor.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, there was some that we’re using… If you go back, we had somebody using a grid method, we had a tree method, the Christmas tree method, we had the rainbow method, we had different ways the kids were showing this on their screen. So, it was a math representation used by the students. So, she made certain ahead of time to plan that for me, so I knew what I was going to be looking for. Because she’s the math expert, not me. She’s the math student, I’m making sure that it shows up in the video.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

The other three, of course, are very general in what we’re looking for here in terms of the learning environment, engaging students, questioning skills, which is the deepening student understanding. Alright, so those ones were easy, it was Rubric nine that was a little bit more difficult.

Hillary Gamblin:

Thank you for sharing with us that, because as you said it can be a little more difficult with Rubric nine and the video.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Yeah, absolutely.

Hillary Gamblin:

Now, as we were preparing for this workshop, you also mentioned that the changes made during COVID sparked ideas to better prepares teacher candidates for edTPA during and post COVID. Can you share with us the edTPA protocol that you put together for 2021?

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, before I do that, I just want to show… Not that it’s going to show my edTPA chops in any way, shape or form. But here’s the September scores for Dena when she did the practice for me, I gave her a four, three, four, and four. And then of course, Rubric 10 is their own analysis of their teaching, so it’s not something I could give feedback on anyway, or look at in any way shape, or form.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

On her actual edTPA submission, which was a different lesson, of course, but looking at my feedback, and doing the things I know she was doing well, she went four, four, four, and three, okay. And again, the activity that she did for me was excellent, I think it would have been a four, but she couldn’t turn in something I gave her feedback on.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

All right, so you can see, what I did was I saw this with a lot of my candidates and I’m like, “I’m going to take this to my peers and see what they think.” So, to your point, there’s the candidates, and you can see my… These are my personal candidates, they averaged better than a three. All right, I did start with 18, I only ended up with 16, some people are just too difficult to finish so they opted to withdraw and try in a different semester.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

All right. So again, this is going to look a little busy. All right, but this is the idea we’re going for with spring ’21. What we’re going to do with middle secondary programs, so this is all of the middle secondary, and this will be upwards of 150 candidates. They are all going to do their first observation, their first formal counted observation with us using the C-PAST tool, they are all going to do… As you can see over here with the red arrow, everybody’s going to do asynchronous.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

All right, everybody’s going to record, nobody’s going to do a live where I join the feed, everybody’s going to do asynchronous. And prior to that this is going to happen within the first five weeks of student teaching, in their support courses, they are going to develop an activity that’s going to be recorded in that timeframe of 15 to 20 minutes and it’s got to be around Rubrics six through nine. And they are with content specific groups when they meet weekly.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, I will meet with math for like an hour, I meet with science for an hour once a week, and I meet with social studies for an hour once a week. So, they will get this support on building this and preparing these lessons, they are actually going to watch Dena’s in preparation so they can see how it’s done.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

All right. And so then what we’re going to do is we’re killing two birds with one stone, we’re going to get our formal observation to see their strengths and their areas of need, and we’re also going to give them an opportunity to have that reflection time to take a look at what they need to do for edTPA as well.

Hillary Gamblin:

Brilliant, thank you for sharing that.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Yeah, no problem.

Hillary Gamblin:

Also, besides that edTPA, I also wanted to talk to you about your experience teaching face to face or you’re supposed to be experienced. Because you’re supposed to teach this fall a face to face course, but COVID hit. And this meant you had to re-engineer your face to face course to be online. While this was an ideal or expected, as most people can relate to, are you going to transfer some of those online elements when you finally get a chance to teach face to face in 2021?

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Yeah, and what I would say to this, any of this stuff, like listen, teachers… All jokes aside, we don’t have decision making power at the highest level, like deciding what the face to face situation was going to be, or the hybrid, or full virtual online, we don’t get to decide those things. We don’t have a voice in that, we don’t. Somebody with a bigger title, and a bigger paycheck is making those decisions.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

What great teachers do and I consider myself in a somewhat effective teacher is we adapt, and we make lemonade when there’s only lemons. And so, this is what I tried to do. So, in spring that course… And people will see that in the first webinar if they get a chance that class midway through, it went from face to face and it was a really planned face to face class, and we went virtual, but luckily I was using all this stuff. So, the transition for me wasn’t that difficult.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

But what I did realize is that when the fall was coming, and I’m like, “Hey, I really liked doing these rehearsals that my students were doing in my classroom leadership course.” Classroom leadership, sort of just a different name for classroom management and proactive and reactive strategies to set up your classroom and manage it properly. Okay, that’s what the class is all about.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, my spring enrollment was only 18 students, so when we did rehearsals in class, and we had three hours, we could do it. We had two hours and 45 minutes, everybody got an opportunity. This fall, my enrollment jumped to 32. I already knew that in the summer, before I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to teach face to face, I knew that my enrollment was going to be too great for everybody, Hillary to really have that opportunity to stand up in front of the class and lead. And you’re never going to be able to do it if you don’t practice.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

I’m trying to help them find their teacher voice. So, two activities around that, I want to do something with proactive and I need to do something with reactive, because that’s what they’re all worried about. They’re all worried about the reactive strategies, what happens when kids are off task? What happens when kids say things that they shouldn’t say? Or do things that they shouldn’t do? How am I going to react? Young teachers are always petrified of this.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So round one, I start them off easy, proactive strategies. So, they did two videos in round one, they had to set up a classroom procedure. And this could be entering and exiting the classroom, turning in materials using the restroom, whatever. The second video, they had to come up with directions for a very content specific activity, and they had to rehearse this and do it on camera for me.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Round two, which we did a little bit later in the semester, when we started talking about having the conversations about dealing with disruptions in the classroom. Video one, they had to do what’s called a whole class reset, and they had to do that when there was a class disruption about something.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

All right, it could have been somebody using vulgar language, telling a joke, there was a sleeping kid that wakes up and everybody notices, it’s something like that. We had all sorts of scenarios that they had to sort of act out or rehearse. And then the second video was a one to one conversation that you might have with a student who has crossed the line. Alright, so they had different scenarios.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, that’s what I did, I made sure that they were doing this. So that means everybody for me, of those 32 everybody did four total rehearsal videos, because… And I did do breakout rooms and stuff like that teaching online, but there was never going to be that opportunity for them to lead an entire class.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So let’s take a look at an example. So this is Dara, and she was very creative. I liked what she did here. She made up her pretend classroom, and one of the things that I laughed about was that she would always do the voices for the students that were asking for stuff, and she would change her voice and stuff like that. She really got into it.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

But so, this was one of the ones, this was the GoReact one and you can see this was second video back in October. And she nailed it, she totally hit it. And what you’re looking at there is my markers, this time around are the goal. What is the goal of the activity? What are the clear directions in yellow? All right, what is the behavior expectation? How are the students supposed to act in this moment? And then finally, what is time? You see there in green you have the time expectation? How long is this activity going to take? We have to set all those things.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

The other two markers that you see there are teacher voice, using a strong teacher voice. And then the one that says EC that’s economy of language. So, doing it with less. I might not be doing that today, I don’t know if I’m doing economy language, you’ll have to reel me in if I’m not. But the whole idea is to do it with less. Less words, keep the kids engaged.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

And you can see Dara nailed all of that, I did say to her that her video was one of the longer videos, five minutes was the max on any of these videos by the way, one minute to five minutes. And hers was four minutes and 33 seconds, but she kept me engaged, she broke it up. She did a really nice job.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

All right. So, that was a proactive. Okay, that’s an example of a proactive. Here’s an example of a reactive. So, this is Brenna, that’s her brother right there. And yeah, this was one that I absolutely had to show because it was hilarious. So, you can see right there what’s happening, this scenario is having to have a one on one with a student who was sleeping in class. So, this was the opportunity, and Brenna did a great job.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, in this video… Again, I have different markers because now we’re doing a different activity. And so what we have here again, is we got teacher voice, because of how are you going to handle it, we want you to become. But you have to be firm, you have to have firm expectations. I want to know which one of the strategies… I gave them about 20 or so strategies that I wanted them to use in these scenarios. And then the DE here is deescalation.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So that if they deescalate, I want to see where they deescalate it. So, what happens in this video, of course, we’re watching a screen or we’re seeing a screenshot, we don’t watch the video. But what Brenna does is she gives the directions to the rest of the class, she discreetly goes over to the sleeping student, and removes him into the hallway and has a quick conversation with him. Which is great, she did it quickly. She made sure everybody else was on task, she handled it discreetly. Again, she hit all the marks, and she got a perfect score there for me.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

And so again, pandemic or no pandemic, I would have done this because with 32 students in class, I’m not going to be able to set this up and allow them to all be able to practice in front of everybody. They could do it in their breakout groups, or at their tables and stuff like that. I did do that in the spring, but with this size of a class and giving them more and more opportunities to really find their teacher voice, get their footing and feel confident, the video has been amazing. Doing the videos.

Hillary Gamblin:

Thank you for answering all of my questions about your plans for 2021.and I’m sure these specific examples and the answers that you’ve given answering my questions have sparked ideas from those participating in today’s workshop.

Hillary Gamblin:

So, let’s take the next 10 or 15 minutes to do the live Q&A, if you haven’t written your question down, do it now. Now’s the time. My colleagues have been monitoring your questions and selected a few that we can ask. So, question one is what is loaded video analysis?

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Okay, so loaded video analysis would be a video that you want the students in your class to watch. Okay, so perfect example, I started off everybody this semester with GoReact, they watched a very short video of one of my student teachers in the classroom, so it was his edTPA video, and I took a snippet of it, and I loaded that video into GoReact.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, my students weren’t making a video, they were watching an actual video and then I wanted them to tag certain things, I wanted them to see… And this is before I introduce them, Hillary to any of that verbiage like deescalation, or strong teacher voice, economy of language. I just wanted them to watch a video and tell me some positive things they think that the candidate is doing.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, I didn’t give them any markers, because I wanted to introduce that slowly. I wanted them to understand how we were going to use GoReact. So, they watched the video, and then they made comments about this previous students work.

Hillary Gamblin:

Thank you for sharing that. Oh, there you… You answered my question like, “We can’t see your face.” We want to see your face as you’re answering these questions.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Wait, was I gone when I shared on the Zoom?

Hillary Gamblin:

Yeah, yeah. So, just wanted to see your face, the full width. Question two, about how much time needs to be allocated to observe identify markers, and comment on videos?

Dr. Tom Fisher:

How much time? Well, it could be… So, that was one of the big changes we made. So what I’ve done it… You saw that we’re going to do 15 to 20 minutes for that first edTPA sort of practice video. One of the things that I thought that I sort of took care of from spring and then the summer trainings, but it didn’t obviously happen that way is I would have student teachers turn in videos that were over an hour to me, and would have just massive amounts of markers. Even Dena, between Dina and I we had 71 comments or markers. And her video was only 18 minutes.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Okay, so we really need to dial that back, and the idea is, is that we want if you’re going to mark something, you can mark multiple things because it could be a check for understanding where there’s differentiation taking place, and you’re using a positive learning environment. So, what you could do is you could list all those markers and then put it into context.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Or if you’re asking a bunch of questions, just put checks for understanding once or critical thinking once and then put it into context. So, I think it’s one of those things we’ve got to get them used to it, and what I’m trying to do is pull the videos where students do the best job doing that, so that they’re not spending more than an hour watching their own video to reflect on it.

Hillary Gamblin:

So, shorter video, so shorter reflection and shorter amount of time for you. Okay. Third question, how do you deal with school districts that do not allow recording?

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Okay, great question. And honestly, we deal with that. We’ve dealt with that every webinar with Pearson around doing edTPA in virtual learning environment, it’s really up to… Candidates will come back and say that it can’t happen, But once you get the EPP involved and sort of explain what it’s being used for, you can have the cameras turned off for the kids, we could have just their initials on there.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

We really just need to see the teacher candidate, honestly. I’m not looking when I was watching Dena’s video, I’m listening to Dena I’m watching the other kids, but I’m watching what they’re doing, and I’m listening for her. I don’t need to see all the kids faces. I couldn’t show them to you today. But, if you reach out to districts and let them know that this… And the permission forms are important to get with your legal department or whatever EPP you’re at.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Get with the legal department, make sure that you have an airtight permission form to give students and parents in the classroom. Because, districts are not necessarily… Listen, they need teachers, every district needs teachers, and do not let teachers do something that’s either required by their program, or required like in North Carolina edTPA required for your license. They’re shooting themselves in the foot by saying, “No, we’re not going to let you do this.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

There’s ways that that can work around, get with legal and get that worked out. But EPP is reaching out to districts, that has shown to be very useful this past fall.

Hillary Gamblin:

That’s a really smart way of doing that. I like that answer. Question four, do you have the students set markers before you evaluate the video?

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Great question. Absolutely. So, the way that we do this… So, we have two different ones, so I mentioned that I’ve done asynchronous with Dena, so I wasn’t there live when she did that video that we saw. However, Dena’s second formal observation with me, she initiates the GoReact, I come in and watch it, and then I mark it. Then she can just go back and watch it before we post conference.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So no, if I do a GoReact live, they are not supposed to mark it because they’re going to be influenced already. Because they can see my marks and comments. So, I’m not going to have them go back and do that what I want them to do [inaudible 00:37:59] post conference, we can address those things. So only with asynchronous videos, where I have them mark before I go in and watch it.

Hillary Gamblin:

So, next question I particularly like, Dr. Fisher, are you going to write a book and put all this together so we can finally have a great source from someone in the fields for edTPA? You have fans.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

I was just going to say is this being recorded because I know that Pearson does it and we can’t record any of those except for internal use. Send that to them. Now, that’s a scale thing. Like there’s a lot of things you can’t show, like I couldn’t show any real edTPA stuff. Like I couldn’t even show the handbook rubrics in here are the way that they’re written. So, its kind of crazy but I understand that.

Hillary Gamblin:

And then I think our final question, are there suggestions for methods classes that help students with the assessment writing of edTPA portfolios?

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Yeah, so I think… Again, if I’m doing a method, of course, I’m going to look and not think that edTPA is taking over my course. Because if you read the rubrics carefully, it’s just best practice. And you can find where your stuff fits in. So Hillary, I’m going to rattle this off quick. But if you think about what they want in science on Rubric nine, is they want to see some sort of data analysis, quantitative, qualitative, observed data, recorded data, that’s what they want to see. That’s a science best practice. We want to see kids working with data. We just talked about the math representations, we want to see that. In social studies, we want to see students developing arguments and conclusions around events, documents, if we’re looking at ELA, we want to interpret complex text, whether it’s in informational text, or whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, it doesn’t matter.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

These are all things that methods instructors are doing anyway, so go and look at what the rubric’s asking for, and then start working with your most creative stuff in those areas, and have the students are working from that standpoint.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Look at your objectives that you’re supposed to teach then think about, “Okay, what are the students doing?” I always say, I want to know what they’re doing. I don’t want to know what the teacher’s doing. I want to know what the students in the classroom are doing, and that’s what the function is in edTPA.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

The function is the action verb. The action verb is not me right here sitting and explaining it’s the ten-year-old who’s across the hall in class from me right now. I want to see him explain if I watch his teacher teach, I want to hear my son explain something, I want to see my son interpret something. So, I think they got to think about it that way. I think methods just go to the function, find that function, think about your best practice and start planning that way. And that’s going to be very, very helpful.

Hillary Gamblin:

Now, I know I said that was the last question, but apparently there is a lot of chatter in the chat box-

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Is it job opportunities? Is it more webinars? Is it more webinars, I can tell I’ve only done like 12.

Hillary Gamblin:

I’m hoping that you can just answer this real quickly, but they’re asking, does it edTPA have a rule about seeing a certain number of students? I believe it’s at least four.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Yeah. No, not seeing. Okay. So, here’s the rule. The rule is there has to be poor students online in your room. Whatever the case may be, if you’re virtual or if you’re face to face. Four students constitutes a class, we don’t have to see their faces. Okay, so I’m just going to tell people what my screen viewers right now, it’s you and I, and then Katelyn is got her camera turned off and it’s just Katelyn’s name. And then Jordan’s got a picture of him and his… I guess it’s his adorable son. And it’s just a screenshot of them.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Okay. You and I are the only two people on here that are live. If we had one more person and I’m the teacher and I don’t see their face, guess what? That constitutes a class, that constitutes a video for edTPA.

Hillary Gamblin:

Okay. Thank you for answering that.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Not a problem.

Hillary Gamblin:

So, thank you for everybody that submitted a question. This really is what makes our workshop invaluable is when you have this collaborative effort of teachers from all over the country, talking to another asking questions. So, thank you for that. Before we end, I’d like to ask all of our guests to share with us three takeaways. So, if you could hammer home three things from today’s workshop for those watching, what would it be?

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Okay. Before I do that, I’ve answered a lot of questions, I get to ask a question real quick. So, Jordan can just send us to the chat. Jordan, how many did we got on today? I have to know, because this is the sequel. Sequels are never usually as good as the original, but they always make more money. So, how many people do we have this time around? All right.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

All right. So, it sounds like we have more registrations than we did the first time, less live viewers. All right. I just had to know, sorry about that, Hillary. I went off script on that one. I guess I got to share my screen for this one. Jordan, you can’t share this, so I got to put that back up. All right. Let’s take a look at the takeaways.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So here’s the takeaways, if you guys got a chance to see the markers. One of the things that I’ve noticed from my candidates and sort of I’ve adjusted this as I’ve gone, is the marker creation and clarity. This makes it so easy for the students to do the activity, and then it’s sort of got some… It tells them what they have to record, but it also, when they don’t… It helps with their reflection when they watch their video.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

So, the better you are at creating those markers and being clear about what should be seen in those markers, in those activities, it makes such a huge difference. And that’s a perfect example of how I went from just doing one type of video in the spring, which was I did everything with everybody was the proactive strategies. And then this fall I made sure to put in the reactive strategies, cause that was feedback from my students. They’re like, “I need more practice on how I’m going to handle a difficult situation.”

Dr. Tom Fisher:

Allow for creativity. I think we saw a little bit of that today. Dara was very creative in the way that she made… She didn’t have anybody to sound off. My students in the classes that they’re teaching, I let them have volunteers and you saw that with Brenna’s brother. Dara didn’t have any volunteers, so she created her own class. That was not a requirement. I didn’t set real strict parameters about what I needed to see in the video. They just had to handle those situations.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

And then again, the last thing here lead by example. And I think I mentioned for the training I did for faculty at our own institution, I made a lot of videos, a lot of short GoReact videos where I did an asynchronous, I went in Mark myself. I got a partner to help me do a live version of it, and I recorded it and marked it.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

We did a conference, I recorded a conference, which is something that we didn’t really talk about here, but you can have a conference and record it. And I did a three-way conference with my student teacher, his clinical educator, the mentor teacher in his classroom and me. So, you had a three-way conference going and you had multiple cameras, and then I could record that and I could go back and sort of reflect on how I could do better at expediting this or giving better tips around that.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

But there’s just different ways. Different people are going to use it different ways. We have a counseling department they’ll like that. They’ll like that idea of doing those conferences that way. The methods class is doing the rehearsals, the people that supervise student teachers is during the edTPA.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

You’ve got to make your own videos. If you don’t use the stuff, then how are you going to teach them how to use it? Teachers should always be modeling, so that’s my last thing is, model well, lead by example. Get GoReact and get used to how to use it.

Hillary Gamblin:

I love that last one. We had someone that’s done a lot of research on video assessment and what makes it really effective. And they’ve found with some research that if it’s a more collegial feeling, then there is better feedback and you are sharing your own videos, I think probably builds that kind of relationship like, we’re all just trying here. So, I think that’s fantastic.

Dr. Tom Fisher:

By the way, just as a joke, I always… And Dustin did give me a nice GoReact t-shirt, I didn’t wear it today. But every time I do those open swims, all of a sudden I turn my camera on and I’m like, GoReact, man. I’ve got my GoReact hat and t-shirt on. So, it always makes people laugh and gets them comfortable with the idea that I don’t take myself too seriously.

Hillary Gamblin:

Well, thank you so much for sharing your techniques and experiences with us today. You did this voluntarily, so we appreciate you taking your personal time to teach us these strategies and your plans for 2021 and how you’re going to make it an even better year than the 2020.

Hillary Gamblin:

We know this workshop is going to be particularly useful for those that participated and for those that were not able to join. So, we’re going to send a recording and make that available as soon as possible. We’ll send it in an email with the link to the recording and then along with a caption version.

Hillary Gamblin:

So, be on the lookout for that, but that’s it for today. Thank you to our participants. Thank you to those behind the scenes, and thank you to our guest, Dr. Tom Fisher. Happy holidays, everybody. Let’s hope 2021 is better.