Scaffolding Candidate Reflection With GoReact

Allison Smith:

I think that from a program side, using GoReact is really exciting to think about the creative ways you can integrate that into the program, what you were just sharing with having a video there and then the candidates can analyze it and pick out different really important things that they’re noticing. That is really great for scaffolding them to be able to analyze their own teaching, which they need to do in the TPA and really showcase what they’re doing and explain and justify and provide rationales as to what they’re doing. The first step developmentally would be doing that to someone else and really analyzing it also enables them to do peer evaluation too. So I’m going to upload this video and then you’re going to look at each other and see what you’re doing. And I think that this is really useful, especially for our interns who are teaching full-time.

They have a district mentor, but they’re not there all the time and they often miss out on the opportunity to go into other people’s classrooms and observe what’s happening. And I think that that is where a lot of growth happens in your own work as a teacher is when you have eyes in another classroom. And so this enables that because they have a video, they can analyze it and analyze it in a focused way that in the way that we want our program to support. So if your program has core values or program learning outcomes or it’s the teaching performance expectations or it’s whatever it is, you can really frame that experience through GoReact because you can create the assignment in a way, and it’s really fairly simple. You can create that experience and GoReact so they can easily do it and then you can unpack it in your courses.