The Perks of Building a Video Library for Trainee Teachers

Jenny Gordon:

And in terms of sort of sharing between peers, Jonty, if you have student teachers in either the same school or across a range of different schools, how do you encourage your students to work together to develop their skills, both either through the content that they perhaps are seeing through video, or just through collaboration, I guess?

Jonty Leese:

Yeah. I think as well that the role of a teacher isn’t it, is to be helping students learn, whether it’s a student teacher or a student. And by the very nature, the best way to do it is to demonstrate what good stuff looks like. So the principle is if you can record a good session on behavior management of a teacher teaching a bottom set maths on a Friday afternoon when there’s just been a thunderstorm and it’s a full moon, well actually that’s a really powerful tool that you can use to unpick and actually scrutinize and actually identify what they’re doing, and that can then be applied to multiple settings. Because once it’s recorded, a student can always go back to that. And they can build up that repository of really high quality resources that they can always access.

Jonty Leese:

So I think it’s around, looking sort of long term, that it may take a bit of time and effort to build up. But as a school builds up its resources and its powerful exemplars and learning objects. And actually, that’s a great place for a student to go to. So ultimately, they can become the first point of course. So a student doesn’t necessarily come to you to say, oh, I’m really struggling, because they’ve already known that they can go and look at the video of a teacher demonstrating an outstanding set of questions, a great bit of behavior management, and so on. I think the other one as well is, the heart of being a student teacher is reflection. And being able to reflect on what you’ve read or what you’ve seen and actually being able to actually unpick it is really crucial. So that skillset of reflection, whether it’s applied to videos, whether it’s applied to an article they’ve read, or a lesson plan, or just them breaking something down, is going to be a skill that’s going to really help them develop and become an outstanding teacher.