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K12
A short video clip explaining how video acts as a neutral third point to lower defensiveness and encourage honest reflection in teacher mentoring
Hear how using video as a “third point” transforms teacher coaching conversations. By creating an outside focus, mentors can guide beginning teachers to explore classroom dynamics without defensiveness. Watch the full session here.
Sean McCarthy:
So the video observation supports this process by providing what I alluded to earlier as the third point. So you have the mentor and the beginning teacher.
The third point is this outside focus that we encourage our mentors to provide. They kind of takes the conversation out of just that mentor candidate relationship and what we find, and we’ve used many types of third points, we’ve used scripting of an observation, we’ve used seating charts where they are tagging which students participate or they track the movement of a teacher in the classroom. All of those can be great. They look at data, student work samples. But the video third point has been, without a doubt, the most powerful because it’s kind of set aside, the candidate and mentor just both look at it together and see for themselves what’s happening. What we find is that kind of lowers that defensiveness. It opens the candidate to exploring because it’s not the mentor telling them, Hey, I noticed a lot of students weren’t engaged in your classroom.
As soon as a candidate hears that, they often get a little defensive or they might shut down or worry about things. But when the mentor is just watching the video with them and asking questions, what are you noticing about student engagement here? What are you noticing about your movement in the classroom? What do you wonder about with this group of students and how they are engaged in their collaboration? We find that that opens the candidate up a lot more to being willing to kind of explore and investigate and check out how they might be able to improve what’s going on in their classroom.
