Video Observations Are a Game-Changer for New Teachers

Sean McCarthy:

And there’s a ton of research, as I’m sure most of you’re aware, that tells us that feedback on actual teaching practices one of the most powerful ways for our novice teachers to improve and that’s where GoReact comes in. We’ve liked leveraging video in order to help candidates see for themselves what’s happening in their classrooms so that they can make action plans that are going to improve what’s going on and ensuring that they’re impacting all students.

So this has been something, like I said, we’ve done for quite a long time, inspired by my national board experience going back to 2000 where I could just see, hey, the video does not lie. You might think you’re doing certain things or certain teacher moves or making an impact in a certain way when you actually watch that video and see what’s really happening. It is so incredibly powerful and that’s what motivated us to start kind of a rudimentary approach to utilizing video. Now we’ve always, ever since I was a mentor, going back to 1996, observations of our novice teachers have been integral to that support process. So we really started shifting to primarily video-based observations during the covid epidemic. That was when we really realized we had that need. And one of the things that we found was going to these video observations really did support that kind of objective authentic feedback for the teachers and our mentors found it to be a lot less threatening and a lot less disruptive to what was going on in their classroom when they could just kind of set up a camera off to the side and record what was happening.

They got a little bit more of a realistic view than when you have somebody in watching, scripting what’s going on that kind of often changes the tenor of how your students are responding. We also found it really respected the time for both our mentors and our candidates while still allowing that thorough feedback that we were trying to provide. And the main reason was they didn’t have to worry about setting up subs release time, getting their schedules aligned so that the mentor was showing up at the right time to see what the candidate was hoping to receive that feedback for. And so that flexible scheduling really made a huge difference. We had so many times where a mentor would do sub plans, get the release time and go, and then things would happen that kind of prevented it from being an ideal observation. And then probably the best thing is it’s really cost effective.

We have always provided release time for our candidates for going out and observing other colleagues, which we also think is a huge part of their professional learning as well as their release time for their mentors to go in and observe them as they teach. And as we were experiencing budget constraints, this ended up being a fantastic solution so we could really kind of focus our budget toward getting our candidates out and seeing their colleagues while the mentors completed their observations via video. So it made real tremendous difference in terms of us being able to still do all the practices that we knew were important.