The Winning Formula for Teacher Observations

Jessica Hurley:

Hello and welcome to our webinar today. We’re thrilled that you have joined us and hope that you enjoy the presentation and walk away prepared to inspire your students and make a positive impact in their careers. My name is Jessica Hurley and I’m on the GoReact team. We’re hosting today’s presentation for those who aren’t familiar with GoReact. We’re a competency-based video assessment and feedback solution used primarily across the United States and in the uk. I’m happy to be joined today by our presenters from the University of Florida. A couple bits of housekeeping. Today’s event will be about 45 minutes. That’ll include 30 minutes of presentation and then 10 to 15 minutes of a live q and a. So definitely place your questions in the q and a as well as in the chat, and we’ll make sure to get to those Today. We are recording today’s presentation, so if you have to hop off before we finish or you want to share the recording with any of your colleagues, we will email that recording to you after the session.

We do want today’s presentation to be as interactive as possible, like I had alluded to. So throughout the presentation, please participate in any polls and be prepared with your questions. To submit a question again, please use the q and a function. We’ll answer as many questions as we can today. If you can’t find that q and a box, feel free to put it in the chat as well. You will see that chat function alongside the q and a. So please use this to now introduce yourself, tell us what school you’re with. If you have any links or any resources you want to share with our attendees, please do so in that chat section. And if you experience any technical difficulties, please use the chat function to also reach out. So let’s get started. Could you each introduce yourself please and tell us a little bit about your experience?

Dr. Shelley Warm:

Sure. I can start. Excuse me. I’m Shelley Warm and I’ve been teaching and mentoring students and teachers for very many years, both online and in person. I wear several hats for the site program, which stands for site-based implementation of teacher education, which is why we call it site. And so my hats are program coordinator, professor and advisor to the students. We’ve been using GoReact in Canvas since fall of 21.

Dr. Barbara Buys:

Thank you so much. Shelly.

Dr. Shelley Warm:

Welcome.

Dr. Barbara Buys:

I’m Barbara bis. I’m a retired elementary teacher and elementary school principal. I was a principal for about 35 years, so I’ve done lots of observations, feedback, mentoring new teachers, middle teachers, older teachers. I’ve known Dr. Warm for lots and lots of years, primarily through the elementary school. And my doctorate is from UF and I’ve been with Site for the past six years and just love it. Love working with GoReact. Thank you.

Dr. Dawa:

Hi, my name is Dawa Zo and you can call me Dawa. I recently graduated with my PhD in curriculum and instruction from University of Florida, and I’m also a double gator. I got my master’s degree in anthropology from UF as well. And yeah, I was a side coach for the past three years and I work closely with Dr. Won Dr. Bias and other coaches, and now I’m continue to teach courses for site program.

Jessica Hurley:

Perfect. Thank you all. So for our first question today, I’m going to have Shelly you answer this one. Are you able to tell us a little bit about the teaching program at the University of Florida?

Dr. Shelley Warm:

Side site is what we call in Florida. It’s a Florida Educator Preparation Institute, but we’re embedded in a master’s, so it’s a bit different than the traditional APIs. Our students are eligible for professional certification, the Florida reading endorsement and 60 hours toward their ESOL endorsement. So we have a variety of intern roles within the program. Some of the interns are just straight interns, and our internship is two semesters long fall and spring semesters. So they get to be there for the initial how to set up a classroom till almost the end of the year seeing progress with the students. And some of the interns are actually co-teaching or teacher’s assistants, and some of them are also teacher of record. So it’s definitely a mixed bag. We also have what we call mentor teachers, which I think other programs do as well, but our supervisors, we call UF coaches, and that’s what Dr. bi and Dr. Dawa and others have been. We like the coaching model versus the supervisory model because we’re all reflecting, we’re all eliciting feedback from the mentors, from the interns, from the coaches to support the student in their journeys.

Jessica Hurley:

Perfect, perfect. Are you able to talk and elaborate a little bit more on your observation process that you developed?

Dr. Shelley Warm:

Yeah, so our observation process is very similar to what we used to do in person. We’ve always had definitely a lot of support from all of our stakeholders and that’s very important to our program. But moving all of our coursework and our observations online during Covid definitely necessitated some changing, and GoReact really made that possible for us. It made it more personal doable because we are able to reflect with the intern, we are able to reflect with the mentor and the coach. So what we do is we try to make sure that everyone has a say, but the intern definitely has the first opportunity to provide feedback, look at their teaching. We have rubrics that are based on the Florida accomplished practices, which are similar to I’m sure practices across the country, and they’re able to discuss their teaching and decide where they want to go next with it.

Jessica Hurley:

Perfect. Perfect. So Dawa, I’m going to go to you for this next question, but you’ve told us that during your observations you focus on a different teaching skill each month. Could you share what those skills are and what kind of impact that level of focus has on your intern’s development?

Dr. Dawa:

Sure. Thank you Jessica. So as Dr. W mentioned in our program, our observation approach is designed to focus on the specific teaching skills each month, and we use FAPs Florida accomplished indicators as our guiding framework. So this structure focus help us to address and develop each skills progressively throughout the academic year. So our observations start at September and we focus on establishing and maintaining effective classroom management strategies. And our interns can learn how to establish clear rules and expectations, and they learn to use behavior specific praise and reinforce the classroom routings. And in October, the focus shifts towards to identifying and addressing student misconceptions. So what we do is we do the misconception observation in conjunction with their math class. And this involves adjusting their teaching methods based on the student’s responses, identifying and addressing gaps in students’ knowledge. And in November’s observation, we start focused on the questioning strategies, how our interns use questioning to promote deeper learning.

And these skills are like in the reflections they need to highlight where technology used to assist the students with comprehension or highlight where they use the questioning to promote critical thinking. And during December, we got our intern to set goals for next semester, and they continually working on the rest of the FS indicators. So from January to April we focus on helping with their goals and continue to working on the rest of the fs. For example, we focus on the effective use of technology and connecting lessons to real world contest. So you can see that our approach is not only enhancing their teaching skills, but also equips them to continuously reflect and respond to their teaching practices. And we help them to develop as teachers who are capable to meet diverse learners’ needs.

Jessica Hurley:

Absolutely self-reflection and goal setting is so important and I’m so glad that you’re teaching your student, those students, those skills as well for their career. Barbara, I’m going to go to you for this next question. What benefits do interns gain from recording themselves teaching?

Dr. Barbara Buys:

Oh, that’s such a good question. And there are so many benefits. One thing is they get to see themselves teach, and it’s rare for teachers to have an opportunity to actually see themselves in action. So the interns get to do that and they do it multiple times. And if they decide after viewing the lesson that it didn’t come out the way they had hoped they can do it again, they don’t have to just load whatever the observation turned out. It also is way less disruptive than having somebody come into the classroom. I can remember as a principal going in and the kids would always wonder who’s leaving now? What’s going on now? But when it’s being filmed, they’re interested maybe briefly in the camera, but they lose interest pretty quickly. It also allows the intern to spot trouble spots in the class that they may not have been aware of because they’re watching themselves, but obviously they see the students too. And it leads to great discussions with the coach and the mentor about their teaching and how to reflect on what’s going on and how to improve it. So I really enjoy it. I really enjoy it.

Jessica Hurley:

So glad. So we’re going to shift a little bit to your feedback process. Could you elaborate on the process of self-reflection a little bit more and reflect that interns go through after viewing their teaching?

Dr. Barbara Buys:

Dao, do you want to start?

Dr. Dawa:

Yeah, sure. Thank you. Yeah, I like this question. So the process of self-reflection and co reflect was like our interns first review their teaching video independently and they will assess their own teaching methods, their classroom management or any interactions with their students, and they are guided to focus on the specific feeds aligned with their monthly focus teaching skills. And they will firstly provide timestamped feedback on GoReact and identify what’s their strengths in the teaching and is there any things they want to improve next for next lesson and after this self-reflection and we start our core reflection. So the core reflection involves interns, their mentor teachers and us, their coaches, and we provide them timestamped feedback on Gore Act and ask questions for more detailed feedback. And then our interns will look at our feedback and answer any questions in our feedback. So the self-reflection and core reflection is a reflective process involves setting specific and actionable plans, actionable steps for next lesson. And based on this reflection and feedback, they have their clear goals for their next teaching session and they know what kind of concrete steps they can do to improve their teaching practices.

Dr. Barbara Buys:

And it really puts everybody on the same page because we’re all watching the same observation. But it gives different perspectives too to the intern from the coach’s point of view, from the mentor teacher’s point of view, but it’s always based on reflection and improvement. So that’s what then together the three people involved get to work to set the actionable goals and we want to see them in action. That’s why they’re called actionable goals. So we look for them on the next observation. So it’s a really smooth process, but it gives the intern the first crack at looking at the observation and adding their comments and really they enjoy doing that.

Jessica Hurley:

Awesome. So for that three-way reflective meeting that you have after the observation, can you share some strategies that help make that most impactful for all involved?

Dr. Dawa:

Yeah, I can go first. So for me, I use positive reinforcement a lot to encourage my students. So I want this reflection meeting is more like to be a very safe place for them to express their concerns or thoughts and to share their teaching with us. And I want to be supportive in their journey. And for me, I write down some main points that we discussed in the meeting and after the meeting, sometimes I send to my interns and this meeting notes provide a reference for our future meetings. And when my students look at it, they can see their progress over time

Dr. Barbara Buys:

And we try to ask questions that promote thinking about what you’re doing so that you don’t become that teacher that just turns the page in the teacher’s manual and keeps going or is tied in too much to the, forgive me, the district or the state’s recommendations or requirements, but that you’re actually thinking about what you’re doing and what’s best for children.

Jessica Hurley:

I love those options. They have to be very, very beneficial for all of those involved. Shelly, I’m going to go to you for this next question. How do you strike a balance between autonomy and guidance in promoting reflective thinking during video analysis? What strategies do you recommend for supervisors to really scaffold the reflective thinking without dominating the discussion there?

Dr. Shelley Warm:

I think the key is active listening, definitely just what Dawa and Barbara both said, we do a lot of that, but just listening to interns are definitely more critical, teachers are more critical of their teaching than anyone else’s, and the interns are equally critical of their own teaching. And so just listening to their concerns and listening to what they’re saying, we’re using AI in the praise mode because it does give quite a transcript and I don’t really want them to be shut down. I feel like at this point, especially for our beginning observations and we’ve scaffolded reflection, so I wonder what you saw in the video that encouraged you to select that marker or if you were able to redo this portion of the lesson, what might you do differently next time? So asking for feedback from the intern, letting them buy in to what they’re doing and what they’re teaching instead of saying that really was not a good lesson, that shuts everyone down immediately.

And then the mentor also of course comes on and provides reflective comments. And then when we all meet on Zoom to discuss the data from the video, the analytics that GoReact has or really interesting, and the students really enjoy seeing that. It’s been very helpful and asking, as Dawa mentioned, the actionable next steps. What do you want to do next? What do you need support with? How can we support you? And sometimes they’ll tell me, I really need some more information about how to do this, and I’ll research some articles and send them to them and so will the other coaches to try to provide resources that are helpful to them specifically. So what steps do you want to take? And maybe your planning, maybe it’s not your teaching, maybe it’s your planning or maybe it’s your classroom management.

Jessica Hurley:

Perfect, perfect. So we’re going to shift a little bit to talk about GoReact specifically. And Barbara, what do you think makes GoReact the right piece of technology for intern observations?

Dr. Barbara Buys:

Well, first of all, it’s so easy to use. I think at first the interns are thinking it’s going to be complicated and difficult, and it turns out well, they do the video with their phones most of the time, and we all know how used they are to using their phone. So that’s not a problem. It allows them to view the video observation several times. You’re not just limited to watching it once, and the mentor or the coach can share the GoReact screen during the Zoom meeting with the students to be specific about what they saw and what they heard. And when you take a peek at those analytics, I remember in the old days if someone said, okay, too many times I started to tally it. Now you just go into the analytics and you can say one thing you might want to work on is dropping that particular phrase too many times. So it’s really easy to use, it’s fun to use, and it provides a lot of benefits.

Jessica Hurley:

Thank you so much for all of that information. How have you used GoReact to help collect data during your observations? doa, are you able to share any of your findings,

Dr. Dawa:

Even

Jessica Hurley:

If it’s just early findings on how GoReact helped instruction feedback or your teacher candidate improvement?

Dr. Dawa:

Sure. I would like to share my slides with the audience. Just one second. I, okay. So can you all see my screen? Okay, great. So yeah, we would like to talk about how we use the GoReact. We absolutely love it to help collect data during observation. On which screen can you see my screen as a,

Jessica Hurley:

Your PowerPoint? We can see the data collection with GoReact.

Dr. Dawa:

Oh, okay. It is not with my notes on it, right?

Jessica Hurley:

No, no.

Dr. Dawa:

Oh, okay. Thank you. So for each summer before the internship cycle begins, we start to meet with each other. We have a meeting coach meeting, lovely coach meeting. I will start to review and discuss data from the previous academic year. And this session helps us to refine our coaching strategies and plan effectively for the upcoming year and just ensure that we have continuous improvement in our approach in our coaching. And I won’t say this data collection is ongoing and we collect data during and post our observation and we use the gory Act platform to share reflections and feedbacks and our students upload their teaching videos, classroom profile and lesson plan on the Gory Act and receive detailed timestamped feedback from us and their mentor teachers. And so I want to show this image. So this is an example of our interactive use of React.

So you can see from the left side is the intern’s teaching video and we provide feedback here, sorry about the black box. So I covered the student’s name to protect their privacy. So these are the students’ feedback and our coaches provide very detailed feedback and questions. So this year we start to using the new features GoReact AI assistant to provide additional feedback. And it’s amazing and we absolutely, absolutely love it and we are able to collect more data from it, like how students’ teaching pace look like and any hedging words that they use in their speech, this kind of data. And this is, and we also use observation rubric to evaluate specific targeted F indicators. Like here’s a picture of our rubric for each month and we use developing and or accomplished as our rating. And here we provide our actionable specific feedback to provide what’s the next steps look like for our interns.

So our data include the coverage of FS indicators during the lesson planning and observation process. And we have our mentor and intern evaluation data and we have exit survey data coach survey data. These are all the data we collect through the GO Act and other techniques technology tools like Qualtrics. And I put a data sample on this slide. This is the intern’s feedback and our intern place, the GoReact platform accessibility. It’s well designed, clear organized, and really a joy to explore this platform. So our team regularly analysis the collected data to refine grading rubrics and explore additional support strategies for our interns. This includes adapting to changes in state standards and responding to feedback from both interns and mentor teachers. We also provide articles and professional resources for our interns and we discuss and implement various supportive matters to enhance their experiences. Like we arrange additional Zoom meetings with them, maintaining weekly communication. We communicate with each other a lot, email, text, or we communicate with course instructors asking their feedback. We really have a wonderful team that everybody working collaboratively to provide our interns personalized mentorship and encourage the reflective practices. And we’re not only equipping them with essential teaching skills, but form that passion within them as lifelong learners and professional teachers. Yeah. Thank you.

Jessica Hurley:

Thank you. Now, within the data you collect, you discussed that interns upload their lesson plan and profile. Barbara, is this all done within GoReact?

Dr. Barbara Buys:

Yes. The process is that the intern sends the coach the lesson plan like 24 hours in advance of the video and gives us a chance to go over it, make suggestions, send it back, and if it needs to be adapted or edited at all, then they do, they load the lesson plan and the profile right on to GoReact. And this year Dr. Warm, who’s kind of a genius at this, has also added the rubric for each one. So that’s attached also, which makes the whole process just seamless from beginning to end.

Jessica Hurley:

Thank you for that. Shelly. You’ve been using the AI assistant in GoReact for just a month or so, any initial findings or results that you’ve been able to collect.

Dr. Shelley Warm:

So yeah, I found that it really, it is just an amazing job. The comments have been very helpful. One thing, I can give you an example that a student was teaching a second grade math lesson and she started using, I’m trying to remember what it was, subtraction, using the standard column model and AI picked right up on that and gave her some feedback about it. And then she switched during the lesson to the number bond method. AI picked up immediately on that on the transition and discussed how it kept the students engaged by using a different way to teach subtraction. What I’m thinking about is using some of markers in that AI could use some of our markers possibly in the future to continue with the cycle of what we’re looking for. I think it would be very helpful and I think it would be really helpful for the students to see that picked up on right away.

Jessica Hurley:

Absolutely. Alright, so that is all the questions that I have for you today. We’re going to turn it over to our audience and have them ask any questions that you want to during our time together. You can again pop open your q and a or just put your questions in the chat box so that we can respond to those live as well. All right. We’ll give that a few moments. All right. For our first question, have you found that interns are reluctant to video themselves and over?

Dr. Barbara Buys:

Everybody’s reluctant to video themselves initially, but they get over that pretty quickly. Yeah, nobody likes to see themselves on screen.

Jessica Hurley:

Absolutely. Do you encourage your students in that capacity or how do you get them to start embracing that?

Dr. Shelley Warm:

What I tell them is to put your video on just a normal day. Just do it every once in a while. Video, whatever’s going on in your teaching. You don’t need to focus on the children, focus on yourself so that you just get used to it being there and it just becomes a part of the classroom. I’ve had some students who said they just loved it and they’re continuing now

Dr. Dawa:

Once

Dr. Shelley Warm:

They’ve left the program with videotaping, because they said it picked up on so many things that they had forgotten that they possibly needed to do. Yeah,

Jessica Hurley:

Wonderful, wonderful. How do you train your evaluators to use GoReact?

Dr. Shelley Warm:

Good question. So I found that GoReact is quite simple to use. It is just a matter of, we do it through Canvas, so it’s already there for us, which is quite helpful. And since we do a lot of co-constructing of our coursework, quite a few of the other professors that work with us are using GoReact for their mini observations and are reading. Faculty are using it actually for their experiences with having them videotape small reading groups or one-on-one. So as far as training, we have support from GoReact if we ever have any questions or problems. Your tutorials are excellent. I don’t think that has been a problem for anyone.

Jessica Hurley:

Thank you. Another question that came in, have you faced any resistance in using the AI assistant as everyone decides their stances on ai?

Dr. Shelley Warm:

I haven’t heard any problems with it. And actually since we’ve just, I think we’ve just finally completed our September cycle because of the hurricanes. So what I’m going to do is put out a little bit of a survey for the students and ask them about the AI assistant and their thoughts on it, because it’s all new to them as well. This is the first time anyone is seeing this and I can get back with you. So with some other feedback on that.

Dr. Barbara Buys:

And I think since it’s the younger generation, they’re open to ai, maybe more so than some of the rest of us, but they embrace it. And when I look at the quality and quantity of comments that AI provides on GoReact, it’s just remarkable, remarkable excellence.

Jessica Hurley:

Awesome. If there are any other questions that you have for our panelists, please feel free to enter them into the q and a or into the chat so that we can respond to those questions today. We’ll give that a few seconds just in case there are any lingering questions. Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I loved hearing more about your process of observations, the data that you’re collecting, and your use of our AI assistant. Thank you to our attendees for joining us and making this a very interactive presentation. Hope to see you on a future GoReact webinar. Have a wonderful rest of your week.