Lights, Camera, Action: Videotaping Teachers for Professional Development

By Alvaro Galvis

A professional crew comes into your math classroom to videotape. Stage fright dissipates as you work from your lesson plan and forget about the camera. What later appears on tape intrigues you so much that you enlist your colleagues in discussing your teaching strategies and the questions and misconceptions students displayed. As a group, you get so excited about the video episodes and the value of a learning community built around classroom dialogue that you create your own video case study, videotaping yourself and your students, scanning student work to digital format, and coming up with questions for reflection.

Sound like your typical elementary classroom? Perhaps not. But many teachers—from the elementary to the pre-service level—are doing just this.

The Seeing Math Elementary (SME) project at the Concord Consortium relied on professional videotapes of teachers to create cases of math concepts that are typically difficult to teach or to learn. Twelve cases were developed as five-week blended courses, offered with both face-to-face meetings and online discussions.

SME soon learned that teachers wanted not only to watch other teachers on tape, they also wanted to develop their own videos. The project created technology, VideoPaper Builder, to support communities of practice that reflect on their teaching and build their own cases in digital and interactive format.

The idea was piloted in Hudson, MA, where SME participants and their math coordinator shared classroom episodes. Teachers were videotaped; they screened the videos to select episodes for a case study focused on calculating the area of obtuse triangles. Teachers reviewed relevant literature, transcribed the dialogue in the selected episodes, and wrote a draft paper. But it was the Concord Consortium’s research group that transformed these separate pieces into a VideoPaper. The technology to support VideoPaper production was still unsophisticated.

A second generation of the software was prepared and the same group from Hudson was invited to create a new VideoPaper. “Building the VideoPaper allowed us to highlight the importance of giving students time to share their mathematical thinking,” said the math coordinator. However, the technology was not fully refined, and one of the teachers commented,

“When embarking on this paper I was excited to learn about the technology and to be involved with it more. As I moved through the paper I felt overwhelmed with the technology. The programs worked and had good directions. I knew that there was support available, but even with all of that, there was just more technology than I could keep up with.”

The SME project revised VideoPaper Builder, preserving the features that allowed users to synchronize video, text and images, while increasing the application’s power to create adjustable user interfaces, to handle different types of video and graphic formats, to write and edit basic HTML pages, to add captions to video segments, and to create a printable version of the hypertext with the corresponding index and references.

VideoPaper Builder 3 (VPB3) was released in October 2005. VPB3 is easyto- use software for creating multimedia case studies. It’s free and open source, and runs on MacOSX or Windows operating systems, with interfaces in English and Spanish. It can be viewed with any Java-enabled browser. The software can be downloaded from http://vpb.concord.org or from the enclosed CD.

Future educators are already benefiting from this tool. Daniel Cogan-Drew of Tufts University tells us, “Video- Papers have become an integral part of the pre-service teacher portfolio in the Teacher Education Program at Tufts.

Working in pairs, pre-service teachers have used VPB as a means by which to develop initial research questions into their emerging classroom practice. VPB has allowed us to reflect upon and share our classroom teaching.”

Is your classroom camera-ready? Your own video episodes can make powerful fodder for local professional development.

Alvaro Galvis (alvaro@concord.org) is Research Director of the Seeing Math project.