Video Analysis of Teaching

...at Hunter College School of Education at CUNY. Watch the introductory video below. Then go on to our podcasts on What We've Done, and What We've Learned from our five years of work.

Video Analysis of Teaching: The Video

Introduction: Effective Teachers Change Lives

The research is in, and it's unequivocal: teachers make a difference. Students taught by outstanding teachers learn more and enjoy success in life. The quality of a child's teacher makes more difference than class size, family income, and parent education combined. There's something going on in the classrooms of these teachers that causes students to succeed.

So for the last five years at the Hunter College School of Education, we've pointed our cameras into the classroom and at the teacher, in order to discover what that something is, and to make sure our graduates practice it. More than 5000 teachers have worked with our faculty to undergo a thorough documentation and analysis of what takes place between teacher and students in that sanctum of scholarship. From day-care playgrounds to middle-school classrooms to high school science labs, our graduates have gathered video clips and sent them to our digital video server. From there, fellow-teachers, supervisors, and faculty analyze the action, and provide feedback to the practitioner.

(0:60)

Focus on Practice: Teaching is the sum of many skills

By requiring video analysis for every one of our students without exception, we have shifted our focus at Hunter College from the lecture hall to the classroom, from an abstract discussion of theory to a focus on the craft of teaching in the classroom. Theories come alive when they are illustrated with classroom clips captured by the students around the seminar table. Methodology moves from dry checklists to active application.

Watching these videos makes it clear just how synthetic is the practice of teaching: the effective teacher is at every instant bringing to bear dozens of techniques, ideas, and strategies, and you can see it happening in real time with these clips. You see our student teachers setting up the learning environment, introducing ideas, asking questions, assigning work, thinking on their feet, and giving honest feedback to their students. All in the space of five minutes. It's amazing.

Before we started the video analysis, our class meetings consisted mostly of oral discussion without much concrete illustration or example. We sat around the table and talked to each other. Nowadays, as you walk through the halls of Hunter College, you see the New York City classroom right up there on the wall, in sound and image. We talk about what's happening in the video, with the students, with the teacher, with the content. It's been quite a shift of focus.

What we've done is to bring the classroom to the college. We can call up at a moment's notice clips from thousands of classrooms, by subject, grade, technique, or type of teaching. We can compare the best with the worst. We can focus on the lesson as a whole, or drill down into the details. We can select three crucial minutes, or contemplate an hour of activity. We've never had a resource like this to enhance our work of preparing effective teachers.

(2:00)

Watch Yourself: You will want to improve.

Most teachers have never watched themselves teach. When they see themselves for the first time, they are alternatively embarrassed and surprised. Watching the clip over again, they become more perceptive and analytic, noticing details and understanding cause and effect. They go back to watch part of the lesson over and over. They notice things about themselves that were previously hidden. It's a kind of coming-of-age for many of them, an outside perspective on their professional self that's brand new. And valuable.

The first reaction is most often, "if only I could do that over again…" And that's exactly what we're aiming at: teachers who want to improve, who see themselves at work and realize how they could work better. Even if we never subjected their videos to expert analysis by others, their own self-analysis would make it all worthwhile. The video analysis process makes you your own Monday-morning quarterback.

We suggest that teachers place the camera at times on a student's desk, in such a way that they can see themselves and the lesson from a student's perspective. And we suggest shooting at times from behind the teacher's shoulder, to capture the faces and actions of the students. You see things in this way that you'd never see for yourself when you're busy teaching.

While we require only one full video lesson to be captured, most of our students shoot themselves regularly. And the faculty at the Harlem Success Academies, who follow or system and use our video analysis software for their own professional development, capture their teaching on video at least once a week, and share it with each other regularly. It's proven to be the best professional development program they've ever had.

Teachers want to improve their craft. But they've never before had tools like this to help them along.

(2:00)

A Million Mentors: it takes a village

Once the video is up on our system, we can do quite a bit with it. Of course, the first thing a teacher does is to examine her own video and learn from it. But that's just the beginning. They may share the video online with fellow teachers of the same subject or the same level. You show me yours, I'll show you mine. This has proven itself to be a healthy way to initiate a professional learning community centered around classroom videos.

Next a teacher might share the video with his mentors: the cooperating teacher, the supervisor who observes the teacher at work, or the faculty member who teaches the seminar. It's valuable to gather these multiple analyses of the same video clip by respected mentors. We've developed tools at Hunter to make this cross-commentary easy and efficient, and all online. In fact, we've developed an online tool called VAT Chat, that lets multiple observers -- each at their on desks -- watch the same video and comment on it in real time with the student. It's like having your own SWAT team descend on your teaching and help you understand it better.

This kind of tool has helped us learn about our own faculty perceptions and beliefs. We found that one of us might find excellence in a particular clip, while another sees mediocrity. The availability of an online video library accessible to all has engendered exercises in faculty inter-rater reliability that have opened our eyes to a need to arrive at a collegial consensus that will benefit our students. To encourage this process, we have developed online rating tools that allow instant comparison.

What makes good teaching? What does great teaching look like? We assumed that the faculty shared a common answer to these questions. But online video analysis showed us that we harbored serious differences that we are just beginning to deal with. It takes a village to prepare a teacher; classroom videos have helped us to convene the village elders around a common event.

(2:00)

Multiple Lenses: Effective teaching is a complex art and science

Let's look closely at a sample video, just a moment of classroom action. Seems simple and straightforward, but it's much more than that. For instance, let's examine it in terms of teacher talk and student talk: who says what, for how long, at what level? Our video analysis tools let us focus on this aspect of the action, and quantify the results.

Now let's look at the same short clip in terms of how well it serves the needs of English-language learners. We developed a tool for this perspective as well. How different it seems under this analytical light. And so we have developed online tools for a variety of perspectives on the art of teaching: questioning strategy, diction and deportment, providing feedback. We've even got a graphical slider that lets the analyzer trace the progress over time of any single aspect of the action.

So the same video can be viewed through multiple lenses, giving the practitioner and our own faculty a plethora of perspectives on the complex and synthetic craft of teaching.

Like other schools of education, Hunter harbors experts in child development, teaching methods, social perspectives, assessment, and subject-matter content. In the past, it was unusual to see them working together on a common task. But through our online system, they can all watch the same event in the classroom, and each contribute their own unique perspective on what's happening. How valuable to a developing teacher to enjoy such a multi-dimensional analysis of his work. How valuable to the faculty to join with colleagues in such a multi-disciplinary online colloquium, each reading the others' analyses.

(2:00)

Close Analysis: Slow down, magnify, improve.

Many schools of education have experimented with video analysis. But none has required it of thousands of graduates each year, and none has developed a comprehensive online system for uploading, sharing, and analyzing the classroom experience. And none has developed the array of online tools to examine, comment, reflect, and quantify the craft of teaching in real time. One tool lets a teacher click on every instance of a target behavior in the video, and compile comparative totals. Another allows multiple evaluators to watch the score same video with a comprehensive rubric drawn up by our faculty. Other tools permit second-by-second running commentary, by the teacher himself or by peers and supervisors.

All of these tools are designed to foster a deeper awareness of the interactions in the classroom, and to permit all of us, faculty and students alike, to better understand what makes an effective teacher. Their availability has helped us to shift the focus of our work as a professional school.

(1:00)

Conclusion

At Hunter, we continue to develop our processes and tools for video analysis. We've modifying them to run on the iPad, and we're developing our own app that permits a teacher to capture, upload, and analyze a video with two clicks on a single unobtrusive device that takes the place of the camera and the commuter. Our faculty come up each week with new ways to take advantage of the video library and new ideas for analytical tools. Since it's what happens in the classroom that makes the difference for children, we'll continue to focus our energies there.

(0:60)

Total 10:00