The Power of the Video

As I am traveling throughout many classrooms, I find myself thinking, "I wish I could show other teachers this lesson, or strategy".  There are so many great things that happen daily, and I wish more teachers were able to observe other teachers.  However, teachers are very busy people, and are not able to observe colleagues as often as they should.  I have tried to highlight teacher instructional practice in my section of the blog titled "Teachers in Action".  This is great to read about fellow teachers but it is simply not as powerful as watching the lesson live.

Since observing other teachers is not a reality, I am interested in creating a video library of instructional strategies that we have been focused on learning and implementing in our classrooms.   On January 16th, I conducted a training for our faculty about three of the Marzano strategies: identifying similarities and differences, cooperative learning, and non-linguistic representation.  I was able to get a lot of feedback and many people were interested in further training to develop lessons that use these strategies.  This week, I was able to meet with one teacher to plan a lesson that would identify similarities and differences between three scientists: Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison and Michael Faraday.  We planned that she would use a graphic organizer called a comparison matrix to look at the similarities and differences between the scientists.  The lesson would also incorporate technology to research each scientist. 

I asked the teacher if I could videotape the lesson for several reasons.  The first reason is that she was implementing a strategy that would be useful to other teachers.  The video would be powerful because it is a person that the whole staff knows, and the students are reflective of all of our kids at Waterman.  The video would be one of our own, and on our turf.  The second reason to videotape the lesson is that the teacher can view her lesson objectively, and make note of which parts went well and which parts did not go as planned.  It provides the opportunity for me as the instructional coach to work as a partner with the teacher, providing support and feedback on the lesson. 

Although it made the teacher nervous, she graciously allowed me to record the lesson.  She now has the homework of viewing her lesson on video, reflecting on the lesson, and we will meet to follow up next week.  I am so grateful that she is willing to work through the coaching process with me.  And I am excited to continue on in the coaching cycle with this teacher.

I am hopeful that once the teacher and I can share our coaching experience, that more teachers will want to videotape themselves using new instructional strategies.  The power of the video will provide us with on-site professional development that furthers the excellence that I see everyday at Waterman Elementary School.