Digital Video Applications in Teacher Preparation

We anticipate that digital video applications will play an increasingly prominent role in teacher preparation. The following comments summarize three areas in which we feel applications will quickly emerge. These areas include:

• Classroom cases for analysis and discussion
• Analysis of personal performance
• Contributions to evaluation and employment portfolios

Developing Preservice Teacher Skills

Teacher educators face the challenge of helping preservice teachers understand what abstract ideas about effective teaching and learning "look" like when implemented in the classroom. How are ideas such as constructivist principles, scaffolding, learner centered classroom environments and critical thinking embodied in classroom behaviors? Once the meaning of these ideas is understood, there is still the need to translate understanding into action. Pre-service teachers will need to learn instructional skills associated with these ideas and become sensitive to the circumstances which trigger specific behaviors.

These are not new challenges in teacher preparation and the curriculum has long included observation and supervised practice as ways to help preservice teachers become effective practitioners. Most preservice teachers spend time in field placements and later in student teaching which provide the opportunity to watch several teachers practice their craft and supervised opportunities for future teachers to teach lessons themselves. These are important experiences and the time spent in the field has typically expanded in recent years to provide more of these opportunities. However, hands-on experiences do not guarantee meaningful learning (see our discussion of rote discovery on page 59). We would describe two of the challenges in the existing system as:

• The separation in time between the consideration of principles of effective teaching and experiencing contextualized examples of the application of these principles.
  
  • Practitioners frequently do not help preservice teachers connect desirable practices with the conceptual framework future teachers bring to the field. In some cases, classroom observations and supervised practice may not acquaint pre-service teachers with the desired range of exemplary practices.
• Applied experiences in K-12 classrooms may lack opportunities for personal reflection and guidance.
  
  • Students may not have the opportunity to actively think through what they have observed or to carefully consider their own experiences as instructors.

Technology tools may contribute to the solutions for these challenges. Videos of classroom behaviors can provide examples to be linked with classroom presentations or assigned readings. Videos of lessons led by the preservice teacher can be critiqued by supervisors and analyzed by the teacher.

The New Video Tools

Again, the use of video in skill development is not that new. I work in an academic program that prepares clinical psychologists and the sessions in which these beginning therapists first work with clients have been recorded and discussed individually and in team supervision for years. My university has also long had a program in which the media center will video lectures for personal review or for discussion with experienced faculty volunteers. What makes the new tools unique is the use of the computer as a way to connect other information sources and capabilities to specific events in the video. Imagine a computer display in which video appears in one window and text comments linked to the video appear in a second window. Buttons allow the video to be started and stopped. The addition of annotation and the opportunity to review this combination of video and notes on your own (perhaps on the Internet) offers new opportunities.

Individual frames in digitized video have a unique identity that can be very useful. It is easy to jump to an exact frame location so an environment in which a user might first read about a type of classroom behavior and then can view one or more examples of such behavior is relatively easy to create. What makes this environment powerful is that the video segments need not be separated for each illustration. The same extended example can be used by linking to specific locations within the example. The program displaying the video can also use the identity of individual frames to trigger other events - e.g., displaying text associated with specific frames or entering text of your own. The viewer can work through an extended video example by selecting start and stop buttons and markers within the example can trigger the appearance of text commenting on the video.

The following material is intended to help you understand how the capabilities just described might be used to help preservice teachers gain insight into abstract principles of instruction or reflect on their interaction with students.

Examining principles in practice

Examples from the classroom are a good way to help preservice teachers make the transition from principles and concepts to application. This position has influenced our own work and we have always attempt to use examples when we write. Video would seem to offer some advantages over written descriptions. Video captures more of the classroom context and yet provides a very efficient way to expose the viewer to all of this information. Video provides information without interpretation and may be suited to prepare teachers for classroom situations in which personal decision making is necessary. Viewers can be asked what they felt was going on or if a different course of action may have been preferable.

The techniques developed for the Preparing Tomorrows Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) grant hosted by the University of Northern Iowa offer a great example of how digital video tools allow preservice teachers to carefully examine classroom behavior. The InTime project consists of many archived and categorized video cases available over the Internet. The cases represent a database that can be searched on many dimensions (grade level, academic area, instructional principle, use of technology) to locate cases of interest. Each case can be viewed using what the developers refer to as multiple lenses. A lens represents a perspective such as the lesson plan, standards, learning theory, or ways of using technology. In some cases, all of these areas apply at certain times. Each lens allows the viewer to move efficiently to a part of the case thought to exemplify issues associated with the chosen perspective (uses of technology, interaction to encourage information processing, etc.). In concrete terms, the viewer selects a video case and a lens. The video appears in one frame of the browser window and comments associated with the chosen perspective appear in a second frame.

While we assume classroom observations and video cases fill in a unique role in shaping practice, exposure to such experiences alone should not be assumed to be sufficient. It may be helpful to understand such experiences as episodes (see Chapter 2) that need to be "indexed" as examples of key principles or as information that must be processed to become knowledge. Discussion or writing tasks may be one way to encourage the cognitive activities necessary to generate these types of meaningful learning.

Visit the InTime site and explore the videos and conceptual framework of the project developers.

A similar approach uses video as a way to present "Best Practices." In this approach, someone has made a value judgment and is suggesting that a particular example has some particular desired characteristics. The California Learning Interchange offers some best practice examples.

Reflecting on personal behavior

Video provides a mechanism for capturing a representation of personal behavior so that this behavior can become the focus of personal reflection and interpersonal discussion. Technology can contribute to these processes. A tool that can mark a point in video and then allow comments to be attached to this point provide both a concrete technique for reflection and an efficient methodology. A more traditional approach may have required that student teachers "journal" after each day of work. An approach taking advantage of digital video and the type of tool described here would ask the teacher to identify key situations encountered during a classroom interaction and to generate reactions to how the situations were handled. The tool supported approach would assure a more accurate recollection of the actual event and would encourage a more detailed analysis. In addition, the tool supported reflection could allow more insightful feedback from a supervisor or colleague.

Visit the Lesson Lab site for a description of one tool for commenting on teaching behavior.

Building a Portfolio Demonstrating Classroom Capabilities

The final way in which we expect digital video to be used in preservice teacher education is as a way to contribute samples to a student portfolio. The samples of teaching behavior might be used as part of an "evaluation portfolio" or an "employment portfolio." We anticipate potential employers will be receiving CDs or DVDs with samples of what job applicants feel are strong examples of their instructional skills.