Sharing Good Practice
USING VIDEO RECORDING TECHNOLOGY
TO SUPPORT THE IMPROVEMENT OF
TEACHING AND LEARNING
BY MICHAEL STRACHAN
T
eachers are unusual among
professionals in that they
spend most of their time
around children and not
adults. They also usually operate
alone without others to give them
feedback. Lesson observations allow
for occasional feedback from another
professional but in many schools these
are infrequent and often linked to
appraisal, discouraging risk taking.
Evidence suggests that getting
teachers to observe one another is an
incredibly powerful way to improve
teaching and learning. However,
with formal observations being more
focused on judgement, the average
28 |
Jan - Feb 2019
|
|
teacher gets very limited opportunities
to be critiqued and improved.
Moreover, unless a teacher is a head
of department or senior leader they
may not get many opportunities
to observe lessons. Indeed, during
a recent conversation with an ex-
colleague, he admitted to not having
observed a lesson since being a
trainee, ten years prior! Even when
staff are keen to observe colleagues,
the timetable frequently means that
it is not possible to schedule a pop in
at a convenient time. Added to this is
the fact that many teachers struggle
with workload issues, therefore it is
unsurprising that even with the best of
intentions, teachers very rarely watch
one another teach.
Class Time
Another aspect we were keen to
explore was giving staff the opportunity
to self-reflect. It is often easy to get
carried away in a lesson and difficult
to recall the numerous decisions that
are made. By encouraging teachers
to film themselves and then review
their own performance, we aimed to
facilitate teachers’ self-development.
An unexpected obstacle rose its head
during our initial discussions around
this idea: staff were terrified of the
sound of their own voice. Though I
cannot guarantee that hearing yourself
talk is not cringe-inducing at the
beginning, after a while it is possible
to ignore it and focus on the lesson.
After being tasked with implementing