Video is seductive technology. It’s used as click bait on
social media, to advertise on the sides of buildings in Times Square, and even
to help pass the time in the back seat of a New York City taxi. In education,
video has tremendous potential to instruct, to inspire, to raise awareness, and
more. It is making its way into teacher education as a tool for analyzing
teaching. Despite its potential, I am concerned about some trends I am
noticing, and that I believe deserve careful scrutiny.
For example, at Relay, the website boasts that its instructors are not “sitting in ivory towers” but
coaching and mentoring students who are learning to become teachers. “When
they’re not right there in the classroom, they’re side by side with our
students, watching and analyzing video of them…pausing, rewinding and replaying
the video to give pinpoint feedback.” They even call these videos “game film”
as in show that you’ve got game in the classroom. Video is also used to
instruct, and Relay’s site explains “our students can watch and rewatch course
modules as they complete our program.” One of the students featured in a Relay
video even claims, “Film doesn’t lie.”
One of my concerns lies in the false sense of objectivity
that is ascribed to videos of classroom life. Like it or not, the camera is a
presence. You can’t be unaware of it, and it comes with its own interpretive
lens even sitting on a tripod in the corner of the room. It is not reality, it
is a representation of reality. What’s more, classroom events are often
incredibly complex, and require deep contextual knowledge to fully understand
and even interpret. I know from my own research in classrooms that when
revisiting classroom events with participants using video there is a lot of
unpacking to do about the teacher’s intentions and beliefs, the students’
understanding, and the shifts and gaps between what is captured in film and
what is remembered by the people afterwards.
Another concern is that the temptation in observing teaching
to satisfy a checklist of items you are looking for is exacerbated with video.
We have been there, done that, and the behavioral checklist doesn’t work. It’s
a bit like getting on a sightseeing bus, driving around a city, and saying you
saw this and that. You caught a glimpse, grabbed a bad photo or two, but what
did you really see? Not much. Using video to evaluate teaching is also
problematic because the likelihood is that only a short clip will be analyzed,
a tiny sliver of what classroom life is really like, and the evaluator will
probably only watch once. It’s as if instead of going to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, lingering over favorite paintings and talking with a friend
about what you notice, like, appreciate, wonder about, and so on, and reading
the contextual information provided by the curator, you watch a quick slideshow
online where each image lasts for 15 seconds and you get the name of the artist
and the title of the work on the bottom of the screen. It’s not likely that you
will have a memorable and long-lasting experience.
What much of the video use in teacher education is intending
to replace is the bothersome and expensive problem of actually being in the
classroom. It is an acknowledged problem that full time faculty don’t generally
supervise student teachers, and that the work is more often than not relegated
to adjuncts and in large universities, to doctoral students. Principals are
also hard pressed to find enough time to evaluate all the teachers in their
schools, and rely on help from assistant principals and instructional coaches.
Now that companies like EdThena are developing software to make it easy and intuitive
to provide feedback on teachers’ videos, we are likely to see more and more
remote evaluation. No one will remember anymore the value of being in the room,
because teaching won’t be seen as relational work, but as a series of
techniques to be micro-managed by data analysis and video software.
How is this creeping up on us? In preservice education, we
are seeing how Pearson’s scoring of edTPA portfolios is micromanaged by very
specific rubrics looking for particular instructional moves in video clips
totaling approximately 15 minutes. This leads to some very problematic
oversimplification as in this Powerpoint slide widely used to explain the
rubric progression of edTPA scoring from one to five: