Identifying Digital Video Clips of Good Pedagogic Practice

2. How to use digital video footage

Some guiding principles:

2.1 A little goes a long way

Footage of what happens in a classroom is rich, dense material. Tiny fragments of lessons are worth analysing in detail. Concentrate on small episodes – generally only a few minutes is plenty.

2.2 A clear focus for the observation

What do you want (student teachers) to look at?

• Classroom management?
• Pedagogy?
• Language?
• Gesture?
• Orchestration of feedback?
• The layout of the room?
• Student interaction?
• Evidence of learning?

2.3 What don’t we know? What can’t we see?

Be explicit about the limitations of our knowledge about the data and about the limitations of the data themselves (see also Section 1.5).

2.4 What issues does this raise for your practice?

What have the student teachers learnt?

Some possibilities…

• Show the same footage more than once, with a different focus each time
• Provide transcripts of the footage – either before or after showing – or (more arduous but worthwhile) ask student teachers to transcribe a brief episode themselves: suggest that they indicate facial expression, body posture and gesture as well as language, and note the different kinds of contributions made by individual pupils
• Run the footage without sound
• Allocate different foci to different observers, such as:
  • selecting a particular pupil to watch during a sequence (so that a group of student teachers would be watching different pupils in a group);
  • observing the teacher’s gestures as well as the language used;
  • noting the board work/materials used (this would help in the discussion about differentiation);
  • noting the questioning – both teacher’s and pupils’…

… and some prompt questions that might help to guide observation

The learning environment of the classroom

• What do you notice about the classroom – about layout, displays, resources?
• What evidence is there in the classroom about learning and the learners, about the subject, about values and relationships?

How does the teacher organise, shape and structure the lesson?

• How does the teacher manage the class?
• How do we know that the lesson has started?
• How does the teacher explain the task(s)?
• What do you notice about the teacher’s and students’ use of language in the opening stages of the lesson?
• How are transitions from one activity to the next signalled and managed?
• Is there any sign of resistance from the students? If so, how does the teacher react?
• How is the lesson brought to an end? Is anything said about future lessons?

Language and learning

• What are the students learning, and how?
• What tells you that work has started – the nature and level of talk, the posture and physical attitudes of students, reading and writing activities?
• What do you notice about the students’ language in different parts of the lesson?
• What is language used for?

Differentiation

• Is the learning the same for all students? If not, how is it different?
• What has the teacher done to make the lesson accessible to all the students?
• What resources assist in the process of differentiation?
• What obstacles are there to participation and understanding?
• Do you notice any differences in the ways in which different students understand and make sense of the lesson?