Video Reflection in Literacy Teacher Education and Development: Lessons from Research and Practice: Volume 5

This critical analysis investigates 23 studies on the use of video in pre-service literacy teacher preparation to gain a better understanding of the potential of video-based pedagogy for supporting pre-service teachers’ development of the complex set of knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed for teaching literacy in today’s classrooms.

This study extends what has been learned from prior reviews to investigate research focused on the use of video in pre-service literacy teacher preparation with particular attention paid to the extent to which pre-service teachers’ work with video helps them examine literacy teaching and learning in relation to race, language, culture, and power.

Working with video has strong potential for engaging pre-service teachers in reflecting on their own teaching, deepening their understanding of the challenges of engaging in literacy practices, fostering expertise in systematically describing, reflecting on, and analyzing their teaching, providing multiple perspectives on instruction, analyzing and assessing student growth, and discussing developmentally appropriate instruction. Results were mixed regarding changing teachers’ knowledge and beliefs. Overall, the tasks pre-service teachers completed did not explicitly guide them to focus on the relationship between characteristics of the diverse learners featured in the videos and issues of teaching and learning.

Literacy teacher educators could do more to take advantage of the affordances of using video to work more explicitly toward goals of helping pre-service teachers develop a critical consciousness, an inquiring stance, and a sense of agency, along with examining teaching practices that represent culturally responsive teaching. Pre-service teachers need explicit guidance in what to observe for and more focused discussion regarding their developing knowledge and beliefs about student diversity.

This chapter serves to synthesize existing literature centered on inservice teacher video-facilitated reflection on literacy pedagogy.

The inservice teacher literature review is focused on: (1) video analysis frameworks and scaffolds used to facilitate inservice teachers’ video reflection; (2) reflection and video discussions; and (3) the use of video for inservice teacher change and development.

From this review we learn that there is a dearth of video reflection research with inservice teachers on literacy pedagogy. Within the field of literacy, we know far less about how, when, and why to use video with inservice teachers than preservice teachers.

The review of literature does not incorporate inservice teacher video reflection in disciplines such as science and mathematics. Expanding this review to all disciplines would present a more comprehensive picture of video reflection with inservice teachers.

The chapter highlights the potential value of using video in inservice professional development and points to the specific needs for studies to identify the most effective uses of video specific to inservice professionals.

This chapter provides significant research-based information for designing and implementing future studies and professional development focused on video reflection with inservice teachers.

The purpose of this chapter is to outline specific features of the videotaped analysis experience to construct successful video reflection communities.

In this chapter, we draw from our multiple studies of clinic practices, including interviews with lab/clinic graduates, a large-scale survey, and artifact analyses. We also draw from others’ research on videotaped reflection activities.

Our combined research showed three essential aspects of successful video reflection experiences, which we share in this chapter: Developing a culture of video sharing as learning, engaging with collegial feedback, and scaffolding teachers’ individual reflections. In each section of the chapter, we situate, within vignettes of practice, procedures we use to create successful video reflection experiences and prompts we have found effective.

While we highlight three features of successful video reflection experiences based on ours and others’ research, we recognize these are not the only instructional practices that make the video reflection experience beneficial.

In this chapter, we provide instructors specific descriptions of how to arrange successful video reflection experiences, including prompts we have found most successful in generating rich group conversation, coaching, and individual reflection.

The success of video reflection experiences is dependent on how those experiences are framed and situated for teachers. This chapter provides detailed descriptions for teacher educators to use while implementing video reflection experiences.

Our purpose in this chapter is to provide researchers and educators with a model of how the Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) can be used with inservice and preservice teachers for professional development when teachers engage in reflective processes through the use of video reflection.

In this chapter we provide a brief review of the literature related to video as a learning tool for reflection and a discussion of the Gradual Release of Responsibility and emphasize the role of a teacher educator or more knowledgeable other who scaffolds inservice and preservice teacher reflection across various contexts. Several versions of the GRR model are included. We introduce and explain examples from two class sessions where a combination of inservice and preservice teachers engaged in reflection through video with support from a teacher educator.

We demonstrate that the teacher educator followed the GRR model as she guided preservice and inservice teachers to reflect on video. Through a contrastive analysis of two different class sessions, we show how the instructor released responsibility to the students and how students began to take up this responsibility to reflect more deeply on their own teaching practices.

The examples within this chapter are from a graduate level teacher education course affiliated with a university literacy center. The course was comprised of both preservice and inservice teachers. The model is applicable in a variety of settings and for teachers who are novices as well as those who are experienced teachers.

This is a valuable model for teacher educators and others in professional development to use with teachers. Many teachers are familiar with the use of the GRR model in considering how to guide children’s literacy practices, and the GRR can easily be introduced to teachers to assist them in video reflection on their own teaching.

This chapter provides significant research-based examples of the GRR model and foregrounds the role of a teacher educator in video reflection. The chapter provides a unique framing for research and teaching related to video reflection. The chapter explicitly links the GRR to teacher reflection and video in contexts of professional development or teacher education.

Our purpose in this chapter is to present a model of coaching used in a preservice elementary teacher preparation program that relies on video as a mentoring tool. We call this tool RCA, or Retrospective Coaching Analysis, and it is based on Goodman’s (1996) work on Retrospective Miscue Analysis. We also provide examples of how cooperating teachers used videos to identify important moments of practice to elicit reflection with their preservice teachers.

We collected video recordings of cooperating teacher/preservice teacher pairs engaging in mentoring conversations using videos of preservice teachers’ practice.

In this chapter, we focus on the cooperating teachers’ choices about when to stop the video to engage in reflection with their preservice teachers. In selecting a focus point for the RCA Event, the CTs chose moments that met some of these four criteria: appreciative, learner-focused, disruptive, and/or generative. We also found the challenges in selecting focus points and in staying with moments of video long enough to generate reflection, which made the model of mentoring challenging to implement.

The analysis of this reflective mentoring tool has led to revisions in our theoretical model of coaching, as described in this chapter. The research suggests the importance of closely examining reflective talk between cooperating teachers and preservice teachers. Our work also illustrates a shift in the use of video in preservice teaching from a video-case based perspectives to reflection embedded in practice.

Our study suggests the importance of selecting moments of practice as the basis for mentoring and coaching, but the research helped us to understand that RCA has affordances and constraints, and therefore, should be a tool for teachers to use flexibly within our theoretical model of Coaching with CARE.

Teacher educators will find the RCA model to be a new way of approaching collaborative work with teachers in the field within a practice-based teacher education program.

This chapter describes a cyclical mentoring model that is designed to scaffold the use of video in a graduate literacy practicum for in-service teachers.

This chapter is organized by (1) an overview of the Literacy Practicum course and the three learning phases and activities within each phase; (2) a description of the mentoring process/procedures during each of the phases, and examples of their impact on teachers’ learning and practice; and (3) a discussion of implications for practice.

Drawing upon recent work in teacher inquiry and reflection, this model provides opportunities for teachers to take increasing ownership of their own professional growth.

The examples in this chapter are anecdotal. But they help to illustrate the processes and procedures in this model, which is described with great detail in order to be useful for pre- and in-service teachers, as well as school-based professional development programs.

The model can be effectively incorporated into both pre-service clinical settings as well as professional development with in-service teachers.

As a potential high impact tool, video analysis of teaching must not be viewed as an incidental approach; rather it must be an integral part of a learning cycle which is committed to student ownership and voice, social engagement, critical inquiry, reflection and integrative learning.

To explain how an innovative practice-based approach to teacher preparation called the Adaptive Cycles of Teaching utilizes video reflection as part of multiple cycles of teaching across high impact literacy practices.

The faculty research team adopted a design-based research approach to develop and test the ACT model through iterations of design, implementation, analysis, and redesign. The chapter outlines the curriculum and findings from the initial iteration of design.

Teacher candidates experiencing the ACT model developed a strong knowledge of core literacy practices and were able to implement them with children. They continued to need additional scaffolding with respect to the quality of their instructional discourse and the gradual release of responsibility.

Continued research on the ACT model will allow us to refine the ways in which video use can enable preservice teachers to reflect and analyze their teaching and learning.

To describe how combining a working definition of reflection with a framework for applying this definition can lead to a greater consistency in the manner with which reflection instruction is implemented in educator preparation programs.

Cultivating the habit and practice of reflection has been a long-standing goal of educator preparation programs. However, much of the research literature indicates a lack of consistency in the way that reflection is defined and taught in these programs, particularly in the context of video-reflection. This chapter examines how a workable definition of reflection based on Dewey’s phases of reflection can be used to make reflection instruction more consistent and meaningful for pre-service teachers.

The authors discuss the video-reflections of four different pre-service teachers, providing examples from their reflections to demonstrate how a workable reflection definition can assist teacher educators in developing the reflective capabilities of pre-service teachers.

By instituting a workable definition of reflection consistently across an educator preparation program, teacher educators can increase the likelihood that pre-service teachers will be prepared to engage in meaningful reflection when they begin to lead a classroom on an extended basis.

To reflect what a teacher’s inner voice mediated by a video observation and discussion revealed about the process of change in literacy practices.

Nexus Analysis (NA) (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) was used in studying the teacher’s self-reflective dialogue for identifying the teacher’s (the first author) ways of being in the nexus of old and new literacy practices – in the process of change in the context of literacy practices. These ways of being were reflected on further in the study in the collaboration with the other authors.

The teacher’s ways of being balanced between “not knowing” and “knowing” connected both personal and professional aspects of learning.

Inner states of professional learning processes imply that both personal and professional support is needed in educational changes, such as the change in literacy practices. Video observations and discussion should thus not only concentrate on practical or theoretical issues of professional learning, but on promoting and offering safe spaces for reflection on subjective learning experiences.

Our purpose is to examine the outcomes of using video as a reflection tool in peer-to-peer coaching with rural teachers as part of a literacy coaching professional development project.

This qualitative case study presents findings from a professional development project serving rural educators interested in becoming literacy coaches. Using a peer coaching model, literacy coaching participants video recorded two literacy coaching cycles capturing pre-conferencing, lesson modeling, and post-conferencing. Reflection was facilitated through face-to-face discussion and online technologies (discussion forums and e-mail).

Face-to-face sessions were integral in fostering participant reflection. Technology challenges impacted the extent to which participants engaged in and valued video as a reflection tool. Participants repurposed video reflection for self-identified professional and pedagogical purposes.

Video reflection can be used as a part of multimodal set of tools to collaborate with teachers. Face-to-face interaction is important in supporting rural teachers’ use of video reflection. Teacher educators generally need more on-site authentic involvement to gain emic perspectives when working with the rural sites in order for the video tasks to be more effective and meaningful for the teachers. Repurposing video reflection can be an expression of agency in meeting teacher needs.

To present a cross-case analysis of two pre-service teachers who studied their own teaching using video within a teacher inquiry project (TIP) – a teacher education pedagogy we are calling video-mediated teacher inquiry.

Activity theory is used to examine how inquiry groups collaboratively used video to mediate shifts in goals and tool use for the two pre-service teachers presented in the study. This chapter addresses the question of how video-mediated teacher inquiry supports the appropriation of teaching tools (i.e., classroom discussion) in a teacher education program.

The findings indicate that shifts in goals and tool use made during the TIP suggest greater appropriation of the pedagogical tool of classroom discussion. We also consider how these shifts may be bound by the inquiry project.

The use of video cases of teachers’ own teaching is an emergent pedagogy that combines elements of both case study methods and practitioner inquiry. We argue that this pedagogy supports tool appropriation among pre-service teachers in ways that may help them develop as reflective practitioners.

This chapter explores whether, and how, video reflections used across three contexts in teacher education (video case-study reflections, self-reflections, and Collaborative Peer Video Analysis reflections) result in teachers’ greater depth and breadth of reflective ideas about literacy assessment practices as compared to their reflections in just one context.

This qualitative case study of 18 teachers tracks their reflective content over time, and uses emergent coding and constant comparative methods to identify patterns in the breadth and depth of teachers’ reflections across three contexts: video case studies, self-reflections, and Collaborative Peer Video Analysis.

Teachers demonstrate greater depth and breadth of reflection across the three contexts, as compared to any one context. Three patterns were identified that describe how teachers develop depth of reflection across these contexts: identifying problems, shifting learning, and transferring learning to novel contexts. Two patterns were identified that describe how breadth of reflection occurred across these contexts: broad array of ideas for a specific topic and a broad range of topics.

Teacher educators can use a three-pronged approach to video reflection to promote depth and breadth of teachers’ reflections. Opportunities should also be provided across time, and prompts should be provided for guiding reflection to support breadth and depth of teachers’ analyses.

This chapter explores how preservice teachers can use videos via social media to organize their ideas and enhance their understanding of content and pedagogical practices. It exemplifies how teacher development programs must embrace and become more in tune with societal practices and norms.

The methods of data collection for this study consist of participant observation of in-class activities (descriptive field notes reconstructing dialogue and activities), an open-ended questionnaire, and a focus group interview.

Five primary themes were revealed that describe preservice teachers’ scholarly experiences using Pinterest: igniting digital serendipity, Pinterest critic in relation to their thinking, Organizing and nesting knowledge, Picky pinning researcher, and Expert distributor of knowledge.

Teacher educators should consider how participants demonstrated a sense of pride in their scholarly creations and some began displaying modest amounts of expertise and characteristics of leadership within their local community both online and in-person.

To explore annotated video-based portfolios and the communicative practices embedded in this technological mediation as a means for teacher candidates to construct pedagogical knowledge and develop self-examination skills leading to a deeper reflection on practice, greater perceived value of the reflection process, and the ability to identify specific behaviors for improvement.

In this chapter, we present the development of an online graduate practicum course in a Masters in Reading program, and the supportive measures put into place so students could reflect on their own and others’ practice within a video-based portfolio construction.

Observations indicate course members’ discussion regarding teaching follows a clear progression: the importance of teachers’ management of materials, space and time; developing their ability to discern patterns in student behavior; and a growing recognition of the impact teacher talk and habits have on their students. To support practicum students’ progress, we have developed a set of assumptions to guide talk about practice during annotation and discussion of video, as well as ways of using talk effectively during a video lesson.

We share this glimpse into the design of our practicum course as a means to make transparent the support systems developed so students could capture and discuss quality practice within the context of their own work with a student. We hope sharing our journey will provide others engaged in this work with a common language and lens for discussion about quality, resulting in positive outcomes for students.

This study explored the impact of integrating digital tools on professional preparation in literacy, specifically an online digital video portal for teachers’ self-observation of instructional practice.

As a design experiment (Bradley & Reinking, 2011), a graduate-level Reading Education course was revisioned for blended learning to accommodate the professional development of practicing teachers in a rural, remote context. This chapter focuses on understanding how teachers experience video as a platform for reflection on and improvement of practice, with implications for those who seek to incorporate digital video into literacy professional development.

Through video analysis mediated by the use of a self-evaluation guide and a collaborative, online community, teacher-learners reflected on their own and their peers’ pedagogy and language interactions with students. After overcoming initial struggle with watching themselves on the video, the close analysis of clips became a powerful catalyst for professional growth. Teachers’ reflections shifted from outward-directed to inner-directed.

To successfully integrate video analysis in Reading Education practicums and professional development for in-service teachers, consideration should be given to technical as well as pedagogical components. Purposefully building in various scaffolds, for example, technical tutorials, prompts to focus video analysis, and safe platforms for sharing and collaboration, proved to be beneficial for teacher-learners in our courses.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the use of a web-based collaborative platform for virtual literacy coaching and how the technology influenced reflective practice.

This qualitative study explored the use of virtual literacy coaching by examining 18 coaching sessions between a university-based literacy coach and a first-grade reading interventionist using Adobe® Connect, a web-based collaborative tool. The application provided a virtual meeting space and through the use of video pods the teacher and coach had synchronous audio and video communication. Each coaching session lasted approximately one hour and included a pre-observation discussion, an observation of a 30-minute individualized lesson with a struggling reader, and a debriefing conversation. Data, including transcriptions of the coaching sessions, interviews with participants, field notes, and journal entries were analyzed using the constant-comparative method.

Findings showed the ability to link teachers and coaches in a virtual space creates new possibilities for engaging in reflective practice that certainly are not trouble-free, but do provide opportunities to think deeply about teaching and learning without being face-to-face.

As school districts continue to experience budgetary cuts, it is important to explore alternative ways to support teachers. The findings identified in this study underscore the differences between face-to-face and virtual coaching. Understanding and accepting the limitations of the technology and recognizing the importance of the teacher/coach relationship could provide a starting point for school districts interested in computer-mediated communication.