Teacher Educators as Learners: How Supervisors Shape Their Pedagogies by Creating and Using Classroom Videos with Their Student Teachers
Source: Action in Teacher Education, Volume 35, Issue 3, p. 147–164, 2013.
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)
This study explored how supervisors can develop greater stances of inquiry toward their practices as they experimented with video of their student teachers and shared their experiences with peers.
The authors addressed to the following research questions:
1. How were supervisors’ existing approaches for supporting student teacher learning enhanced and challenged by creating and using video?
2.What did supervisors learn about their own pedagogies by creating and using video and how did sharing those experiences with others support that learning?
Method
The participants were 12 supervisors who participated in the Video Reflection Project in School of Education in American University.
Data were collected through patterns in project meeting and interview transcripts.
The findings revealed how these experiences not only enhanced their existing personal approaches toward supervision, but also challenged their roles as observers and prompted them to build messages about teaching dispositions directly from video.
The supervisors’ willingness to share and listen to others’ experiences with video was critical to their growth.
Supervisors across grade levels, subject areas, and field sites either recognized or began to recognize how creating and using video could help them share at least a bit more of the learning space with their student teachers.
The findings show how a community of practice encourages supervisors to take considerable responsibility for their own growth as teacher educators and provides a coherent framework others can use to pursue similar professional development initiatives.
All members of this established a community of practice can also now share their experiences with others at the university and their field sites to encourage more diverse collaboration around video.
As classroom video becomes more ubiquitous across a variety of performance assessments for preservice and in-service teachers, the authors expect its value as a resource for dialogue and shared learning about pedagogy will also increase.
Because video-based dialogue can promote student teachers’ reflection about and their supervisors’ stances of inquiry toward their own practices, it can powerfully inform and enhance the practices of teachers and teacher educators.
The authors are now assisting supervisors in collecting a much wider array of student teacher data to better understand how different video-based pedagogical protocols influence the learning of different student teachers and supervisors.
Such spaces are crucial to ensure the voices of all the players who shape the structure and function of the field-based elements of teacher education programs are clearly heard.