Video Narratives to Assess Student Teachers’ Competence as New Teachers

Source: Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, Volume 22, Issue 1, 2016, Pages 21-34

This article describes one postgraduate teacher education programme, where video narratives were evaluated as a valid way to assess student teachers’ teaching competencies, promoting connections amongst different competencies, situating these in practice and showing their development over time.
Data were gathered from self-reports of both teacher educators and student teachers as well as student teachers’ completed video narratives.

The findings revealed that most student teachers succeeded in meeting the set criteria for the video narrative assignment with connected video clips and text frames. However, student teachers also came up with only a few video episodes and loosely connected clips, reflections and other sources. Although most of the students during the programme did explicitly reflect upon their personal development towards becoming a teacher, almost none of them explicitly connected these ideas to their long-term development.

The authors conclude that video narratives show potential to be used as a valid assessment of student teachers’ teaching competence. Yet, structured guidance as well as ill-structured assignments are needed in framing assessment of student teachers in teacher preparation.