Using Video for Professional Development

All right, welcome back ladies and gentlemen. We are going to be doing some of our filming things today, okay, like we have done in the past. Because of professional development at Kettle Moraine, teachers have the skills and the tools that they need to really meet the needs of all of our students. Everyone is working towards creating a culture of growth and taking risks to interact and engage with their class as a whole. At Kettle Moraine, we have a vision of continuous growth. Whether that's students, teachers, it's about how can we get there together. Visible learning is a strategy where staff will actually get behind a camera and have the opportunity to look at themselves and to watch and reflect on their teaching practices. It helps me see what the learning looks like in my classroom through a different lens. I'm going to draw a couple more hydrogen bonds in here. We did a few test filming sessions and I saw students all over the place as far as engagement. And so for my goal, I chose to try to increase student engagement through use of vocabulary words. More vocabulary I've defined as more engaged. When students walk into the classroom, it is nice to let them know like, hey, I'm going to be filming you today. If this is on your desk, what's pointing at you? They are all part of the process and I share my goal with them as well. I'm usually filming about 30 minutes of discussion time so I can see who's really interacting, if they're writing things down, if they're drawing, if they're showing each other different things. What things dissolve? How do you tell? The swivel is set up for an iPhone or an iPad. Sometimes teachers choose to have the camera on students and then sometimes they will put the camera on themselves. So that really just depends on what their goal is. We often fall into the habit of making assumptions about what's going on in the classroom and visible learning gives us a chance to see our habits and our patterns and recognize maybe why they aren't effective all the time. Just having a little bit of a shift in our practice can lead to gains on students' part. All right, so we can ask questions. It's really important for a teacher to have the ability to reflect on what they're seeing initially. It just allows teachers to get comfortable with the experience. I try to watch those films on the same day they've been recorded just so they're fresh in my mind. What I do is I watch it through once without really tracking anything. The second time through is really when I start to track. I'm going to stop the video every minute and tally which students are authentically engaged and which students are not. I'm writing down which vocabulary words they're using and what I was seeing on film was a lot of non-engagement with their peers. After a teacher watches their video, they meet with a coach to talk through some of their ideas. Tell me what's going on. I was concerned about engagement in the class. To get another set of eyes either on what they think that they're seeing in the classroom or some possible solutions. What strategies are you trying? Yeah, so in order to change the student's interaction in class, I needed to give a little bit more direct instruction on how to interact with your peers and how to use science vocabulary words. Individually, the teacher is going to be the one that determines what that success looks like. Maddie sunk the paper towel. Right, we're going to have to explain that with some some science-y words, right? Some vocab. Visible learning gives us a chance to reflect on our practice, to align what we believe is happening in the classroom to what really is happening, and also it gives us a chance to adapt to reach as many students as possible. Use the terms solute and solvent. We are all trying to grow in our professional career and it's all going to help the students at the end of the day and that's really the goal of the teaching process.