Instructional Leaders Reflect With Video, Too

Ashleigh was a 2005 Las Vegas corps member and taught first grade in her placement school. After the corps, Ashleigh relocated to Washington, D.C. and researched factors affecting child achievement (including parenting and out-of-school time programs and early education supports) at the independent research organization, Child Trends. She has several publications on topics ranging from out-of-school time best practices, fatherhood programs, and early child temperament. Ashleigh has taught college students (4 years & counting), early elementary students (5 years), and served in various capacities at Teach for America Institute (9 years). She also earned her Ph.D. in early childhood education from New York University, and currently serves as Relay’s Director of Content. When Ashleigh is not busy with work, she can be found soaking in time with loved ones, watching a food/fashion/dancing competition or mystery on TV, or doing some YouTube yoga.

How can video be used for reflection in teacher training?

Ashleigh: So Relay uses video a lot. And in short, and it's always great to hear new innovative ideas of how others are using and implementing it. But we tend to use it with teacher preparation which looks like they're reading theories of educational approaches. They get embedded videos that show what they look like in practice in addition to just reading about them. Then they come into class and we'll show videos where the professors are kind of annotating. This is what's happening, this is how it's being implemented. We might ask them questions related to that as well. And then they also have assessments where they have to demonstrate their proficiency and using that strategy in their classroom. So they are videoing themselves doing that with their actual students. There are occasions where we do peer review so they can do videos that aren't for evaluative purposes, but they're just sharing it with their peer to get feedback. and then the professors also used video. We tend to use video to evaluate our own practice so our colleagues and I will look at each other's video and say oh this was a strong approach or moment. Here's how it can be better. So the same things that we're asking our graduate students to do. We do the same.

I think one is that we can empathize with the graduate students. When I first got there, I didn't come from a teaching background where we got lots of feedback. So when folks say that we use video to get feedback I'm like wow that would have been great. Also, we didn't have very many administrators that are coming in saying why don't you try this to get better. So the fact that I have anyone, let alone my colleagues who actually know and can empathize because they're doing a similar experience, watching video and giving feedback is really helpful.

So as assistant professor and even as a director of content when we're thinking about preparing teachers we're also recording ourselves because we want to make sure that what the instruction we give them is just as strong as the instruction we're asking them to give their K12 students.