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Dr. Elizabeth (Buffy) Bondy has been on the faculty in the School of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education since 1989 and served for six years as the School’s director. She focuses on elementary education and preservice and inservice teacher professional development in low-income communities of color. Dr. Bondy explores the use of critical social justice perspectives to transform beliefs, practices, and structures that historically have advantaged some groups of students and disadvantaged others. Winner of UF’s 2017 Dissertation Advisor and Mentoring Award, Dr. Bondy works extensively with Ph.D. and Ed.D. students who wish to lead social justice praxis in U.S. and international settings.

Ester J. de Jong is a Professor in the School of Teaching and Learning. She teaches courses in bilingual and bicultural education and in curriculum, methods, and assessment for English speakers of other languages. Her research interests include two-way bilingual education and other integrated models for language minority schooling, educational language policy, and teacher preparation for bilingual students.

How might incorporating video observation change teacher preparation and/or professional development?

Buffy: Teachers are intellectuals. They're not technicians though they are often treated as if they are. And we want to encourage them throughout their teacher preparation program and into their career to see themselves as people who are capable of generating knowledge and not only having to be on the receiving end of someone telling them what they need to do, what they should fix. So it seems to me that video is just a natural outgrowth of that. We try to encourage our students from the first semester they're with us to to wonder and wonder aloud about teaching and about learning about the impact that a particular practice may have on learners. So adding video into the mix is simply concretizes that a little bit more. And it feels like a very natural and normal step for folks who were trying to socialize to think of themselves as professionals who generate knowledge and continually raise questions about their own practice and its impact.

Ester: I think it's good to start with what’s effective professional development for teachers. I think one of the reasons why you may get the check the box is because it's put down as a mandate to teachers. And it's not always relevant to them personally and/or their classroom and where they're at. So I think that one of those reasons why you get the check the box using video in a way that can be self-directed professional development I think is a huge shift where you actually treat the teachers as lifelong learners and professionals and the professional learning connects with them. So I think that's more of a shift to me that we kind of need to see if maybe we moved away from that as we do more like, “everybody needs to know X,” but it's not always relevant for everybody. So I think figuring out how to match that better and treat teachers like the professionals that they are I think is really important.

Buffy: And much more much better aligned with what we know about adult learning and what we know about research on professional development. So, it's relevant, it's authentic it's practice embedded, it happens over time. So these are all reasons that this use of video in the kinds of ways we've been talking about here can be really powerful.