Get Specific Feedback on Content
EDUCATOR TESTIMONIAL
Cinnamon Garner
Middle School Teacher, English Language Arts
Thompson School District
Loveland, CO
As a professional teacher, Cinnamon has independently used video to critically reflect on her own instruction and improve the quality of feedback she is able apply to her classroom practice. Cinnamon has identified video coaching a way of collaborating across classrooms and gather feedback from colleagues who are able to provide valuable content-specific feedback.
How has the use of video impacted your evaluation process?
Cinnamon: I'm an experienced teacher so in my district I only really had to be formally evaluated - and that's what we were looking at formal evaluation - formally evaluated like twice a year. Now I think it's even down to one time, but I wasn't getting any like really good feedback out of that process and so by being able to videotape my own classroom I could kind of reflect for myself. So I could videotape any lesson I wanted, send it to my evaluator so I could capture an entire lesson and set off like them walking through for 20 minutes, they could see something beginning to end. I could watch back and reflect myself, and also tag moments that I wanted to point out to my evaluator, and then also got just really great feedback from her on the other end, too.
It was really helping me grow as far as like, knowing where to look at my classroom and what students to kind of hone in on that I wasn't picking up on before, and also where I was out with my practice. I was also able to send my videos to a content someone in my content. This was really exciting for me because my evaluator although she knows good instruction was a former P.E. teacher and I teach English language arts at the secondary level and so I wanted more specific feedback on my content and teaching my content and so I was able to choose, select videos, send them to another teacher who is experienced content person and get that good feedback from that person, too.
I was getting way more feedback and more valuable feedback and then also just being able to look at my classroom in a different way through the videos.