Make it Meaningful

Diane provides professional development oversight through new teacher induction programs, curriculum implementation support, and the integration high-yield instructional strategies for diverse learners. In her district role, she oversees federal programs (Title I, II, III, and IV), including special education and early childhood education, and works to ensure success for at-risk student populations.

What are the barriers to changing the culture around video use in school?

Diane: I will say that initially I probably paid much more attention to some of the technical challenges. You know I was concerned with how do we get a platform to make this easily accessible, password protected. How are we going to upload the videos? How are we going to teach people to use their microphones and technology and what I wasn't really extraordinarily mindful of were some of the adaptive challenges and that first kind of presented itself with my own staff. My staff didn’t use videotape for themselves when they were teaching. So as professional developers, when they were going out there coaching with teachers, we first started looking at technology as this way to make things more efficient, and a way to bring people together across distance, and you know confusing schedules.

And what I realized at that point was that we hadn't really understood the power of video for itself and it's transformational nature. We were just looking at it as kind of something in addition to, we didn't see how it we didn't really see how it added. And it wasn't until things started to happen for my coaches because of the video that wouldn't have happened without the video that they started to really understand its value and not see it as additional time or something we don't need.

Sometimes it takes a long time for us to see the markings of our growth. We have to have that passage of time. And video is a great way of documenting your own growth. And that's not really the reason for it, you don't do that for that purpose, but it's a great way to be able to go back and to see yourself. There's not a lot of opportunities to really have that level of concreteness when we reflect on ourselves. We may go back and we may look at our lessons from a year ago when we taught that same unit. We might look at student work and say, “Wow, my students are writing a lot better at this time of year. They weren't last year,” but to think about your instructional moves, what did I do to make that happen. That's the question that teachers are asking.