Present Objective Evidence

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.

How can video help educators insight into their practice?

Diane: I have a professional development coach who is working with a brand new sixth-grade teacher and he was doing fantastic except for that class that came in right after lunch. And those little sixth graders would just come in and they would be squirrelly and buzzing around. And the coach had been working with this teacher for two months on classroom management; coming in every week doing the visual you know traditional observation and coaching feedback. and it just wasn't changing. And then one day he decided to, himself, take a videotape of the classroom.

He put it up into the platform, looked at the time signature, and the teacher thought the kids were getting in and taking about five minutes to settle down. It was really around 19-20 minutes. And so that clear picture of reality, and you could see in the video when he was facing this way and trying to get the kids seated over here, these kids over in this direction were doing whatever. And so of course he didn't realize what was going on. He wasn't looking in that direction. And so this teacher set a goal. He said I'm going to get those kids in within two minutes. Well that took two weeks because he was intentionally looking at himself, looking at the kids, seeing how things were going, in two weeks he got those kids seated in less than a minute. And then, he did something I've never seen a teacher do before; he said I can I can even do this better. He said, "I don't want them just coming in and getting started in less than a minute. I want them thinking about math and doing math from the moment they walk in the door." So he took his warm up, his "do now" and he put it outside in the hallway. And so the kids are actually looking at that math problem. From the moment they were lined up they were engaged and they came right in with their task and they just got to work right away. It was amazing. And that that shifted the thinking. My coaches started talking about the way they saw their own coaching practice shifting because video was a way of presenting objective evidence. It wasn't a way of you know it didn't get in the way of relationships. Maybe you don't trust my credibility or or any of those things. It was it was a third point; it was an objective source that they could come in from a collaborative stance sometimes and really work together to improve practice.