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January 5, 2021

4 reasons teachers want classroom video to be a part of evaluations

Like any technology, classroom video will never improve educational outcomes unless teachers buy in to using it. To get a sense of educators’ attitudes towards video in the classroom, Insight and SmartBrief conducted a poll, and the results were eye-opening.

We asked teachers, “Would video help improve your practice?”

A whopping 91% of teachers responded that filming their instruction would improve their practice.

Even more powerful, though, was the fact that nearly 80% of teachers said they would be willing to take the next step of selecting and submitting a video for formal observation by school leaders.

Why would so many time-crunched teachers be so eager to jump to video?

To put it bluntly, for most teachers, evaluations without video aren’t working. In our survey, only 30% of teachers said they receive meaningful and timely feedback. No wonder they’re so willing to try something new.

Educators in our survey cited a number of reasons why they want classroom video to be a part of observations and evaluations. Here are the top four:

  1. It’s “instant replay,” so both teacher and observer can see exactly what happened in the classroom and can review it as many times as they like.
  2. It leads to content-specific feedback.
  3. It provides an objective record, increasing the fairness and accuracy of scoring evaluations.
  4. It’s approved in collective bargaining agreements.

That sounds a lot like buy-in to me.

You can read more about how video observation helps teachers and school leaders in A Game Changer: Using video to achieve high performance in the classroom (Playbook for School & District Leaders).

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