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November 17, 2020

How Video-Driven PD Favors Growth over ‘Gotcha!’

Via EdTech Digest, “I wanted observation at Howard University Middle School (HUMS) to be a way for teachers to become better teachers, so for the 2016–2017 school year, we started asking them to capture videos of their lessons.”

After 12 years of working in school administration, one aspect of the job that I have learned to dread is the teacher-evaluation process. In the past, it worked like this:

1) I would inform a teacher that it was evaluation time.

2) We would have a pre-meeting.

3) I would sit in on a class, and they would put on a show for me.

4) I would take notes on the show.

5) We would talk about the show that I saw, which in no way represented what they did every day.

6) I would give them an evaluation.

The whole procedure was ridiculous. I wanted observation at Howard University Middle School (HUMS) to be a way for teachers to become better teachers, so for the 2016–2017 school year, we started asking them to capture videos of their lessons.

An added bonus of having video from classrooms is that when I see a teacher doing something well, I can take that snippet and show it to other teachers.

The idea was that I could look at a video the way I wanted to: see a piece, stop, go back and look at it again, and then provide feedback that the teacher could use to improve their practice.

Growth Comes First

We started with the math department, because I was a math teacher before I became Head of School, and because HUMS has a focus on STEM and careers. Using the Insight ADVANCE platform ADVANCEfeedback, all the math teachers took a video of one class, and I used our instructional rubric to discuss different points that I saw in the classroom.

– Kathryn Procope, Head of School at Howard University Middle School in Washington, DC.

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