A Quick Guide to Video Coaching: The best practice to improve the art and craft of teaching through guided reflection

The need to train high school graduates specifically to become teachers was recognized in the early 1800s. Over the next century, “normal schools” turned into teachers’ colleges which became state universities, and these entities changed from teacher training schools to liberal arts colleges and then into research universities. The focus reasonably shifted from the practical to the theoretical as a result of this evolution. Many colleges and universities have attempted to recalibrate their approach to preparing prospective teachers for the profession, but it is evident that teacher preparation must continue to evolve with more emphasis on teaching experiences that provide opportunities for feedback and reflection on a continuous basis.It’s not just our postgraduate teaching preparatory programs that struggle with this mission; the field of K-12 education owns a big part of this dilemma as well. Once teacher candidates enter the system, we continue to miss the target by not providing opportunities for them to improve their instruction. The structure and methods for such approaches are absent from the field. Often quality professional development is sparse and may seem more like a current fad rather than a change in practice for overall teaching improvement.Early on in our approach, we were convinced the answer could be found in the realm of coaching. One of us had some experience with peer coaching where colleagues meticulously “scripted” each other’s lessons and provided feedback within carefully agreed-upon parameters. The other had experience as a student-athlete through college, varsity coach, and physical education teacher who recalled an expression repeated by a football coach: “The eye in the sky doesn’t lie.”The football coach was referring to video-recording.That’s when we experimented with the notion of recording a teacher’s instruction. A curious and willing classroom teacher had video-recorded a number of his lessons and allowed us to view them. Then we sat down together to discuss exactly what we were seeing. The teacher was energized by the undeniable evidence of his own actions, both those that were effective and those that were not. We discovered that the teacher, who was seeing himself teach for the first time, was very capable of identifying those teacher actions that needed to be altered to produce more desirable results, but the lightbulb went off when we realized that the experience could be enriched with the guidance of an instructional expert. We started small with “slow is fast” as our mantra. In the first year, we worked with about a half dozen volunteer teachers. Fourteen teachers benefitted from video coaching the next year. Within four years, the number of schools participating had increased dramatically. We know the video coaching approach is working as part of systemic change because we are now training cadres of coaches instead of only working with individual classroom teachers. Part of our journey has been understanding how important quality control at every juncture is in maintaining credibility and building trust. In this book, we are offering a pragmatic approach to the implementation of a video coaching model in your school. We have successfully worked through our model on a small scale in a small school, then on a larger scale in a small school, then in nine different school districts, and now on a larger scale in a large school district. The most direct route to improved instruction is to refocus and support teachers on their teaching by having them reflect on their own practice in a safe environment with a trained coach in response to incontrovertible video evidence of the instruction they deliver in their own classrooms. We’re excited about helping you to chart your own course.