LEVERAGING THE POWER OF VIDEO FOR TEACHER LEARNING: A Design Framework for Mathematics Teacher Educators

Abstract

With recent advances in technology, along with a greater emphasis on practice-based opportunities for teacher learning (McDonald, Kazemi, and Kavanagh, 2013), video is being used extensively in teacher preparation and professional development. It is becoming one of the primary artifacts of teaching practice - as it represents events unfolding in a classroom interaction that affords individual and collective analysis to deepen understanding of the work of teaching and facilitate improvements in instruction. The genre of video captures the specificity of the teaching and learning experience, allowing for fine-grained observation and sense-making. At the same time, video is a snapshot in time - what is captured is only a piece of classroom life and thus has limitations in what inferences can be drawn about the learners’ experiences and teaching effectiveness. Given this tension between the promise of what video can offer and its limitations, teacher educators need guidance for using video productively in order to leverage the affordances of this tool to advance teacher learning and teaching practice.