Eric.ed.gov – Creating Effective Video to Promote Student-Centered Teaching

Training and investing teachers at all career levels in student-centered practices is widely recognized as a significant challenge. Various studies document the failure of student-centered teaching practices to take hold in K-12 mathematics classrooms in significant ways, including collaborative work; problems that are cognitively demanding or that encourage connections, inquiry-based approaches; teacher questioning to enhance student understanding; classroom-based performance assessments; and student choice. While pre-service math-teacher education is not solely to blame for this failure, it is also the case that pre-service training has been relatively unsuccessful at promoting nontraditional teaching practices in new mathematics teachers, in spite of the efforts and intentions of university-based teacher educators. Overcoming resistance to student-centered methods has been the author’s major challenge in teaching the secondary-level mathematics-methods course in her institution’s credential program. An often-recommended strategy for promoting student-centered methods in pre-service courses is to show video of exemplary K-12 classrooms. Ideally, classroom video can illustrate how theories about teaching can be implemented in practice, provide teachers with a shared, concrete experience for discussion and reflection, and encourage teachers to adopt a practice by showing a real teacher implementing it successfully. Several professionally produced video projects for teachers have aimed to capitalize on these potential benefits and are available for purchase or free on the Web. In this article, the author describes a project to produce a video library for her methods and other teacher-education classes that was designed to retain the many benefits of professional classroom video but overcome its shortcomings. The author also shares the results of its use in her most recent methods course. Although her project focused on mathematics teaching, the author believes the problems she found with professional video, the resistance of her pre-service teachers (PSTs) to nontraditional methods, and the efficacy of the features and use of the video she produced are directly relevant to the teaching of any subject. Most importantly, this low-budget project required few technical skills and could be easily replicated by any teacher educator. (Contains 2 tables and 4 notes.)