Focus on Teaching: Using Video for High-Impact Instruction

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to have as my guest today, Dr. Jim Knight. Dr. Knight is one of the world's foremost authorities on instructional coaching. He is...

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a research associate at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning and president of the Instructional Coaching Group and the author of a number of different books, including Unmistakable Impact and the book Focus on Teaching, which we're here to talk about today.

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And now, our feature presentation.

[00:44] SPEAKER_01:

Jim, welcome to Principal Center Radio. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Thanks. So what is it about video that gives us a unique opportunity for instructional coaching? Because instructional coaching, you know, hopefully is a reality everywhere. I think, you know, we've caught on to the value and the power of instructional coaching in education.

[01:03]

But video can do some things for us that can really take it to the next level. What was the appeal to you that led you to write this book?

[01:11] SPEAKER_02:

Well, you know, we kind of stumbled on the use of video in kind of a funny way, and maybe I'll just tell that story to set the stage. I was watching the World Cup, I think it might have been 2006, and I'd known for a long time, we needed video really for our research project, but I'd known about the power of video. A friend of mine, Mike Hoke, had been studying video as a part of training tutors, and he'd seen it as being really powerful. But the downside had always been it was just such a hassle, and you had to get these big cameras, and then they were hard to figure out, and often you had to transcribe it onto a VHS tape or something, and then you loaded it into a TV. And it was disruptive in class because you had this big thing. And I was watching the World Cup of soccer, and Mick Jagger was in the crowd.

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England was playing. And he had this snappy little camera in his hands, And I thought, well, boy, if we could get one of those cameras into the hands of coaches, we could start gathering data really easily and maybe we'd even start to use it. And what he had was a flip camera. And so I thought, well, they must be really expensive. We probably can't afford it. But they were a couple hundred bucks, I think like $250 or something like that.

[02:22]

And so right away we bought some flip cameras. We started to use them. And we found that the camera totally transformed the coaching for a number of different reasons. But probably the main thing is that very few people know what it looks like when they do what they do unless they watch a video recording of it in some way. So whatever the profession might be, you're probably pretty unaware of what it looks like when you do what you do. And we found that with teachers and coaches for that matter.

[02:56]

When we showed them a video of their class, it was mind-blowing for them to see the class. It was nothing like they expected. And so when we started to use video, what it did is it shifted the coaching conversations for being something that's kind of theoretical, well, maybe I'll try this, to something that was real. Oh, I saw my class. They weren't that engaged. We have to change that right away.

[03:16]

What can we do? And now we've reached a point where I'd say those people I've worked with who've integrated video into their coaching, they're probably going to tell you, and many of them have told me, I can't imagine coaching unless I use video. It's so central to the whole coaching process because first off, it's for setting goals, but then it's monitoring progress towards the goals.

[03:37] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think anyone who's ever videoed themselves in the classroom or doing something else, if you just watch family videos and see yourself, you always look and sound a little bit different than you think. I think if we take that to a professional level, then yeah, absolutely. We're not necessarily... aware of ourselves in the same way that we are when we can actually see ourselves on video.

[03:59]

Now, as you know, we're doing a project called the Professional Collaboration Challenge, working with an organization called Sibme to help people use video in their classrooms. And one of the first ideas that we introduce in that challenge is the Johari window, this idea that there are things that maybe that we're aware of, but we don't share with other people. There are things that other people are aware of about us, but that we don't know about ourselves. And then there are things that, of course, everyone knows about. And one of the things that we say is that video can really help you first to become more aware of your own practice and then maybe selectively share that with other people as well. But at least be aware of what other people are seeing and how you're being perceived in the classroom.

[04:41] SPEAKER_02:

The truth is that most people don't want to watch themselves on video. In fact, I've never met anybody who's all excited about it. And the reason for that is that I think it's just people don't like the way they look. And there's a problem, and the problem is that we compare ourselves to standards of beauty that are literally non-existent. There was a TED talk a while back by Cameron Russell, and she's a model, and she talks about what it is to be a model, and she shows a picture of what she was like. before they put makeup on her and did her hair, and then what she was like when they put her in the photo shoot.

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And she said the way she looked in the photo shoot was a fiction. That's not the person she is. She's a whole different person. She's not that person at all. But in our minds, we think we should look like a model, or like someone we see in the movies, and when we see the video, we're always a little bit disappointed by the physical appearance. But we have to bear in mind that the people we see in film have perfect light, somebody spent hours on their hair, they did their makeup for hours, and it's just...

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It's just not realistic to look at yourself that way. And once we get beyond the fact that we don't look like a movie star, and in fact movie stars don't even look like movie stars, once we've got beyond that, then we can really do good stuff. Then we can really start to learn important things.

[06:05] SPEAKER_01:

So, Jim, I think there's the potential for video to be kind of threatening. And if you go to a conference and go to the exhibit hall, you'll see these different video products with these kind of RoboCams that you can use to kind of spy on your teachers. How do you feel about that issue of a kind of teacher choice in the process of being videoed or of receiving feedback or documenting a teacher's practice via video?

[06:30] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think it's really important that the teachers have a real voice in whether or not video is used in their class. And I'm not in agreement with any kind of big brother kind of activity. I think that runs against the whole idea of seeing teachers as professionals. I mean, if we don't treat teachers like professionals, we don't want skilled laborers raising our kids, but that's what we'll get. Teaching the classes will be skilled laborers and not professionals. And so I really think choice is critical.

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And Where there isn't a choice, I suppose, is about learning. If we want to be called professionals, we have to continuously improve. But to say you have to do it through video, I think it could backfire in any school or system to make it compulsory. And I'd be careful about, as the old sort of cliche phrase is, go slow to go fast. I would want to build capacity slowly. And there are people who just can't stand to see themselves on video.

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It's really threatening. It's profoundly uncomfortable. And those people, I think, probably video isn't going to be helpful to them. And forcing them to do it isn't necessarily going to help. And in fact, you could end up in a tough situation if you make a compulsory. So I...

[07:45]

really believe in giving people a lot of say, a lot of choice, particularly because of the emotional complexity of watching a practice on video, not rushing it, making sure that you do it with the teachers, not to the teachers.

[08:01] SPEAKER_01:

Very well said. I think that's true of just about anything that we want to do to bring about improvement in our schools, that we do it with our staff and not to our staff. Great point. Now, in the book, you have a number of different models for how video can be used. And I wonder if you could take us through each of those models just briefly, how we can use video and kind of what the benefits are versus just kind of doing a traditional observation post-conference, that kind of model for coaching.

[08:28] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think it is something you can use in lots of different ways. So In my opinion, the go-to way, that is the way that I would be most confident about success with, would be for coaches to use it, where a coach would video record a lesson for the teacher, share the video with the teacher, and then have the teacher watch it, and the coach watches it, and then get together and they set a goal. And it should be a particular kind of goal, a student-focused goal. And they pick a strategy, a teaching strategy they're going to use to help hit the goal. And then they keep working. The teacher learns that strategy and tries it out, and they keep modifying things until they hit the goal.

[09:07]

That's sort of instructional coaching. And in that process, video is there to set the goal. Video is there to monitor progress towards the goal. And when adaptations are made, video is there to see how effective the adaptations are. And ultimately, video is there to say we hit the goal. Sometimes the goal of coaching though might be to help teachers coach themselves or you might say our district doesn't have coaches.

[09:34]

So what if we teach the teachers how to coach themselves? Now some people don't really call this coaching but I mean people can learn from themselves.

[09:42] SPEAKER_01:

Right, and it gets at that idea of just reflective practice. Right.

[09:46] SPEAKER_02:

And so I think to do video where a teacher learns how to basically use the coaching process, you might call it the improvement cycle, on their class. So they'd video record a lesson. They'd watch it a couple times. They'd use different kinds of protocols. All these are online at corwin.com slash focusonteaching.

[10:07]

You can download all these forms online. to analyze your lesson, and then you set a goal, and then you pick a teaching practice or teaching strategy to help you hit the goal. That could be from, I've got a book called High Impact Construction, but it could be from Doug Lamar's Teach Like a Champion, or Marzano's book, any one of his books, but I was thinking particularly Art and Science of Teaching, or The Skillful Teacher. I mean, there are lots of ideas about how you could improve. Then you use video to monitor progress, but you do the process yourself. You don't do it with others.

[10:38]

I also think video can dramatically improve the quality of teacher evaluation. Well, in every case, I would never force it on anybody. If I was a principal in a school, I wouldn't say, I'm going to use video to evaluate you. But if I was a teacher in a school and the principal gave me the option, I would want to be video recorded so I could use it as some kind of standard tool. That the both of us could talk about so we could look at it.

[11:01] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and Jim, one thing Dave from Sydney pointed out to me as we're working on the professional collaboration challenge is that in a post conference, if you're with a coach or a supervisor, the coach or the supervisor, the person who is taking notes has all of this documentation about what happened. And the teacher who was observed really is at kind of a disadvantage in terms of evidence because they can't say, well, this happened, this happened, and this happened. They can only say, well, here's what I did, didn't I? And they don't actually have the documentation that their counterpart does.

[11:33] SPEAKER_02:

If you talk to principals about teacher evaluation, many of them will say it's not as effective as they'd like. In fact, it's just sometimes... Something you have to do, you have to check it off your checklist, and it's not going to make much difference. And it can be worse, actually.

[11:49]

It can be a negative experience for teachers. And you can make it a lot more effective, I think, through the use of video, so long as the teacher chooses to do it. And what we found is when you don't use video, the conversation tends to be about what happened. and sort of a different disagreement often about recollections of the class. But when you have the video, that doesn't happen. The focus is totally on what happened in the class.

[12:21]

And it's a lot more instruction-based kind of conversation rather than sort of competing memories. And it also changes the kind of conversation from one of, here's what I saw you do, and here's what you need to do differently, to looking at this third point. And it's the teacher and I engaging in dialogue about this third point we're looking at. And so I think...

[12:43]

Video has the potential to really transform the business of evaluation to make it something that improves teaching rather than just something you have to do.

[12:52] SPEAKER_01:

So I could see a principal saying, hey, if you would like us to video your lesson so we have something additional to talk about so that you have some evidence to bring to the post-conference, we can do that. If you want to trash the video, if you want to just delete the video at the end of class, that's completely fine. But kind of leaving it in the teacher's hands to make that decision, is that your recommendation?

[13:10] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I wouldn't even record it. go in with the camera unless the teacher asked me to do it right but or unless the teacher agreed but i like i said if i was a teacher i would want that evidence to look at i would want i think it would it would lead to a better conversation and i'd see it as more useful and you know if i disagreed with the evaluation i could say let's go back and look at let's get back on the same page

[13:31] SPEAKER_01:

So we've talked about a couple of different models of kind of coaching yourself, reflecting on your practice with video individually, supplementing the evaluation process, supplementing a traditional instructional coaching relationship. Now, I wonder if you could talk to us about video learning teams, because that I think has the potential to be one of the most exciting things in the book for schools that have not done something like this before. What is a video learning team and how does that work?

[13:55] SPEAKER_02:

Well, it can work in different ways, and I agree with you. I think it has a lot of potential. I think in all these things, psychological safety is really critical unless the person feels safe. The learning experience isn't going to work, whether we're talking about coaching or we're talking about teachers coaching themselves or whatever. But that's especially the case with a team. You don't want to bury your soul to somebody you don't trust and you don't feel safe with.

[14:20]

So you have to spend a lot of time making sure you're setting up the right kind of team. We don't have time to talk about it now, but you could. You could look up the book or other books like the work on professional learning communities essentially establishes the same kind of thing, a psychologically safe environment where we can share information. And then once you set up that team, it happens in different ways. Sometimes, and one thing that I've seen work really powerfully is where there's a particular teaching practice we're working on and everybody on the team takes their turn trying out that particular practice. For example, a group in Maryland worked on this graphic organizer called the Concept Mastery Routine.

[14:59]

And every time they got together, they got together once a month. A different person would bring in the routine and show some of the things that work and what didn't work, and they would sort of talk about that. You could also pick sort of a theme. You could focus on engagement and say what's increasing engagement, what's not working. And you could have a different teacher host a conversation about that particular thing. Or you could do more...

[15:23]

sort of like visual instructional rounds where a lesson is video recorded and it's shared with everyone and everybody gets together and sort of explores what they see in a lesson. And you have some kind of protocol for looking at it. We have one that was used in Colorado that I include in the book, but there's lots of other ways you could do it. But essentially, you have something like instructional rounds, except instead of going into the classroom, you use the video as getting there. Now, I don't think...

[15:50]

you get as much information from video as you do from being in the classroom. I think it's a little bit like watching the game on TV versus versus being at the game. But you can't pause reality and stop and rethink it and look it over a few times. And if you're teaching, you're not going to see it. And so I don't think that this can take the place of something like instructional rounds, but it provides for a different kind of conversation, a more reflective conversation, and also focused and edited And if you're the person putting together the edit of your lesson and you want to show the part, watching the video multiple times in and of itself is a very powerful learning experience. One last thing I'd say about Teams is when we've seen this happen, in a psychologically safe grouping, the team becomes very close because when you bare your soul, so to speak, when you're vulnerable in front of the team, they support you and encourage you and everybody has their chance to share and the team becomes really tight.

[16:52]

A group we work with here at the University of Kansas, They were looking at their coaching skills through a video learning team. And now they're in different schools. They're out in Beaverton, Oregon. They don't work in the same places together at all, but they still get together once a month to have dinner and to talk about how things are going. They check in with each other all the time on Facebook and through social media and talk to each other on the phone. They are extremely good friends as a result of what they went through learning together on a video learning team.

[17:18]

So I think a sort of side benefit but an important benefit of the video learning team is they become in the right If it's managed correctly in a way that creates safety, they'll become a really tight group.

[17:30] SPEAKER_01:

And it almost seems like there'd be the potential for that to cross school boundaries, because I always felt bad for our teachers who were the only teachers of their subject in the building, the art teacher, the music teacher, people who wanted feedback, who wanted to collaborate, but really just had very few opportunities, maybe at quarterly or annual district meetings. But the potential of using video to form a PLC, to form a video learning team, I think is really exciting.

[17:58] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think you're right. I think that holds great potential. And the broader you can go, if we could really network this effectively, you could say, well, I'm teaching this particular topic. Who else has taught it in the last couple of weeks? And you could probably bring together a number of different people. If you had a big enough community, you could...

[18:18]

you could collaborate with sort of focused precision on exactly what you need.

[18:23] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let me ask this. The technology's been there for several years. I think it was the iPhone 3GS was the first that could do video, and people had flip video cameras before that, and now pretty much every phone can record video. Why are we not doing this across the board in the profession? Why is one in every ten lessons not recorded and shared and collaborated and reflected on? What do we as leaders need to do to move more in that direction to take advantage of the technology we have available to us?

[18:52] SPEAKER_02:

I think it is happening. I think it's growing by leaps and bounds. I don't know data. I'm just basing it on my own experiences. And maybe the people I see happen to have a proclivity for doing this, but I think it's a powerful, disruptive technology in that give it less than five years, almost every school will have video as part of their professional learning. Right now, 90% of teachers have a smartphone or an iPad or some other kind of tablet device.

[19:26]

It's free. You just put the thing in the corner and you push the red button. You might want to get a tripod. There's different things you can do. I'm convinced that it's the single most powerful technological advancement in professional learning in schools in our lifetime. I think it's so powerful that it's going to be everywhere.

[19:47]

I think the thing that's holding people back is they don't know how to do it. They haven't thought about the power of psychological safety. They might move forward quickly in a kind of primitive way that engenders resistance. just broadly speaking in America in particular that we have a kind of a top-down industrial model about how teachers should learn and that runs counter to the whole idea of professionalism and we need to treat teachers like professionals and we want them to act like professionals so I think nonetheless even in that system if people learn how to share video and set up a psychologically safe environment for video it's going to really change what happens I guess I'll just say one thing too is that historically in American schools, I think it's often the case that we do things because we have to, but they don't really have much impact.

[20:43]

They're nominal initiatives. That is a name only. For example, teacher evaluation could be like that. It's often the case that all the teacher evaluations happen the last six weeks of school or the last four weeks of school. Well, you would want to have them if they're going to have an impact earlier on in the school. And then they're just done because they have to be done.

[21:00]

They're just checked off a list. They don't make a different school improvement plans it's often the case that it's just something you have to do and six weeks before there's going to be an audit a bunch of people get together and create something that looks like we really did something but the truth is not much learning took place so there's been a tendency to just do nominal change just talk about it but not really do it but video makes it real once you turn on the camera it's not just talking about it now we're really doing something and I think there may be some resistance to the idea of moving away from from a sort of nominal change to real change. And video makes it real.

[21:37] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I think part of the paradox there is that it can't be mandatory across the board. And I think we will choose time and again, as leaders, we'll choose to do something that's nominal and mandatory over something that's voluntary and transformative.

[21:52] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think over time, though, it will become the cultural norm, you know. And what I've seen, too, is it's usually the case that either the whole school does it or nobody does it. And so it's not teacher by teacher, it's school by school. So that means you can set up an environment where everybody becomes comfortable using video. Michael Fullen talks about the importance of transparency. He would argue we have to get to a point where it's just no big deal to video record the class and share it, that it's through transparency that real improvement is going to happen.

[22:23] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Focus on Teaching, Using Video for High-Impact Instruction by Dr. Jim Knight. Jim, it has been an honor to speak with you today. Thank you so much.

[22:31] SPEAKER_02:

Hey, I'm honored to be asked, and I really want to applaud the good work you're doing to spread the word. I think it's great.

[22:38] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[22:42] SPEAKER_01:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Dr. Jim Knight? One thing that really stands out to me is the importance of psychological safety. And you'll see that all throughout the book as well, that setting teachers up to feel safe in just about any professional growth process is absolutely critical. I want to encourage you to sign up for the Professional Collaboration Challenge, which we're doing in partnership with Sibme.com, which is one of the video platforms that Dr. Knight references in his book that will help you go through that process with your staff of making video-based collaboration easy.

[23:19]

So go to principalcenter.com slash collaboration. It is a completely free program, and we'll take you through the entire process and give you different models for video-based collaboration.

[23:30] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.