On second thought, I was probably making a comparison to the old movie search feature in Sherlock, if you remember that.

What you’re asking for has been done before, at least in some capacity:

http://nces.ed.gov/timss/video.asp

The cultural differences are fascinating.

Point taken. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like that either. Please share if you ever find it, as my interest would be high as well. Couple it with a solid research based, and that would be gold. Get on that will ya?

I also just realized that I’ve been to a PD on the east coast that is almost just like what you are describing in terms of teaching techniques. I can’t remember the name of the principal who runs it, but he worked for a charter school in Boston – I thought it was the Academy of the Pacific Rim, but I didn’t see him on their website. Anyway, he gave a session titled the 100 habits of highly effective teachers, where he’d show little 30 second clips of a teacher in a classroom performing a certain technique identified as highly effective and then he’d open the floor to reflection. It was really fast moving. I actually signed up for it twice in a year, it was so good. Even if you saw some of the same clips, you’d hear different ideas come out in the blitz discussions. The thing about the clips, was that they would be less useful out of context, though even presenting them with a blurb might improve the quality.

Dan, the store was named “Sky Mall,” unfortunately it’s only on planes – but I remember that coffee pot also. Additionally, the dude’s name is Doug Lemov. I believe he’s now a director within the Uncommon Schools organization (a Charter Management Organization) in NYC.

I’m actually working on trying to do that for our county right now. I’m filming an elementary math class tomorrow. We’re focusing on specific classroom techniques for particular content areas and grades. I’m hoping to end up with very short, to the point videos.

Where it will end up living is somewhat up in the air. We do have a site license for PD360 which would put it behind a wall. We’ve also got iTunesU. Maybe I can do both. If it ends up public, I’ll submit it for review. I’d be interested in your review of our attempt.

I think a lot of this stuff ends up behind walls. You get a lot of paranoia around showing students etc.

You’ve also got a lot of different vocabulary around things which makes it harder to find what you want. Opening up the tagging would help that but making it time relevant would be more difficult but probably more interesting.

I also wonder what happens to all that video that’s done for National Board teachers. I’d love to see that thrown out somewhere for chopping and tagging as a requirement for the process.

Paranoia is what I meant. The fear around these videos on the Internet isn’t driven by anything to do with research ethics. It’s because of the fear of Internet Super Pedophiles who will see children on video and then abduct them. Oprah told me all about it.

I’d be willing to bet very few people in k12 would consider this research. I’d pitch it as an educational documentary.

Yuck. Not to put too fine a point on it.

Not that I dislike video. But Dan, I don’t believe your prodigious talent at the *art* of video has its place in this particular arena. I think it excludes itself because it is art, frankly.

Here’s why: seems to me that videoing snips of teaching a) lends them a surreptitious visual credence that they don’t necessarily earn; b) takes them out of the whole-class context that is integral to their success; c) crystallizes their format so as to make them appear immutable; and perhaps most importantly, d) makes no apparent distinction between a “habit,” a “technique,” an “approach,” an “activity,” and so on– definitions which are essential to pin down pedagogically.

That catchy title “100 Habits” actually sent a little shiver down my back. I mean, not to toot my own horn here, but when I asked Marzano this very question over on ASCD’s blog

http://ascd.typepad.com/blog/2009/02/marzano-responds-chapter-one.html

he was clear on the answer, and it wasn’t “Every teacher needs to learn a certain 100 things to be good at what they do– and here they are.”

The latter is salesmanship. It ain’t teaching.

Why?

Maybe I’m being a bit obtuse, perhaps I’m missing the point (which, I’m sure was already composed, but as always, I tend to miss some of the reasoning around here), but what would I do with these ‘clips’?

When I first started teaching, I had my management issues. So I asked my dept chair how to handle the side-talking going on in my class. He told me to snap quickly and loudly, and do so without looking at the chatterers.

So I did that.

And they kept talking.

So I went back to my dept. chair. He said, “Well, that’s how I handle those moments, doesn’t mean it will work for you.”

What would be different if I watched the video segment entitled, ‘Snapping to eliminate side-talking during instructional time’?

Not much. And I’d probably never watch. The title is death.

@Tom
If Dan (or any other teacher whose blog you follow) had a series of vodcasts that he did on classroom strategies, would you view them? I would. I don’t know any of the teachers who respond on this blog, but based on the comments they leave, I would love to spend an hour in their classrooms. So why couldn’t a group of teachers do the same thing by taking footage of classroom practices, examples of not only good questioning techniques, but examples of good questions and then post them to a common site (ie, blip.tv, iTunes, etc. )? If the videos were posted to a common channel on blip or a common podcast on iTunes, then the tags wouldn’t be such a problem.

I can think of one compelling reason why not to do it.

Privacy. of the learners.

To create something like this in my district, with my district’s rules, I would have to blur all of the faces, edit out all of the names, and even then it may not be enough to satisfy the requirements of the privacy laws.

It sucks, but it is an issue that we have to deal with. We created the laws to protect the learners, but those same laws also keep us from doing something very important and helpful.

I agree with Dan, I would like to see some good and bad scenes from real classrooms. I would have to use a personal day or prep time to do it, and then it would only be in my building or close by.

Dan, I’m with you. I don’t know why there is so much resistance here, at least on the merit of the idea.

I studied under UW’s Lani Horn, who regularly showed us video of classroom interactions. She then started a Video Club research project for teachers in the Seattle area where each teacher in the club was filmed once a semster (I think). The video was taken back to the group, shown to all the other teachers, and discussed. When I was in grad school under her, she filmed us (fixed-tripod-style, like you like) doing microteaching. The discussions that followed were *very* enlightening. I learned a lot from watching the other people and then a ton from listening to the discussion of the others watching me.

If you want to contact her, her UW page is http://education.washington.edu/areas/ci/profiles/horn.html. I cannot speak highly enough about her. She changed my teaching life. Before her, my teaching focused on procedures and algorithms, and I thought I was very good, but I didn’t like my job. After her, my teaching focuses on problem-solving and independent thinking, and I realize that I have a lot to learn–but I like my job.

Before I pen (?) a longer response after my five week grades are in, I will leave this one comment: I’ll concede immediately that this proposal is more palatable to me when you dump the possible artistic massaging/spinning that lighting, transitions, etc. would entail, and apologize for any misunderstanding there.

However, four good reasons for needing a much, much pedagogically clearer approach to (and for) video clipping does neither “meaninglessness” nor “rhetorical excess” make.
And count your blessings, dude. I could have put those and a a handful more in a David Foster Wallace-type footnote and *really* blown your mind.

In my teacher prep program a large emphasis is placed on collaboration, creating and distributing videos of our own teaching, and observing teachers in ‘real life’ and on video. Each student in my program is loaned a video camera for the year and learns how to navigate consent forms, the basic technology behind uploading video, and other issues. For example, I participate in a variety of lesson studies where I plan lessons with a team of teachers from many different backgrounds, teach/tape a lesson in front of the team, and then we analyze the video to replan the lesson to make it better. To be fair – this process isn’t easy. It is hard to fit all of this work into the busy schedule of teachers and have meaningful, ego-detached conversations about teaching. There were great and terrible parts of the experience but I hope to try it again in the future.

I wish more teachers collaborated and invested time into the professional and intellectual community of educators. If anything, we would see diverse pedagogies and realities – I feel like teacher prep programs have a mainline stance they do not like to deviate from.

Interesting post, Dan.

TeacherC
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Context is my problem with this – initally appetising – idea.

You use basketball as your starting point. Basketball has no context. A travel is a travel whether it’s done in Texas or Toronto, by Y. Ming or A. Iverson, at home or away. That basketball is abstracted from context lends itself perfectly to the idea of video instruction.

This does not apply to teaching. Ken’s example nails this. What works or is appropriate will be different for each class, for each teacher for each community (by community I’m talking about another whole set of variables – race, wealth, etc). Teaching is heavily contextualised – isn’t this one of the conclusions of the “student-centered learning” enlightenment?

During my teacher training I remember an instructor trying to help me with behaviour management. She demonstrated how to “be firmer” with them. I tried it. I just didn’t feel like me, or fit with my budding pedagogy, and I stopped doing it. Very unhappy instructor. I used an approach that felt right to me (a reciprocal respect approach I suppose…). It worked (and I actually gained the respect of the instructor too).

I’ve been thinking of doing something like this for my gymnastics team – little video clips for newbies to study so when I say “puck jump” or “hitch kick” they have a better idea what I mean.