Using video in science teacher education:An analysis of the utilization of video-based media by teacher educators and researchers

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Running Head: Using video in science teacher education Title: Using video in science teacher education:An analysis of the utilization of video-based media by teacher educators and researchers Authors: Sonya N. Martin, Drexel University Christina Siry, University of Luxembourg Full address: Sonya Martin, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Science Education Drexel University School of Education Korman Center, Rm 233 3141 Chestnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104 Email: [email protected] Christina Siry, Ph.D. Post-doctoral researcher CODI-SCILE-A project (Competences for Organizing Discourse in Interaction and Science Learning - Analyzing knowledge building as activity of collaborative inquiring) University of Luxembourg Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Educational Sciences Unit for Sociocultural Research on Learning and Development - UR LCMI (Language, Culture, Media and Identities) Route de Diekirch L-7220 Walferdange, Luxembourg Email: [email protected]

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Using video in science teacher education:

An analysis of the utilization of video-based media by teacher educators and researchers

Sonya N. Martin and Christina Siry

ABSTRACT: In this chapter, we examine trends involving video usage in science teacher education and science education research. We tracing some developments in video technologies and explore examples of the ways in which video/multimedia have been utilized in the education of science teachers. We conclude the review by summarizing our findings, and then offer implications for future research on the utilization of video and multimedia technologies in the preparation and professional development of science teachers. Specifically we raise questions and considerations for future research as it relates to science teacher education and research in science education.

KEY WORDS: Technology, Teacher Education, and Learning Sciences

INTRODUCTION

There is an increasing trend towards incorporating video and multimedia1 into teacher

education for both K-12 pre- and in-service teachers of science. As programs attempt to meet

U.S. accreditation standards, they must include examples of technology integration and

instructional practices, and for many, video technologies help fulfill this goal. Our purpose in

writing this review chapter is to examine the trends involving video usage in science teacher

education and science education research that we have noted in the literature, both recent

directions as well as early uses of video, which science educators have been developing and

adapting over the last three decades.

We begin by tracing some developments in video technologies and exploring examples of

the ways in which video/multimedia have been utilized in the education of science teachers. For

1 In this chapter, we are considering both the use of video, as well as the use of multimedia programs that generally include video clips or vignettes as one part of the media component. We use both terms within the chapter, but attempt to distinguish for the reader how the video is utilized in each context.

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example, we examine the utilization of commercial multi-media programs focusing on snapshots

of “best practices” available via the Internet and often packaged with new textbooks. We also

focus on some of the web-based technologies and software that enable educational researchers

and teacher participants to edit video content (both from their own classrooms and others) and

then author and share their analyses of the video with a larger teacher or educational research

community. We also note a growing emphasis in science teacher education towards having pre-

service and in-service teachers develop electronic portfolios, including video vignettes of teacher

practice with reflections as evidence for development as a critical practitioner. We conclude the

review by summarizing our findings, and then continue by offering implications for future

research on the utilization of video and multimedia technologies in the preparation and

professional development of science teachers. Specifically we raise questions and considerations

for future research as it relates to science teacher education and research in science education.

VIDEO TECHNOLOGIES AND TEACHER EDUCATION

Proponents of video usage in teacher education often reason that teaching occurs in

isolation from peer support, and that sharing video of one’s teaching with others offers an

opportunity to not only see oneself in the act of teaching, but also provides a convenient

“window into a classroom” where others can view and discuss the teaching and learning that has

been documented. Video serves as a lasting record, which can be reviewed and analyzed over

and over from different perspectives, with different people, and over long periods of time.

Advances in technologies have now made it possible for teachers, students, and researchers to

not only view video, but to also rewind, fast forward, and advance the video frame by frame to

analyze classroom interactions. This can support careful consideration of participant actions and

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discourse around pedagogy and content, and provides a focus on individual and collective

gestures and interactions at the micro level. In this way, the use of video by classroom

participants and researchers mediates becoming consciously aware of the unconscious practices

that are not generally available to us when social life unfolds in real time. These technologies

also enable teachers, students, and researchers to engage in multiple analyses from differing

perspectives and theoretical frames as long as the video lasts. Indeed, watching oneself and other

teachers has become common practice in teacher education and promises to become more so as

video continues to be an important means of evaluation and instruction in education programs

around the world.

Over the last fifty years, technologies for recording, storing, and showing video have

become more affordable, portable, and accessible for general consumers as well as educators.

Currently, digital video cameras no larger than a box of crayons can be purchased for about

$150-$200 USD (e.g. FlipVideo http://ca.theflip.com/), which record 60-120 minutes of video

that can then be transferred immediately via a USB connection to a computer for instant digital

video editing and analysis. The availability of such inexpensive videography equipment for the

everyday consumer is rapidly changing the ways in which people (particularly young people)

interact with video and multimedia in their lives, especially through image, video, blog, or social

network hosting/sharing sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, MySpace or Ning. Indeed, a

new generation of learners, and future teachers, who are sometimes referred to in the media as

“digital natives”, are coming of age as students in K-20 classrooms.

Even when new technologies are being touted in the popular media, and students from

younger generations are becoming experts at utilizing “cutting-edge” technologies, there is

generally a considerable lag-time between when new equipment, software programs, or

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applications of media become available and when these technologies are introduced into K-12

classrooms. A trend that we have noted in the literature indicates that the implementation of new

technologies in science teacher education often trails behind the use in the consumer market for

several reasons, including policies that make access in K-12 schools complicated as well as a

lack of training and professional development for current and future teachers in technology

instruction and implementation.

In an historical overview outlining major video implementation advances in teacher

education programs, spanning nearly forty years since the late 1960s, Miriam Sherin (2004)

accounts for some aspects of these trends in the literature via an interesting analysis of how video

implementation has been driven by prevailing theoretical frameworks in education, as well as

technological innovations. Sherin cites the evolution of learning theories from primarily

behaviorist models where teaching was viewed as a “well-defined activity consisting of a set of

skills to be practiced and learned”, to the growth of cognitive psychology models of learning to

teach where “researchers and teacher educators began to focus more on the ways in which

teachers think rather than the ways in which teachers behave” (p.5). She argues that as a result of

these theoretical shifts, teaching began to be seen as a more complex activity from which notions

that utilizing video to help novice teachers develop practical teaching knowledge, by observing

and analyzing the actions of veteran teachers, began to emerge. Sherin suggests that video usage

has been influenced by these changes, noting that early use focused on re-viewing episodes of

microteaching or analyzing/coding teacher actions in video (e.g., via the Flanders (1970)

method) to identify, discuss, and emulate specific teaching actions characterized as behavioral

aspects of classroom teaching practices. In the 1980s, Sherin notes that researchers changed their

focus to examining teacher thinking, teacher practice, and developing teachers’ abilities to reflect

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on and change classroom practices. She further posits that technological advances, as well as

evolving theories about how people learn to teach, have informed the use of video in teacher

education, citing advances in how video is stored and accessed as being key elements in the

ballooning market of video case studies and multimedia enhanced resources and websites.

In the sections to follow, we expand on these ideas and trace the development and

utilization of some of the ways in which video and multimedia are being utilized in teacher

education. Specifically, we share findings, both general and focused, to provide readers with an

understanding of the evolving trends in video use in science teacher education and science

education research. First, we detail the organization of our analytic process and describe our

multi-level approach to analyzing the literature on video in teacher education.

A LAYERED APPROACH TO ANALYSIS

Findings from this study examining video and multimedia utilization in science teacher

education stem from a previous, more extensive review in which we conducted an interpretive,

comparative analysis of the literature around general uses of video/multimedia in teacher

education (Martin & Siry, 2008). Additionally, our own research involves the creation and

analysis of primary source video of science teaching and learning in K-12 classrooms, thus,

findings from our field research also inform our interpretation of the literature we reviewed.

Thus, the evidence we have collected results from a multi-modal inquiry and synthesis of

literature in the field of teacher education combined with findings from our own research.

For the purposes of this chapter, we discuss primarily our analyses of the science teacher

education literature to offer readers examples of trends that can be considered in structuring

experiences for teachers to interact with video and multimedia as they learn about teaching and

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learning science at a variety of levels. In this section, we describe the process by which we

identified research for the initial review and describe our synthesis and analysis of the literature.

Literature Review Approach

Stemming from a review of over 100 publications from journals, book chapters, and

books, we categorized and analyzed the different ways in which video has been utilized in an

attempt to better characterize the uses and reported efficacy of video in teacher education. Our

analysis included sources focused on video and multimedia usage in pre-service and in-service

education as well as for research purposes. Initially we conducted several levels of analysis of

these data sets to describe different instances of the implementation and usage of video, the

intended purpose of video implementation, and the targeted audience for the video usage. From

the first level of analysis, we developed six categories of video implementation and usage,

including 1) video cases, 2) hypermedia/multimedia presentations of video, 3) video for

self/individual analysis, 4) tools/programs for analyzing video, 5) video utilized in electronic

portfolios, and 6) conferencing facilitated by virtual/video interaction.

Once we categorized the literature according to usage, a second level of analysis

demonstrated that video has been utilized in teacher education programs for a variety of

purposes. We identified four main reasons, including: to demonstrate “best practices” of specific

teaching strategies, to document growth or development in teaching and learning practices as an

evaluation of individuals and/or programs, to promote reflective practices, and to record

classroom events for educational research on teaching and learning. From these categories, and

including findings from our own science education research utilizing primary source video

analysis, we synthesized the findings for this chapter. This synthesis and review is by no means

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exhaustive of all the research being done in teacher education with video technology, but is

meant to provide readers with a historic overview of seminal earlier works, as well as an

understanding of the emerging and innovative research using video in the field of science teacher

education. Based on our analyses of the literature and our own research experiences, we offer

implications and provide suggestions as to the ways in which video and multimedia can be

utilized by science teacher educators and researchers.

VIDEO IMPLEMENTATION AND USES

Video Cases

Case methodology is often touted by teacher educators as a powerful tool for creating a

bridge between theory and practice. The literature offers many instances of studies and

descriptions of programs where teacher educators use pedagogical dilemmas, both in the form of

written case studies and video case studies. Video cases take a variety of forms, including

commercially made video as well as cases that science teacher educators have made to represent

what they consider to be exemplars of teaching and learning situations. Case method instruction

offers pre- and in-service teachers with models of how to approach pedagogical dilemmas and

are thought to help bring the complexities of classroom activities into focus by allowing teachers

to connect the theories being discussed at the university with real life scenarios from K-12

classrooms. Also of great import, case methodology is cited as a cost-effective and logistical

solution for circumventing issues related to field experiences – either not having time in program

schedules for extended field placements or not having suitable placements for pre-service

teachers to experience classrooms where teachers enact “best practices”. Although some

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researchers have raised questions about the efficacy of case methods (e.g.: See Copeland and

Decker, 1996 for a critical examination of video/case study), proponents of case methodology

laud the potential to support the development of teachers to become reflective practitioners and

to be able to analyze classrooms interactions effectively and develop decision-making skills.

Most of the research on case studies in teacher education has focused on the use of text-

based cases (e.g., see the works of Shulman (1992) and Koballa & Tippins (2004) for examples

and analysis of text-based cases designed to promote reflection on learning to teach science).

Today, in addition to text-based cases, there is a growing body of work using video and

multimedia to develop case studies. James Watters and Carmel Diezmann’s (2007) research

provides a good example of how video cases are used with pre-service teachers to depict teachers

and students engaged in various science activities. Enriched by a suite of multimedia resources,

Watters and Diezmann created video cases depicting teachers and students engaged in various

science activities. Designed to “make visible” the pedagogical practices and assumptions of

teachers and actions of students, these cases were shown to teachers who were then asked to

reflect upon the actions of the teachers and students in both the cases and in real classroom

interactions and consider how these experiences inform their own teaching. As a frame for

promoting discussions among teachers as they analyze and reflect on the classrooms depicted in

the video, many studies invoke the work of Donald Schön (1983; 1987). In this study, the

researchers cited the need to situate teacher learning in “real” contexts, citing Lee Shulman’s

(1992) research on the importance of providing pre-service teachers with “images of the

possible” and to need to support in-service teachers to develop pedagogical content knowledge to

improve their science teaching.

Based on our analysis of the literature, case studies have clearly become the primary use

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of video for many education programs, and this seems especially true in the areas of K-12 math

and science teacher education. Researchers using video cases in science teacher preparation often

cite the lack of classrooms that incorporate inquiry-based science teaching (e.g., see Abell, and

Bryan 1997; Yung, Wong, Cheng, Hui and Hodson, 2007) and note that video case studies

provide authentic examples of classroom practice that becomes accessible to wider audiences.

Sandra Abell, Lynn Bryan, Maria Anderson, and Katherine Cennamo have been pioneers in the

use of video cases in science teacher education (see Abell, Bryan, & Anderson, 1998; Abell,

Cennamo, Anderson, et al, 1996; Abell and Cennamo, 2004). Citing Schön’s (1987) article,

Educating the reflective practitioner, Abell, Bryan, and Anderson (1998) suggest that video

cases provide prospective teachers with “virtual worlds” within which one can think about

science teaching and learning. Abell, et al, developed what they termed, “integrated media

(videodiscs controlled by hypermedia) cases of elementary science classrooms” which they used

in an elementary science teacher education program to promote a reflection orientation in their

pre-service population. Abell and colleagues designed several structured prompts to promote

discussion and reflection among pre-service science teachers around a shared experience of

viewing the same video vignettes as part of the case studies (see Abell & Bryan, 1997; Abell,

Bryan, & Anderson, 1998; Abell & Cennamo, 2004 for detailed discussions of findings from this

on-going study). This early work has been very influential on the work of other researchers as

evidenced by the many times the studies have been cited by science teacher educators who use

video in courses.

Other examples of uses of video case studies in science teacher preparation include the

work of Larry Bencze, et al (2003), who created a set of cases based on video from seven

lessons. In this study, the use of video cases led to a contextual understanding of the issues in

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teaching a science and technology lesson to children, and the authors recommend cases of this

type as a way to incorporate authentic science observations into teacher preparation and

professional development. More recently, Benny Yung, et al (2007) conducted a study in which

pre-service science teachers in Hong Kong were asked to watch the same two videos of

exemplary science teaching three times during one academic year. The researchers found that

progressive viewing, analysis, and reflection on the same two videos over a period of time

provided a supportive structure from which to scaffold these novice teachers’ evolving

understandings of science teaching during their pre-service education.

Today, there are many examples of video cases being utilized in teacher education (e.g.:

see Barnett, 2006 for another example of a web-based professional development system for pre-

and in-service science and math teachers using video cases to their develop an appreciation for

and understanding of inquiry-based teaching (http://ilf.crlt.indiana.edu/). In fact, reports on the

development and challenges of implementation of video cases in science and teacher education

were the most common papers we were able to access for our review on video use in teacher

euducation. Terri Kurz, Gloria Llama, and Wilhelmina Savenye (2004) provide a comprehensive

review of challenges associated with creating video cases for pre-service science teachers and

discuss recommendations for other educators and researchers. Video cases have become a

critical component of many multimedia resources now available for science teacher education, as

we elaborate on in the following section.

Hypermedia/multimedia Presentations of Video

In the late 1980s, advances in technology allowing for digitized video segments to be

“hyper” linked to text and graphics which could be accessed on the internet or using programs,

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such as HyperCard. The ability to provide hyper links to additional materials, like texts such as

lesson plans and samples of student work, or audio interviews with teachers and students, or

photos of classroom activities, etc., all offered teacher educators and researchers a means to

provide a richer social context for their video cases of exemplary teaching practice. Due to the

hyper linking of additional materials to one central site, location, or central text/image/video, this

technology was initially called hypermedia, but is now most commonly referred to as

multimedia. While the terms are often used interchangeably in the literature when referring to

mixed media applications connected to a central component, in this paper, we will refer to all

hyper linked media as multimedia.

These technologies are generally more cost effective to develop than analog videos, offer

increased functionality for users, and due to web-accessibility these products can be utilized with

a wide audience. As a result of these technological advances, the majority of publications in both

the late 1990s and currently, examine the role of video cases within the context of various

multimedia resources. Multimedia presentations of video for science teacher education generally

include different types of web-based activities available in classrooms, including scientific

visualizations, simulations, virtual reality, animations, video clips or still images, and distributed

information sources (Bodzin and Cates, 2003). Watters and Diezman (2007) report on the

development and use of multimedia materials that demonstrate professional practices, and their

data supports the value of multimedia material for explicitly representing particular parts of

practice and providing a shared experience for discussion, debate and reflection. They suggest

that the use of such multimedia can improve the experiences of distance/on-line learners,

enhance field experiences by illustrating authentic classroom science teaching for comparison

and discussion, result in an increased willingness among future teacher to adopt technology

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within their classrooms as a result of positive experiences interacting with technology as a “mind

resource” in their own education (p.369).

The Multimedia in Science & Technology (MUST)-project in the Netherlands combines

interactive video linked to comments by teacher educators and prospective teachers, context

description, curriculum and lesson plans, and justification for video cases focusing on outdoor

activities in science education (Van Den Berg, Jansen, & Blijleven, 2004). Another example of

multimedia resources used in science teacher education include materials from Knowledge

Media Laboratory (KML) of the Carnegie Foundation where users can access a free web-based

program called KEEP Toolkit, which enables K-12 science teachers to document and share

“snapshots of practice” from their own science classrooms which pre- and in-service teachers

can both view. Described as a “living archive of practice”, users can then engage in reflective

analysis and interactive discourse with one another. Emily Van Zee and Deborah Roberts (2006)

describe this project and provide an evaluative discussion as related to science teacher education.

The Gallery of Teaching and Learning (found at http://www.cfkeep.org) provides a venue to

view an exhibition of faculty, teacher, and student-developed studies in science and technology

education. Reflecting a science teaching and content perspective, the eSTEP and Knowledge

Web projects offer a digital library of video linked to a hypertext book. These programs provide

pre- and in-service teachers a variety of content developed to offer windows into K-12 science

classrooms that engage participants in design experiments structured to develop cognitive theory,

sociocultural understandings about classrooms, and science pedagogical content knowledge

(Derry, et al., 2002).

The development of new software and video-web sharing sites that provide users the

ability to edit existing archives of video or to edit and post their own video for discussion within

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a larger teacher education community is a significant trend to consider. Video annotation tools

provide interesting possibilities for enabling individuals to capture and analyze video of personal

teaching as well as review, analyze, and synthesize examples of their own teaching for viewing

by others. In Peter Rich and Michael Hannafin’s (2009) recent review of video annotation tools,

they urge educational researchers to consider the potential of utilizing video analysis programs,

such as Transana (www.transana.org), DIVER (diver.stanford.edu), and Constellations

(orion.njit.edu) not only for their data-mining capabilities, but also as tools for analyzing

instructional decision-making processes and participant interactions in classrooms. Additionally,

they call for expanded research agendas to examine not only the utility of these tools for

promoting reflection practice, but also the impact, effects, and risks associated with using these

technologies in educational research. Pea (2005) argues that ethical and legal restrictions

preventing researchers from sharing original data sources for re-analysis by other researchers

obscures connections between evidence and argument, impedes research, and as such,

discourages researchers from utilizing video as data. Noting the proliferation of digital video

recording in the contexts of social sciences research and learning technologies, Roy Pea and

Robb Lindgren (2008) call for the creation video collaboratories, in which researchers from

around the world and in differing disciplines would access virtual repositories with video files

and associated metadata to develop a community where researchers would work together to

share “video data sets, metadata schemes, analysis tools, coding schemes, advice, and other

resources, and build video analyses together, to advance the collective understanding of

behaviors represented in digital video data” (p. 236).

Advances in video technologies such as these provide unique pathways for the

educational community to engage in cutting edge research on how people learn to teach. We

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have found that the majority of the information about these innovative projects and sites are not

available as publications. That these technologies are available as free access websites expands

opportunities for changing the roles and responsibilities of teachers in educational research. We

discuss the issue of autonomous video use by science teachers, educators and researchers in

greater detail in the following section.

Video Used for Self/individual Analysis

The ability to digitize video has contributed to the most significant technological

advancement shaping the way in which video is being utilized by teachers, educators and

researchers today. Sherin (2004) attributes current developments to the fact that now video can

be explored in a non-linear fashion, no longer restricting users to sequential viewing of recorded

actions, but enabling viewers to move through time, rewind actions, and jump to different

segments of recorded interactions. Our review of the literature suggests that this change in user

dynamic has not only influenced the ways in which teacher educators and researchers have

implemented video playback in teacher education programs, but that these advances have begun

to shape theories of how people learn to teach using these technologies. Indeed, many of the

papers published within the last five years have begun to consider not only what teachers are

learning about teaching via multimedia interactions, but also how teachers are learning from

these experiences. Researchers are beginning to raise both theoretical and methodological

questions about how tasks should or could be scaffolded to support learning as users chose to

move through these multimedia materials in unstructured, non-linear pathways. Our review

suggests that there is a growing shift away from using pre-developed video cases and supporting

multimedia resources in teacher education towards involving pre- and in-service teachers in the

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construction of their own video cases, either by editing pre-captured video of science classrooms

or by having teachers capture and edit their own classroom teaching for the purpose of critical

reflection with others about how to improve science instruction.

Interesting examples of how teacher educators and researchers are introducing the

concept of autonomy and videography in teacher education include utilizing programs that

enable teacher participants to annotate, edit, and share video with others for the express purpose

of constructing meaning about teaching and learning from the perspective of the individual to

then be shared with a larger community of educators, both in face-to-face and on-line education

courses, teacher-led professional development groups, and for educational research. One

example, called video clubs, engages in-service teachers and a facilitator (often a university

researcher) in regular school-based meetings to watch and discuss excerpts of one another’s

classroom teaching. Researchers Elizabeth van Es and Miriam Sherin (2008) note that video

clubs provide a forum for teachers to effectively discuss pedagogy, content knowledge, and

student learning where video plays a pivotal role in providing a shared experience from which

teachers frame their discussions. Using desktop video editing software (e.g., iMovie), Randy

Yerrick, Donna Ross, and Philip Molebash (2005) found digital video editing an effective tool

for helping promote reflection in pre-service elementary science teachers. These researchers

found that the cyclical process of engaging students in editing, producing, and sharing personal

science teaching vignettes through digital video editing extended participant engagement with

their own teaching, helping them to make “mature and insightful shifts in their thinking about

science, teaching, and even their own science experiences as children” (p. 369).

Described by Linda Beardsley, Daniel Cogan-Drew, and Federica Olivero (2006),

VideoPaper is a presentation of text and video side-by-side, where authors annotate digital video

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and upload still images captured from video, (e.g. off prints of facial expressions of students),

scanned content (e.g. student work), or other digital images. VideoPaper allows users to choose

to read text and play video as originally intended by the author of the content, or select to interact

with the raw data (in the form of video, text analysis, etc) as the reader chooses without a need to

advance through the material in a linear fashion. Used primarily with in-service teachers and in

conjunction with educational researchers, VideoPaper is a good example of some of the

programs currently being developed and used to provide teachers with opportunities to perform

research on their practice by choosing video episodes to (re)construct and (re)present for others

in order to share their understanding of the moment (see http://vpb.concord.org/about/ to access

VideoPaper Builder).

These are just three examples of some of the ways in which video can support pre- and

in-service teachers to consider new and different aspects of their practice. By providing access to

tools that allow for individual and shared editing, viewing, and discussion of classroom events

captured on video teachers and researchers are able to engage in more complex and innovative

uses of video technologies to improve teaching and learning. As these technologies continue to

evolve, they offer a more cost efficient means for evaluating teaching practice via greater

distances, and thus, reduce the need for on-site teacher supervisors and mentors. Examples of

this trend include the utilization of video-mediated videoconferencing [VMC] by veteran

teachers to supervise/mentor pre-service teachers (Ardley, 2009) and the utilization of video-

enabled, web-based computer-mediated communication [CMC] for supervisors to provide

feedback to prospective teachers while engaged in a teaching practicum course (Lee and Wu,

2006). More and more districts and teacher education programs are beginning to implement

video as a tool for conducting program and individual teacher performance assessments. In the

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following section, we discuss video in the context of the assessment and evaluation of teachers as

well as explore implications for changing practices in educational research.

Video Utilized for Evaluative Analysis

There are a variety of ways that video recordings have been used for evaluative analysis

in teacher education. One way is for video to be used by teachers as part of electronic portfolios

to document individual growth and development for evaluation purpose. A study that

documented the use of web-based portfolios by pre-service elementary teachers found that the

use of such portfolios supported teachers as they developed their understandings of the ways in

which children learn science (Zembal-Sual, Haefner, Avraamidou, Severs, and Dana, 2002). In

this project, pre-service teachers authored hypermedia as they constructed their own portfolios.

This was based on the assumptions that a web-based portfolio can place more emphasis on the

process of constructing a portfolio, rather than the product itself. Further, the authors suggest

that it is a more effective way of documenting the complex nature of teaching and learning. As

teachers created “multidimensional and interconnected representations of learning” (p. 289) the

research considered the types of representations that teachers included as well as the ways in

which the portfolios revealed their understandings of science teaching. This study revealed that

the web-based portfolios were successful in supporting critical reflection, enabling pre-service

teachers to make connections between their course work and children’s learning using a non-

linear approach to documenting learning. Furthermore, some states, as well as the National

Board Certification program, are now requiring video as evidence of effective teaching to be

submitted as part of certification or certificate renewal processes (e.g.: for description of

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inclusion of video evidence in performance assessments as a measure for making credentialing

decisions, see Pecheone & Chung, 2006; Park & Oliver, 2008).

A less common, but seemingly increasing, use of video in science teacher education is for

program evaluation. A current study (Ruggirello & Pitts, 2009) situated at the University of

Pennsylvania’s Science Teachers Institute (Penn STI), explores the ways in which the creation of

electronic portfolios, which include videos, provides a medium to promote teacher reflection. It

has been reported that through the use of video in e-portfolios, researchers were able to gain

insights into participant practices, thus documenting and demonstrating evidence of growth in

areas that met that goals of the University’s teacher education program and evaluation. In the

next section, we take up the issue of video usage in research in science teacher education,

providing examples from the literature as well as examples for our own research.

Research

Our work using video in research and science teacher education is what prompted us to

undertake this initial review of the literature and our experiences with video provided a lens to

the interpretation of the literature. Our approach to research on learning to teach science involves

collaborating with pre- and in-service teachers and students to discuss and analyze shared

classroom events as recorded on video. Thus, we use video to capture events in the classroom,

and we replay this video to re-examine moments in time and analyze classroom interactions. By

working directly with teachers and students to examine the video, we seek to develop a

reflexivity that goes beyond reflecting on past events. In our research, reflexivity implies that

participants are reflecting upon what occurred, from their own standpoints, with the explicit

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intention of considering ways to improve practices moving forward. In this way, video helps us

to develop a polysemic approach to understanding teaching and learning.

From an analytic perspective, the uses of video with participants are vast. In addition to

simply replaying classroom events (either events at which all were present or not), video can be

used to examine classroom events in ways that manipulate the perspectives of time. Video can be

sped up or slowed down to examine particular features of classroom interactions, and gesture

analysis can be added through successive off prints (e.g.: see Roth (2005, p. 234) for examples of

how to create gesture diagrams and off prints from captured video for empirical analysis).

Further, video provides an innovative window from which to examine the role of emotions in the

learning of science, and a variety of micro-analytic approaches have been utilized to examine the

ways in which emotions mediate the teaching and learning of science. Examples include the

analysis of prosodic features of participant voices, facial expressions, gestures and body

language (e.g.: see Roth and Tobin (2009) for utilization of video and audio to identify aligned

and misaligned prosodic episodes between teachers and students and their effect on conflict and

solidarity in an urban science classroom). Consequently, the use of video can be a valuable tool

for teachers and researchers as they investigate learning to teach science.

In Jennifer Adams’ collaborative research with pre-service urban teachers (Adams,

2009), participants work together in cogenerative dialogue groups to discuss their student

teaching experiences. In the cogenerative dialogue groups they then share selected video

vignettes from their host classrooms and co-analyze them during the research meetings. In this

way, the pre-service teachers, as research participants, have central role in data collection and

analysis. In our own experiences, as in Adams’s work, the ability to replay classroom events with

varying speeds allows a research group to focus on interactions and to examine moments that

21

may have passed unnoticed in teaching, and provides a forum for individuals to share their

classroom experiences with others. We have learned that if teachers are in control of the

videoing, have a voice in what gets videoed, how the video is viewed, edited and interpreted,

then the process becomes more transparent, and is less anxiety-ridden.

Thus, collaborative research between teachers and researchers is one way to mediate the

anxiety surrounding the use of video. Much of the research we have reviewed indicates that

teachers benefit as practitioners and researchers with expanded access to forums where they

experience autonomy with regards to the capture, editing, annotation, analysis, and

(re)presentation of themselves in video that is used for educational research purposes. Advances

in video technologies are expanding the roles that teachers and their students play in research,

making it imperative that we recognize and pay attention to ethical concerns associated with

classroom research. In the following sections, we begin to address some of these issues and raise

questions for teacher educators and researchers to consider.

CHALLENGES OF IMPLEMENTING NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Simply making technology available, such as placing microcomputers in K-12

classrooms, does not typically enhance or transform classroom instruction, as the technology is

likely to be utilized to support existing teaching practices (e.g.: replacing “chalk and talk”

lectures with PowerPoint enhanced “point and click” lectures). This includes both K-12

classrooms, as well as classrooms in teacher education programs, where research, such as that by

Jon Pederson and Randy Yerrick (2000), has shown implementation of changing video

technologies also lags behind the consumer market. Based on results from a broad scale survey,

Pederson and Yerrick found that even while science teacher educators report they use technology

22

themselves and think it is important for teaching science, the majority are not integrating

technology into their instruction of future science teachers. Acknowledging the same disconnect

in science teacher education and implementation of technology that other researchers have found

in K-12 science classrooms, these researchers urge the science teacher education community to

address the need to programmatically improve the preparation of future science teachers by

addressing this disparity of belief and practice in their own courses. Additionally, there have

been instances of school policies that limit the technology that could be available to educators,

like accessing the vast database of video clips available on video sharing sites, such as YouTube,

which have been blocked by many public schools in the U.S., the UK, and in some states in

Australia, all of which cite concerns about inappropriate content on the website. Thus, pre-

service teachers are often not exposed to implementing innovative uses of video technologies in

their preparation at the university level or in the classrooms they participate in.

One possible reason science teacher educators may not be informing prospective and

current science teachers how to implement technology for science instruction is that the

publishing process for research papers takes a considerable amount of time, leading to

publications about the uses of video technologies in teacher education lagging behind current

cutting-edge trends in technology. For example, some of the most widely cited work on the use

of video cases with pre-service science teachers stems from a project beginning in the late 1980s

and early 1990s, involving laserdiscs as the delivery format for viewing video cases of

exemplary science teaching in an elementary science methods course (see Abell and Bryan,

1997; Abell, Bryan, and Anderson, 1998). At the time, this research was cutting edge, but the

laserdisc, like VHS tapes and even CD-ROMs, have become virtual dinosaurs in the everyday

lives of most students and teachers. In a more recent publication referencing the papers from

23

1997 and 1998 (Abell and Cennamo, 2004), this research group indicated they have transferred

the video cases from the laserdisc format to an updated web-based media site, but this work

raises important considerations about the timeliness of publication and implementation of these

technologies. One of the dilemmas we have found in the literature is that the information

published about advances in utilization of video technologies in teacher education are lagging

well behind the general consumer’s use of video, but the use of video technologies in teacher

education are also out of sync with current advances in video technology. With the proliferation

of web-based journals, perhaps there will now emerge additional reliable, valued means of

disseminating research and information about advances in technology and potential impact on

practice, which can be accessed sooner than traditional journal publications.

In addition to there being an issue of lag-time in new practices and technological

advances, the majority of the publications we have analyzed in our review of the literature on

efficacy and implementation of video in science teacher education are mostly descriptive in

nature, focusing often on the process of developing a video/multimedia product to be used with

pre- and in-service teachers or describing the implementation of a product with a small, sample

population of teachers. In other words, while many authors have exciting new uses for video or

multimedia, there is not much evidence as to what purposes these tools actually serve towards

learning about science teaching. Many of the studies we reviewed, including those more than 30

years old, highlighted the same problem. For example, Fuller and Manning in their Review of

Educational Research publication from 1973, chided authors for commonly providing

descriptive accounts of ways in which they used video in their teaching, evaluation and

supervision, and research without sufficiently explaining theoretical and methodologically sound

frameworks for data collection and analysis for the wide-spread application of video in teacher

24

education (e.g., for extensive review and critique of early literature on focused on “confrontation

of self” through video playback, see Fuller and Manning, 1973). Thus, while there has been

much innovative work done on developing and implementing specific materials, there is a need

for researchers to also consider the ways in which people are interacting with video-based media,

and to ground their work in theoretically and methodologically sound ways that reflect the

researchers’ perspectives and foundations.

IMPLICATIONS

In this chapter, we have targeted our analysis to focus on how video and multimedia have

been utilized specifically in the education of science teachers and we have offered examples of

some of the contexts in which teacher educators and researchers have implemented these tools in

the preparation and professional development of K-12 teachers. We have drawn attention to

advances in video and multimedia technologies which continue to offer new potential in the

realms of educational research and teacher preparation through the adaptation of video

technologies for learning about and improving teaching. Our review of the literature revealed a

wide range of rationales for using video in teacher education and demonstrated that research

studies and professional development efforts utilizing video vary considerably, depending on the

ways that video has been adapted for particular instructional or research goals of a particular

program or study. In this way, we can be flexible in our uses of video technologies while

continuing to expand our understanding of how these technologies inform teaching and learning.

While we have found much literature around the development and implementation of

specific video technologies, there is not much that has been published about how these

technologies can mediate the teaching and learning of science. We are left with important

25

questions to consider in the field of science teacher education. In particular, we wonder, What

role can science teacher educators play in transforming science teaching practices through video

technology implementation? Further, we ask, how can/do pre- and in-service teachers use video

technologies to reflect upon their own science teaching and science learning experiences?

As more and more educators introduce video and multimedia resources as teaching tools

into their courses and as more programs require electronic portfolios with integrated video

analysis, there are implications for what is being asked of students and how video/analysis and

supporting resources are being used. Additionally, there are increasing trends toward online

teacher education and distance learning. Such programs are proliferating nationally and globally

as communities become more multimedia savvy and as more education programs extend their

services to educate teachers in remote areas or those with few resources. The expansion of on-

line education options greatly increases educational opportunities for people around the world.

While this is may be positive direction for education, it raises many new questions about the role

of technology in the teacher education. As researchers, we must question how to effectively

integrate video/multimedia in these programs to promote teacher reflection and we need to

develop new evaluation methods to assess the effectiveness of these new learning technologies.

Research also needs to be done to determine how to make these programs more effective because

these programs are not likely to diminish in the future. Clearly the future will continue to include

many new technological advances in video and other areas and educators at all levels need to

continue to engage in “cutting-edge” research to meet the needs of future teachers and learners.

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