Using video clubs to develop teachers’ thinking and practice in oral feedback and dialogic teaching

ABSTRACT

The authors report outcomes of an evaluation of a ‘video club’ intervention to improve the feedback and dialogic teaching practice of 91 teachers from 11 primary schools in England. Participating teachers worked collaboratively in a sequence of six video clubs over a six-month period. To understand teacher engagement they examine videos of video club meetings; online platform use metrics; surveys; selected videos of classroom practice; focus groups; and interviews. They evaluate change in teachers’ thinking and practice using survey results for participants compared to a comparison group of non-participating teachers at the intervention schools. The survey includes a new instrument for gathering evidence of teachers’ thinking and practice in feedback. The results suggested changes in thinking and practice for teachers who self-reported as engaging highly with the intervention. They conclude by discussing the potential of video technology within professional development and the challenges of researching changes in thinking and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Video clubs
• professional development
• formative assessment
• feedback
• reflection
• classroom dialogue

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the organisations (IRIS Connect and Whole Education) that provided this intervention. We also acknowledge the design support provided to these organisations by the University of Cambridge, MediaMerge and Julia Snell, and Adam Lefstein of the University of Leeds.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Based on figures provided by IRIS Connect and data from the Department for Education: (Department for Education, 2016).

2. The multiple imputation used imputation by chained equations, ordered logit to reflect the ordinal scale. It produced 10 imputed datasets and was conducted in Stata 13.