Supporting teacher reflection in video-coaching settings

Teaching is a complex task that needs to be supported in order to retain high-quality teachers, especially novices. Two forms of professional development that have the potential to be highly effective together are teacher coaching and the use of classroom video. Unfortunately, while each of these has received considerable attention in educational research over the years, investigation of the combination – teacher video-coaching – is limited. Nonetheless, many schools invest in personnel and equipment to enable video coaching for teacher professional development, in which recorded teaching episodes are used to stimulate reflection. The lack of research is unfortunate because an empirical basis is needed to inform and develop supports for teacher coaches. There is as yet very limited insight on how to support coaches in this type of work. This study was undertaken to address these concerns. Three research objectives were formulated to guide this study, namely, (1)
to conceptualize teacher reflection in video-coaching settings, (2) to articulate support to improve teacher reflection in video-coaching settings, (3) to reify (make concrete) the articulated support to improve teacher reflection in video-coaching settings. To achieve them, four sub-studies were undertaken within one educational design research project. This chapter introduces the sub-studies individually, shows how they map onto the different phases of educational design research, and describes how they contribute to achieving the three research objectives.