Video Study Groups for Education, Professional Development, and Change

It's not easy to analyze your own teaching style, to illustrate in words your classroom strengths and weaknesses. Neither is it easy to keep an accurate mental record of your students' tendencies, or determine the overall classroom atmosphere and the countless factors that create it. Videotape can capture all the fleeting events that so often go unnoticed or are forgotten, and can be combined with group analysis to provide a uniquely valuable teaching improvement tool.

However, to fully realize the advancement of professional practice, such a group should be more than just a collection of interested practitioners getting together to discuss their work as recorded on video.

This "something more" is what author François Tochon calls "video pedagogy", a mix of structured conversation with powerful reflective frames.

Tochon provides descriptions of six different types of video study groups--functional, strategic, constructivist, sociocultural, personal, and pragmatic--thereby allowing for the use of multiple reflective frames. His use of real-world examples of teacher involvement in such groups makes his approach all the more compelling.

This book is intended for teachers, as well as staff developers, teacher educators, and policymakers who are interested in a bottom-up approach to teacher improvement that fully recognizes the realities of those doing the ground-level work.