Videopaper in the classroom

Article in the Boston Globe
THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING

PROGRAM HELPS TEACHERS SHARE LESSON PLANS

Author(s): Jeff Lemberg, Globe Correspondent
Date: July 28, 2002
Page: C6
Section: Education

In two years as a Somerville High School teacher, Alicia Kersten has had few opportunities to observe her colleagues in action. A ninth-grade social studies instructor, Kersten says she is often too busy leading five classes a day to learn tricks of teaching from someone else.

But Kersten and 23 other teachers from the Greater Boston area are chipping away at the walls and workload that separate them. Their tool is VideoPaper Builder, software that allows teachers to produce their own CD library of best teaching practices using text, digital video, still photographs, and links to Web pages. It's the latest twist in teacher development, according to Rob McGreevey, who led a four-week summer program on the program earlier this month at the Tufts University School of Education.

All too often, McGreevey said, professional development is provided by an out-of-school source that's heavy on theory and light on practical relevance.

"I've never been to a professional development meeting where you're asked to share your own reflections on what works and what doesn't work in your classroom," said McGreevey, who taught history at Medford High School for the past three years and is entering Brandeis University's doctoral program this fall. "It's really shameful and insulting to teachers to say there's no expert in any subject area in the entire school."

Using the VideoPaper program, Kersten and other teachers conceived topics that ranged from four ways to review classroom material with students before a test to ideas for promoting learning by using teacher- and student-led discussion along with writing and hands-on activities.

"Teaching is messy," said Kersten, who teamed with Somerville High colleague Caroline Berz to create a VideoPaper on best practices in subject review before a test. "But when you see what other people are doing, it helps you redefine your own expectations," she said.

The gap between research and practice is one of the biggest problems in teacher development today, according to Roy Pea, director of the learning sciences and technology department at Stanford University. "This is teachers capturing their own best practices and disseminating it to other teachers," Pea said.

Helping teachers to share their strengths is invaluable when school budget cutbacks are virtually eliminating professional development programs, said Chris Dede, head of the learning and teaching department at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. Dede was a consultant on the VideoPaper project first conceived by Tufts in early 2001.

"We know from many studies that people learn a lot from people who wear the same shoes," Dede said. "This is a valuable piece of software . . . a rich way for people to share what's happening in their classes."

Kersten and her colleagues were tapped in April to produce 16 VideoPapers. After being introduced to the software, teachers were given digital camcorders to film a lesson plan in action before the end of the school year.

Each teacher then spent three days at Tufts editing their videos, preparing captions, writing their lessons, and using basic Web page coding before uploading the content into the VideoPaper Builder software. The final products are viewable with a common Web browser.

Teachers received copies of all the VideoPapers to take back to their schools. Tufts hopes to continue the summer VideoPaper workshops next year, and the technology already has been incorporated into the curriculum at the Tufts School of Education.

Dana Lehman, an eighth-grade science teacher at Roxbury Prep Charter School, said her technical expertise begins and ends with word processing. However, with just a quick lesson and limited guidance from Tufts' staff, Lehman produced her own VideoPaper.

"For me, this was a great exercise in self-reflection," said Lehman, 25, who will start her second year at Roxbury Prep when school resumes next month.

"In putting this together, I did a lot of thinking about how I did a lesson and what I wanted to accomplish by doing it."

Tapping a colleague to do her filming, Lehman led her class through a lesson in the laws of energy. The eight-minute VideoPaper showed Lehman lecturing and facilitating discussion, calling upon her students to explain how gravitational potential energy and kinetic energy work, using a roller coaster as an example.

To the right of the video, which featured audio and close captioning, Lehman's rationale for the lesson and her goals are conveyed in closed captioning, visible text usually used for spoken audio.

"This is a great way to see what's going on in a classroom," Lehman said. "I think it will create a feeling of community that a lot of teachers don't currently feel."