Designing Video-Based Multimedia Curriculum for Teacher Learning. Deidre Le Fevre Washington State University Vancouver USA.

Transcription

1 Designing Video-Based Multimedia Curriculum for Teacher Learning Deidre Le Fevre Washington State University Vancouver USA Abstract Recent technological developments enabling web-based and random-access multimedia platforms to be more readily available significantly impact what it means to create videobased multimedia curriculum for teacher learning. There is a need therefore to gain a clearer understand of what video offers as a tool for teacher learning. There is also a need to better understand the work of designing video-based multimedia curriculum in order to provide a better understanding of the actual curriculum, it's potential use, intended outcomes, and the resources needed for future curriculum development work. This paper addresses two questions: Why incorporate video into curriculum for teacher learning? and, What challenges do professional development designers face in harnessing the potential of video records of practice into an educative tool for teacher learning? The potential affordances of video as a tool for teacher learning include the capability to represent the complexity of teaching, the provision of a relatively unfiltered representation of practice, the provision of a common text from which to ground talk about practice, and the capability of making practice accessible that is temporally, geographically, and pedagogically distant. Some of the challenges that designers face in designing video based multi-media curriculum include determining achievable goals for teacher learning, designing for the facilitation of the learning context, changing the current cultural script of professional development, and designing for the scaling up of the curriculum. Video records of practice embedded in a web-based multimedia platform Several types of video have been used in teacher professional development. This research focuses on video records of practice. These consist of authentic footage of teachers and students working in actual classrooms. They are authentic from the perspective that the teaching and learning is not scripted or acted, but is filmed as it naturally occurs. Editing effects can determine the difference between a piece of video that feels like a slice of life from the messy reality of classrooms to a slick performance that does not reflect the messiness of actual teaching. In video records of practice there is typically minimal editing and no voice over providing explanation of what is to be viewed. There is an extensive and growing range in the format and technological capabilities of video records of practice. Traditionally the term "video" may have conjured up images of constantly rewinding tapes to the desired place and of tuning television sets to video channels. The video-based multimedia curriculum development project examined in this

2 paper utilizes a web-based video environment. The technology itself influences how and what teachers can learn through this curriculum. For example, the web-based format has enable designers to create layered resources. Video records embedded in random access memory environments can enable teachers to examine different aspects of teaching from different perspectives, similar to exploring a landscape. Ill-structured knowledge domains such as teaching can be usefully compared to a landscape [Spiro, 1987 #719]. One way to understand any given landscape is to explore it in many ways; to traverse it from many directions [Spiro, 1990 #952]. Previously, such exploration was restricted to a single perspective, such as a chronological analysis, however web - based random access technology allows users to search backwards and forwards across records of practice, jumping into places and following different threads of interest in ways not possible with data constricted to a linear arrangement (Spiro & Jehng, 1990). What does video afford teacher learning? Making Practice Accessible to Study Video has the potential to capture many aspects of classroom practice through the capability to record visual and aural richness and detail. It has the potential to provide rich and thick representations of practice that leave distinctive mental images in the mind of the viewer. Video provides a means by which teachers can have access to teaching that would otherwise be difficult to observe in real life, it can enable the manipulation of time, accessing practice through accelerating, slowing down, pausing, and even juxtaposing places in time. Video has the potential to provide a relatively unfiltered representation of practice. Interpretation is a part of any representation of teaching, however the medium of video has the potential to minimize the amount of interpretation involved. Kinzer (1997) compared print and video-based cases for example and concludes, The fact that the case is written after the fact means that it is influenced by the perceptions, re-collective nature, and subconscious biases of the writer, the raw data of a video-based case is preserved and presented, allowing for a more powerful, real-time analysis of embedded data rather than consideration of recalled data (p. 13). Video records of practice have the potential to be positioned closer to the unfiltered representation of real life than other medium used for representing practice. Providing Access to Different Teaching Video records of practice can provide a means by which teachers have access to teaching that would otherwise be difficult for them to observe. It is rare for teachers to have the opportunity to observe other people s practice. Video has been referred to as a form of virtual observation (Lampert & Ball, 1998). With the potential to enable teachers to visit sites of practice in ways that are not as typical in the teaching profession as they are perhaps in other professions, such as a group of medical practitioners doing their medical rounds. Video may also function to expand the horizon of possible practice for viewers by providing access to practice which may previously have been outside one's realm of experience. Video therefore offers possibility in bringing the foreign and

3 innovative closer to home. In this way it can make accessible practice that is temporally, geographically, and pedagogically distant (Wetzel & Radtke et.al, 1994) The potential to manipulate time using video technology also contributes to making practice more readily accessible. One can pause, move forward, or back, moving to different time codes as desired. Video enables aspects of practice to be manipulated temporally, thus making accessible an examination of practice that would not be possible in real time. Enabling a Shared and Common Experience of Practice Video has possibility in affording opportunities to share common experiences of practice that would otherwise be difficult to orchestrate. If people want to share meaning, then they need to talk about their shared experience in close proximity to its occurrence and hammer out a common way to encode it and talk about it (Weick, 1995, p. 188). There is a scarcity of opportunities for teachers to learn from common experiences of practice. Video records of practice have potential to function as a shared common text. By providing a shared common text, video records of practice can enable the analysis of teaching from within teaching. It is possible for teachers to examine and talk about practice on-line so to speak, without interrupting the actual classroom. Shared knowledge and understanding around practice is difficult to achieve in part due to the complexity, immediacy, and subtlety of classroom practice, the diversity of individual teachers histories, the lack of a common technical or profession al language with which to converse, and limited opportunities for shared experience. Video has been critiqued as never being able to promote a shared understanding of practice on the basis that sometimes there is just too much information for viewers to digest and integrate (Seel & Winn, 1997). However, the fact that each person can be expected to see something different, to make different interpretations as they view from different perspectives can be an asset for learning teaching. As such, video might be used as a basis for calibrating knowledge and grounding talk about practice. In other words the video record of practice can serve as a common referent around which people can talk, thus making visible different perspectives and understandings of the learning and teaching observed. In summary, the potential that video has for making practice accessible in manageablesized chunks, and the opportunity video offers to pause and re-view practice may be a resource to professional development designers. This may provide a way to access the complex and multidimensional aspects of teaching that are so challenging to grasp at real-time pace. Video has the possibility of portraying the complexity of practice while at the same time enabling foci into the mass of action. However, as with any new technology or approach to learning, it is critical to purposefully design professional development curriculum so as to harness the possibilities video offers, rather than to merely follow with exaggerated zeal what might otherwise become just another passing fad.

4 Designing professional development curriculum The concept of a curriculum in professional development is rarely addressed. Literature about curriculum predominantly examines student curriculum. One of the problems that frames the context of this research is that professional development is often criticized as being a patchwork of fragmented and disconnected opportunities without clear connections to improving the practice of teaching (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Smylie, 1989; Wilson & Berne, 1999). Professional development is often undertaken in the absence of an intentional curriculum. This situation would suggest that there is a need to make curriculum a more prominent concept in professional development work. I use a definition of curriculum here that includes both what is to be learned and how it is intended to be learned, in other words curriculum includes the goals, materials, and approach for teacher learning. The field of curriculum theory often differentiates between curriculum and pedagogy. For example, curriculum is viewed as defining the knowledge to be taught and pedagogy is conceived of as the delivery system (Foshay & Foshay, 1980, Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery & Taubman, 1995). Other perspectives do not differentiate between curriculum and pedagogy in this same way, for example, Doyle (1996) discusses curriculum as a pedagogical event and views curriculum as being achieved during acts of teaching (p. 486). I use a definition of curriculum that includes the goals, materials, and approach for learning. The findings and ideas discussed next are based on the authors learning from a five-year longitudinal ethnographic case study of a professional development curriculum design initiative Video Cases for Mathematics Professional Development (VCMPD). The VCMPD project was undertaken in North America by two designers. These designers worked with technology advisors, mathematicians, teacher educators, and several groups of pilot facilitators and teachers throughout the design work. I studied the designers decisions, actions, and rationale as they went about the work of creating video-based professional development curriculum for year 4-9 teachers regarding the teaching of mathematics. The data these research findings are based on include my ongoing field notes, interviews with the designers, pilot facilitators, and teachers, observations of pilot sessions in which the curriculum was trialed, and records and artifacts collected throughout the 5 year development period. The VCMPD project created a module of video-based cases for teacher professional development in mathematics. The designers explained the purpose of these video-based cases, The video cases are designed to engage teachers as researchers: investigating, analyzing, and discussing the details of teaching. They are about inquiry into practice; about understanding the interplay among students, mathematics, and teaching; about deepening understanding of mathematics and big ideas in mathematics; about developing an understanding of how children develop mathematical knowledge and how that knowledge grows and deepens over time; and about teaching and developing an understanding of the teacher's role. In other words, they are about helping teachers craft a robust personal theory of teaching.

5 The intention of this curriculum was that it would be practice-based with the potential to influence not only one's knowledge about teaching, but one's actions in teaching. This use of video records of practice was as a vehicle for inquiry into learning and teaching in contrast of the more traditional use of video as providing an exemplar of best practice. The goal of my research discussed next was to better understand what it takes to harness the potential of video records of practice into an educative video -based multimedia curriculum for inquiry based teacher learning. I examined the challenges faced by the designers. Challenges of the curriculum development design work I define the four main challenges the designers faced in their work as (1) creating achievable goals for teacher learning; (2) designing for the facilitation of the learning context; (3) changing the current cultural script of professional development; and (4) designing for the curriculum to be used in intended ways. Creating achievable goals for teacher learning The limited time typically available for teachers to participate in professional development initiatives in North America posed a challenge to the designers. They addressed this in part by opting towards the provision of depth rather than breath of learning goals. Defining the foci of the learning goals was a further challenge. They faced the challenge of establishing learning goals for teacher professional development when there is not even a partially agreed upon body of knowledge or skills outlining what teachers of mathematics need to know and be able to do. Indeed, this is complicated by the situation that there is not an agreed upon set of knowledge and competencies for students of mathematics. While various standards exist regarding student understanding, some of which are widely accepted, these still remain highly contentious. The challenge for these designers was then to make normative decisions about what this knowledge base might be and to prioritize how to begin to address this within the VCMPD professional development curriculum. A further challenge was the goal of connecting the VCMPD professional development experience with the participants experiences of classroom teaching. Why was this connection with practice difficult to achieve at times? Perhaps the fact that the nature of the task of observing practice recorded on video is very different to the nature of the task of observing practice while you are in the midst of actual real-life teaching. Van den Berg (2001) observes some of the differences between watching a video and the act of actual teaching and comments that "one of the most remarkable differences is that watching a video does not ask for immediate action" (p. 248). This way of observing practice on video does not map easily onto the act of what and how one can observe when actually teaching. In real life teaching cannot be stopped or paused. The challenge then becomes how to employ video as a tool for observation wherein it provides opportunities for observation that are quite different in nature to the kinds of observational strategies possible in actual teaching.

6 Designing for the facilitation of the learning context An ongoing struggle faced by the VCMPD designers might be defined as the agendasetting dilemma. Richardson (1992) suggests that the dilemma of agenda setting relates to the "dual and sometimes conflicting goals of introducing participants to a particular content, and creating an empowering and emancipatory environment that requires that the participants own the content and process" (p. 288). The agenda-setting dilemma is a struggle that has also been observed by Heller (1999) in his study of the creation of videocases in another teacher professional development project. Heller noted, "On the one hand, these teacher educators describe themselves as producing rhetoric-free materials, videos that 'represent' the 'reality' of teaching 'truthfully' and in an un-biased, open-ended manner. On the other hand, their day -to-day decision-making appears to be thoroughly rhetorical, concerned with modifying their texts in order to be more 'appealing' to an audience of teachers and 'effective' in bringing about changes in their practice. Heller describes these other designers as being "conflicted about their own agency" (p. 735). He concludes that all forms of teacher education are inescapably rhetorical in nature in that they are aimed at the persuasion of teachers. Heller maintains that while reformers may attempt to deny such intentions, they cannot help but employ rhetoric in practice. Along similar lines, Freire (1998) discusses the intrinsic lack of neutrality in any media communication, "all communication is the communication of something either implicitly or explicitly" (p. 124). These theories are interesting to consider in light of the challenges faced by the VCMPD designers. Evidence that the designers faced the agenda-setting dilemma exists in their work of designing for how much direction to give to teacher participants and design decisions regarding how definitive to make the facilitation guide. The first is then about how to facilitate teacher learning, and the second is about how to guide the facilitators of teacher learning. Another challenge the designers faced was creating a safe and at the same time challenging learning environment for teacher participants. This balance of a safe and challenging learning environment might sound contradictory, however, the designers believed that both of these are critical and that they indeed interact. They articulated the need to provide a safe environment in which learners are willing to take risks. They worked towards designing a learning environment that makes it safe to be analy tical and critical about teaching. It is important to establish learning contexts in which teachers are confident enough to deliberate and share their understandings and learning with one another. The development of learning contexts in which teachers feel confident and secure is a critical element in seeking to provide educative experiences through observation. Changing the current cultural script of professional development Teaching has been described as a cultural act and cultural activities such as teaching are represented in cultural scripts. A cultural script is "generalized knowledge about an event that resides in the heads of participants" (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). A strong cultural script exists within professional development in North America. For example, the cultural script of attending a typical professional development event might be described

7 as having an expert first demonstrate something and then provide the necessary resources for teachers to go back to their own classrooms and try it themselves. This typically takes place in a single session. Teachers have expectations about what they will gain from professional development sessions and these usually include something very tangible, concrete, and usable in practice (Zech, Gause -Vega, Bray, Secules, & Goldman, 2000). Cultural scripts such as this are learned implicitly, through observation and participation, and not by deliberate study (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). Efforts to change this cultural script might be expected to initially create misunderstanding and frustration in teacher participants. Indeed, this was evident in the VCMPD project. Dave, a pilot group teacher participant felt dissatisfied with what he was learning and wanted something that he could "use in class on Monday morning. The designers were influenced by these reactions and had ongoing conversations with Dave who himself continually faced the dilemma of wanting to delve deeply into looking at teaching while also wanting to seek guidance and answers in terms of what to do with his class the next day. Dave explained, "I get impatient I think it was, you know, realizing that we weren t going to come to identifying any techniques. Teachers often enter professional development with views of content understanding that are fact-based and procedural (Zech et al, 2000). Tensions can arise when professional development challenges teachers to rethink content areas in terms of learning with understanding. Tensions can also arise when teachers' expectations for the professional development process differ with the actual opportunities being offered. Consistent with the majority of their prior experiences with professional development, teachers typically expect to be provided with materials and with instructions on how to use them in their classrooms. Efforts to engage teachers in collaborative inquiry, focused on student understanding are often not initially seen as relevant to their everyday practice. Designing for the curriculum to be used in intended ways Designers of professional development curriculum that are to be published and disseminated for wider use in the field face the challenge of having to relinquish control in terms of how the curriculum is taken up and used by others. This was an going challenge for the designers of the VCMPD curriculum. A fundamental issue the designers faced was that it was challenging enough to use this curriculum in intended ways themselves and this was not what the ultimate goal of the curriculum project is. It was challenging by another magnitude to design a curriculum for use by others. Significant challenges exist in the work of multiplying beyond oneself and it is at the point in which the curriculum "slips out of one's control. It remains an ongoing challenge to provide facilitators with the necessary skills to utilize the technology in which this curriculum is embedded, and to support problem solving. Several of the facilitators who piloted the materials with their own teacher groups communicated challenges in knowing how to access and use both the web-based platform. Marx (1988) notes that when teachers encounter problems with the technology they require timely and easily accessible help. To address access issues in terms of fully utilizing this curriculum requires the availability of necessary technology resources.

8 Teachers will not profit from the technology nor will it be self-sustaining unless infrastructure capacity is developed, including attention to resources and maintenance. Conclusions This study increases visibility of the concept of curriculum in professional development and reveals the complex nature of the work of designing video-based multimedia curriculum for professional development. By increasing visibility of the complexity of developing professional development curriculum, this research can potentially empower professional development designers, professional developers, policy makers, and researchers to pay attention to what is required to create educative curriculum for teacher learning. Making the complexity of the work more visible might inform policy makes and curriculum designers of the resources necessary to undertake this work. It may also highlight some of the many issues that designers need to be aware of in their own work. References Ball, D., & Cohen, D. (1999). Developing practice, developing practitioners: Toward a practice-based theory of professional education. In L. D. Hammond & G. Sykes (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of policy and practice (pp. 3-32). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Doyle, W. (1996). Curriculum and pedagogy. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Curriculum (pp ). New York: Macmillan. Foshay, A., & Foshay, A. (1980). Curriculum development and instructional development. Educational Leadership, 38,8, Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Oxford, U.K: Rowman & Littlefield. Heller, R. (1999). Rhetoric and teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 15(7), Kinzer, C. K. (1997, April). Issues of structure and user interface design in multimedia cases: Lessons from preservice reading education. Paper presented at the Annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL. Lampert, M., & Ball, D. (1998). Teaching, Multimedia and mathematics: Investigations of real practice. New York: Teachers College Press. Marx, R. W., Blumenfeld, P. C., & Krajcik, J. S. (1988). New technologies for teacher professional development. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14(1), Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., & Taubman., P. M. (1995). Understanding curriculum. New York: Peter Lang.

9 Richardson, V. (1992). The agenda-setting dilemma in a constructivist staff development process. Teaching and Teacher Education, 8(3), Seel, N. M., & Winn, W. D. (1997). Research on media and learning: Distributed cognition and semiotics. In R. D. Tennyson, F. Schott, N. Seel, & S. Dijkstra (Eds.), Instructional Design: International perspectives (pp ). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Smylie, M. A. (1989). Teachers' views of the effectiveness of sources of learning to teach. Elementary School Journal, 89, Spiro, R., J, & Jehng, J., C. (1990). Cognitive flexibility and hypertext: Theory and technology for the nonlinear and multidimensional traversal of complex subject matter. In D. Nix & R. Spiro (Eds.), Cognition, education, and multimedia: Exploring ideas in high technology (pp ). Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois. Spiro, R. J., Vispoel, W. L., Schmitz, J. G., Samarapungavan, A., & Boerger, A. E. (1987). Knowledge acquisition for application: Cognitive flexibility and transfer in complex content domains. In B. K. Britton & S. M. Glynn (Eds.), Executive control processes in reading (pp ). Hillsdale. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Stigler, J. W., & Hiebert, J. (1999). The teaching gap: Best ideas from the world's teachers for improving education in the classroom. New York: The Free Press, Simon & Schuster. van den Berg, E. (2001). An exploration of the use of multimedia cases as a reflective tool in teacher education. Research in Science Education, 31, Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Wetzel, C. D., Radtke, P. H., & Stern, H. W. (1994). Instructional effectiveness of video media. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Wilson, S. M., & Berne, J. (1999). Teacher learning and the acquisition of professional knowledge: A review of research on contemporary professional development. Review of Research in Education, 24, Zech, L. K., Gause-Vega, C. L., Bray, M. H., Secules, T., & Goldman, S. R. (2000). Content-based collaborative inquiry: A professional development model for sustaining educational reform. Educational Psychologist, 35(3),