Beginning Science Teachers’ Use of a Digital Video Annotation Tool to Promote Reflective Practices

Abstract

The development of teachers as reflective practitioners is a central concept in national guidelines for teacher preparation and induction (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education 2008). The Teacher Induction Network (TIN) supports the development of reflective practice for beginning secondary science teachers through the creation of online “communities of practice” (Barab et al. in Inf Soc, 237–256, 2003), which have been shown to have positive impacts on teacher collaboration, communication, and reflection. Specifically, TIN integrated the use of asynchronous, video annotation as an affordance to directly facilitate teachers’ reflection on their classroom practices (Tripp and Rich in Teach Teach Educ 28(5):728–739, 2013). This study examines the use of video annotation as a tool for developing reflective practices for beginning secondary science teachers. Teachers were enrolled in an online teacher induction course designed to promote reflective practice and inquiry-based instruction. A modified version of the Learning to Notice Framework (Sherin and van Es in J Teach Educ 60(1):20–37, 2009) was used to classify teachers’ annotations on video of their teaching. Findings from the study include the tendency of teachers to focus on themselves in their annotations, as well as a preponderance of annotations focused on lower-level reflective practices of description and explanation. Suggestions for utilizing video annotation tools are discussed, as well as design features, which could be improved to further the development of richer annotations and deeper reflective practices.