Going Forward: Encouraging Teachers to Embrace Video Technology for Self-Development

Abstract

Overall the studies reported in this book found that teachers, researchers and mathematics educators have benefitted from the affordances of videos. In particular, teachers who overcame their reluctance to be videoed learnt much more about their practice. The reflections of three particular teachers showed how they became more critical about their practice after watching themselves at work. Teacher-T from Singapore who taught model drawing to a group of Primary 2 children challenged herself to design more meaningful instructional materials to address the intellectual needs of the children. More importantly the grounded images of children volunteering information that they had difficulties engaging with different representations challenged her assumptions of how children engage with the different representations used to capture the same set of mathematical relationships. Teacher-K from Korea became more reflective with viewing of each of her five lessons. Her reflections showed that she became increasingly more concerned for those students who were not engaging with the mathematics lessons. Bessie from the Philippines learnt that confidence about her teaching could be misplaced. To ensure that she was able to identify students’ misconceptions, she had to review sharing of her colleagues and to value those shared knowledge. Although teachers from Lu Pien Cheng’s chapter finally embraced video technology, none agreed to be videoed. The teachers were willing to watch a video of the critical commentator, who was also the author of the chapter, conducting a lesson on conversion between different units of measurement. Grounded images of the critical commentator at work were used as a catalyst to promote richer reflections amongst the participating teachers.