


Teaching Tip: Video recording lessons over time

Michele Dufresne

If you have been following the blog series I have been writing about Maddie, a seven-year-old I am teaching long distance, you will notice that I have been doing a lot of video recording. The other day, I watched a number of clips I made during the writing part of lessons. I was immediately struck by how powerful it was for me as a teacher to review just one aspect of the learning process over time. I am urging you to get yourself a video camera and use it to regularly to record your lessons. I am using a very small video camera called a Flip. There are a few different brands that carry small cameras like it.

Whether you are an intervention teacher working one-on-one (Reading Recovery), or a classroom or reading teacher working with small groups, this is a tool that can give you huge amounts of information that will inform your teaching.

For example, I watched a number of examples of Maddie using sound boxes. Hearing sounds has been a strength for Maddie right from the beginning, yet when I reviewed some clips I realized the tasks had not gotten well established. Therefore, I was not getting the payoff I had expected. Once I saw where I needed to better focus my teaching, the change was amazing. 

With my videos of Maddie, I can now look at all kinds of things: How has her fluency changed over time? Can I see her searching for information at difficulty and how is she searching? How do the prompts I use match up with what she needs to do? Is my prompting changing? Am I encouraging more independence? Oh my! I can think of a zillion things to look at!

Teaching is complex. Using video recording over time can help us do a better job of observing our students' learning as well as our own teaching so that we can be doing the best possible work we can.


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