Cutting-Edge Video Analysis of Student Teaching
Bobbi Frankfort
A school of education should be measured by the performance of its students in real classrooms. Too often, this is rarely the case: schools of education tend to focus on course work, and their graduates, not surprisingly, report that much of this preparation is irrelevant to the challenges they really face in front of children.
The Hunter College School of Education will take national leadership in reversing this history. A gift in 2005 to Hunter College from the Pumpkin Foundation and Joseph and Carol Reich enabled the School of Education to embark on a cutting-edge initiative in the videotaping and analysis of its student-teachers at the Beginning With Children Charter School. With the assistance of a splendid $1 million gift from Bobbi and Lew Frankfort (‘67), this pilot project has grown into a nationally innovative model of teacher preparation in which a digital video recording will be made of each of Hunter’s 500 graduating students during a lesson of their student teaching. The student teacher and a supervising faculty member will analyze these video recordings closely, with a focus on multiple aspects of content delivery and classroom technique. Faculty in other courses will use segments of these same videos to bring “teaching case studies” into their courses. The videos will be indexed by content, level, technique, pedagogic purpose, as well as educational principles, and archived in a searchable online database usable by all our faculty and students.
The video clips developed in this project will be published on-line, in a searchable internet database (on CD or DVD discs), and on iPods, making them available for teaching and analysis in all the common modern formats, easily accessible in the classroom or at home. Graduating students will be able to add video of their teaching to digital résumés.
Through the sophisticated indexing of these videotapes, and by placing them in a user-friendly on-line database, we will build a library of case studies for our faculty, unique in any school of education in the United States. This video analysis initiative will place the Hunter College School of Education at the forefront of national efforts to improve the preparation of teachers. It will also prepare us for the new era of value-added assessment of our graduates.