How to Improve Teacher Professional Development

Current instructional techniques emphasize teacher/student collaboration. The giving and receiving of feedback is intended to help students truly interact with and master the material. Most would agree that student success is directly linked to the quality of instruction or in other words, teacher performance. So, if teacher performance is so critical to student learning, why are lecture style classes still the primary vehicle for delivering professional development to teachers?

Research has found that when teachers attend a one-time lecture for professional development, they rarely implement what they learned in their day-to-day practice. For a teacher to master a new instructional technique, they too, must practice it and receive feedback throughout the learning process. When teachers receive continual and specific feedback, they are able to more quickly incorporate new teaching practices that better the learning outcomes for their students.

The largest issue standing in the way of schools implementing intentional professional development for their teachers is a lack of time and resources. Observing all teachers multiple times over the course of the school year is a massive time commitment for administrators. A solution for this is to use video technology. Video technology is a tool that changes the interaction between teacher and observer into a real-time collaborative process.

Use Video For Professional Development

Video based solutions like Vosaic have a wide range of benefits for teachers. The power of self-reflection can be harnessed and used to further develop skills. Teachers can submit their videos to their coaches and/or administrators for feedback. They can watch the videos either together or separately as well as multiple times. This allows them to catch all the small details. With the hectic schedules of education professionals it is so important not to lose time to ineffective professional development practices. 

Performance discovery with video technology is there to help ensure that teachers are given the best opportunity to develop their practice in a way that will have the most impact on student learning.

You can get started with Vosaic for FREE. To learn more about how Vosaic can help your school, please schedule a short demo with us.