Superintendent's Thoughts on Using Vosaic for PD, Observation, and Evaluation of Teachers

My name is Sam Stecher. I'm superintendent of East Butler Public Schools I've served in that role for five years. I'm also co-founder of school culture initiative known as Mission Monday where we provide interventions to positively impact on school climate on a weekly basis. 

When I have a teacher and administrator unpacking and observation and going off of memory and notes at minimum I'm getting two versions probably three or four depending on how they're translating what the other one is saying. If you want to authentically and accurately know what's going on in your classroom and be able to look at those things and say how can I make them better....that's huge.

What intrigued me about Vosaic and using video as a method to enhance our teaching it stems back to research I read a long time ago from the gentleman by the name of Dr. Kevin Feldman. One of the lessons that really took away from him is this notion of observable engagement. Did I hear the student speaking. Did I see them writing. Did I see them engaged in an act of creation. Did I see them engage in physical activity that moved towards the learning goal. 

We can use video to document those observable interactions and then use that video to dissect to analyze to enhance what we're seeing where we're seeing it eye to eye that's great but when we can go back and look at what we know we observed it just amplifies the impact of having that observable engagement because the next time we engage in those things. We have the footage and we've done the research and make them even more effective. 

Number one I think the user interface is very intuitive and easy. The more friction we can eliminate by having effective technology and effective training which that's another element Vosaic has been great about engaging our staff and our teachers so that they can bring that training to us lowering that level of concern because my teachers are all over the spectrum on how comfortable they are at this. 

I'm not a technology maven, I'm pretty comfortable with it, but I could figure my way through this if I needed to without any professional development it's that simple. But the professional development the training is also there so that I think we can bring all our teachers across our spectrum of technological proficiencies on board without too much sweat on their part.

We're relying on the papyrus...papyrus and quills for our documentation I know that writing down is a little more advanced than papyrus and quills that's how old that technology is. We have something new that's more accurate. We don't need to rely on the same methods that we've relied on for thousands of years.

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