Professional Growth Opportunities: Learning Together using Video Observations

Peer Critiques: Using Video to Model New Protocol

by: Edrick Macalaguim

For the last couple of years, our school has been participating in a district-wide professional growth training, implementing a new pedagogy called the Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR).  As a staff we had decided to make the first year a “safe period” to test this new method in our classrooms.  Since we were still learning, most of the staff did not want to be observed (formally or informally) on a pedagogy that was new and unclear.  It was during our second year of implementation that we decided to add an accountability component to our professional growth, by bringing in peer critiques of specific sections to the GRR model.  Videotaping our lessons was the easy part; we were most challenged with creating a protocol for constructive feedback.  Even after the protocol was created, teachers still had clarifying questions:  What does this look like?  How much time do we spend on each section?  How do we give feedback without offending the teacher being observed?  These questions and many more surfaced as we struggled with this process.  From that point, my team decided to videotape a critique session of one of my lessons, in hopes that watching our process might answer some questions still lingering around our staff on how to implement the feedback protocol.  The following video was presented to our staff during a professional learning day centered around critiquing and GRR model.  In order to capture my staff’s attention, as well as to ease the atmosphere a little, I edited this video including a few comedic surprises.