Video Feedback Reduced Air Travel Costs to Observe Teachers Across Alaska

Providing timely and frequent feedback to teachers can be challenging if you’re a coach and your teachers work in a different school or town.

But what about when there are no roads and the only way to visit is by flying there?

Amy Vinlove is a professor of teacher education at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. For years, she’s faced this exact problem.

While some teachers teach in the Fairbanks community, other teacher interns are scattered all over Alaska. Some are a six-hour-drive away in the urban area of Anchorage. But others are in rural towns like Koliganek, population 209, where there literally are no roads leading into town (but there is an airport).

Last spring, to provide her interns with more regular feedback and coaching, Amy decided to try out Edthena.

What was it like providing your interns with feedback before Edthena?

Before Edthena, by the midpoint in the internship year, off-campus interns would have had only two sets of eyes actually see them teaching – those of their mentor teacher, and those of their university liaison, during their lone semester on-site check in. 

By the midpoint of their internship this year, the interns have had their teaching observed and commented on by their liaison, their mentor teacher, two of their peers, themselves (they are required to watch and reflect on their own videos) and at least four faculty subject area instructors.

That is nine sets of eyes watching them teach and giving them meaningful feedback!

What’s the real-world impact of getting to observe your teachers more often?

One shortcoming in our program has been the disconnect between the faculty who teach methods courses and the actual teaching that occurs in the interns’ classrooms. We have always felt that we do a solid job of helping our interns create high quality curriculum and also in providing opportunities for guided reflection on their teaching, but we haven’t had the ability to know if and how these practices were actually being enacted by the interns.

Edthena has offered us the opportunity to actually see our interns trying out core practices in their classroom, and has closed the feedback loop for us.

How does video reflection impact your role as a teacher educator?

I can provide engaging and thoughtful lessons and readings and facilitate discussions and role plays all day long, but up until now I haven’t had much solid evidence that the instructional strategies I was presenting in my class were even being tried by the interns in the classroom. 

Sure, they could plan to use a particular practice, and they could even reflect on how the practice went in their classroom. But without me being able to see them try that practice, I have been unable to really know what additional support I could or should offer to help them improve their actual teaching.

In this regard, Edthena is as useful to me, as a faculty member, as it is to the students!