In Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schon (1987) described the features of a professional development experience he termed the reflective practicum. Schon envisioned a setting in which participants learn by doing, joining with others with similar learning goals, guided by a skilled coach. The setting, as he described it, would be a virtual world representative of the world of practice, a place where learners could run "safe experiments cheaply." In a reflective practicum, students interact with one another and with a coach, who engages students in reciprocal dialogue stimulated by their shared experiences in the virtual world of the practicum.
As teacher educators inspired and guided by Schon's work, we try to create and study such virtual worlds through an approach that combines video technology and the case method of teaching. Working with the Dayton, Ohio, public schools and other area school districts, we are trying to create learning opportunities that will enhance the growth of preservice, novice, and veteran teachers as reflective practitioners. Our work has yielded two video series distributed by ASCD, Mentoring the New Teacher (Rowley and Hart 1994) and Becoming a Star Urban Teacher (Rowley and Hart 1995).
Star Urban Teachers
Our success with the video cases in Becoming a Star Urban Teacher illustrates the rich potential of the video case method approach to help create a reflective practicum.
The series is based on Martin his career-long study in which he has identified characteristics of those teachers who are most successful with urban students. Seven of these ideologies and behaviors, which he refers to as functions, are the basis of The Urban Teacher Selection Interview (Haberman 1994) used to predict the potential success of teacher candidates for urban schools. The seven functions are: persistence in problem solving; protecting learners and learning; applying generalizations; approaching at-risk students with high expectations; assuming a professional rather than a personal orientation toward students; avoiding discouragement brought on by working in a school bureaucracy; and admitting teacher fallibility. (Haberman 1995).
Intrigued by his ideas, we conducted and videotaped in-depth interviews with 10 outstanding teachers from the Dayton schools, using questions from Haberman's interview protocol. These interviews validated Haberman's claims and left us wondering: Can these star teacher functions be taught? We felt that they could and proceeded to develop seven video case studies designed to promote the kind of reflective dialogue among practitioners that would (we hoped) lead to insight and action.
Time to Reflect
Each Star Urban Teacher program contains an 8-10 scene video case designed to provoke discussion and analysis of one of the star teacher functions. How does one use the video in a staff development or preservice setting? Let's take one example, What to Do About Raymond, as it might be used by a group of preservice or practicing teachers guided by a coach or facilitator.
Raymond explores the star teacher function of persistence in problem solving. In the first scene, a middle school social studies teacher is leading a lecture-discussion on the prohibition era. The camera captures Raymond, who has his head on his desk and appears to be asleep. At this point, the facilitator pauses the videotape before the teacher responds to Raymond's behavior. Those watching discuss both the various strategies the teacher might employ and possible reasons for Raymond's lack of involvement.
Throughout the remaining nine scenes, viewers follow the teacher as he struggles to understand the nature of Raymond's behavior and to find a workable solution. As each scene unfolds, viewers acquire additional insight into Raymond as the perspectives of other teachers—Raymond's father, the assistant principal, and Raymond's classmates—are introduced to the case. At each reflection point, preservice or veteran teachers have the opportunity not only to react to the action the teacher took, or failed to take, but to suggest what they would have done in similar situations.
The reflection points built into the video cases place participants at the center of challenging professional dilemmas to which there is often no singularly correct, strategic response. Schon (1987) has called this the indeterminate zone of professional practice. It is precisely at these decision points that teachers find themselves engaged in a virtual world where they are free to experiment with their ideas and vicariously experience the challenges of professional decision making.
Workshop participants may also view a star teacher commentary video, which enriches the dialogue by introducing the reflections of star practitioners whose thoughts and attitudes exemplify Haberman's conception of persistence. The workshop participants are not told that persistence is the skill exemplified in the video case. Ideally, they discover this in a more personal and powerful way as a result of struggling with the issues and from viewing the star teacher commentary video that follows.
Voices from the Field
All seven of the video programs in the Star Urban Teacher series have been extensively field tested with preservice, entry-year, and veteran teachers. During the 1994-95 school year, for example, the programs served as the focus of mentor teacher training and entry-year teacher support in the Dayton Public schools and eight suburban school districts. In addition, the series has been used extensively in the undergraduate teacher education program at the University of Dayton. In general, these users have found the video cases to be highly realistic and helpful. We believe that video case studies are proving to be a valuable tool in promoting more reflective and professional practice.
