Reflective professional development for urban teachers through videotaping and guided assessment

Abstract

As a part of the United States Department of Education Teacher Quality Enhancement Grants (TQE) program, a professional development project was conducted to support selected urban teachers from a Professional Development School to think reflectively about their teaching and learning. The 24 survey items were developed based on the three domains of Danielson’s teaching practice. Using the survey, the eight participating teachers and 15 external reviewers were asked to assess the videotaped teaching performances three times. The main goal of the study was to examine if the participants would improve their reflective thinking skills using structured reflective tools, i.e. videotaping, the assessment rubrics, reflective writing guidelines, coaching and the reflective practice model. In addition the study examined if there were any significant differences in the three ratings. The results indicated that several items showed the significances among the ratings, and half of the participants evolved to the stage of evaluation, creating new schemata.