Sharing Classroom Video for Teacher Development

On the one hand, university faculty are expected to engage in professional development throughout their working lives (Borko, et al. 2008). On the other hand, there are not a great many opportunities to interact with colleagues throughout the day (Boon, 2005). In many cases, very little is known about what takes place in a colleague's classroom. Surely, educators can benefit from observing each other, especially when they teach at the same institution or even the same program. Sharing a video of a class activity is one way to open the classroom doors and engage in professional development. Putnam and Borko (2000) wrote about the importance of interactions with the people in your environment to the process of learning and development. In this project, three university teachers met regularly to share and discuss video clips of their classes. The teachers reflected on their classes, shared activities, techniques, and materials, and discussed pedagogy. Analysis of notes made after the meetings indicated that this practice supported teacher development in a number of distinct ways, fostering an increasing sense of trust and openness between the members of the project group. University faculty, to a great extent, work in isolation (Boon, 2005). University faculty members rarely, if ever, get the opportunity to observe a colleague's classroom interactions. Most of the non-teaching day is spent in a private office. Interactions may occasionally occur in offices, common areas, or at meetings, but these exchanges do not shed much light on what occurs in the classrooms of colleagues. In short, faculty members generally know little about each other's teaching styles, approaches and methodologies even though they may work in the same department and teach some of the same classes. One of the authors of this study, John, was experiencing this state of isolation in his work as a lecturer at Gifu Shotoku Gakuen University, a small private university in Gifu, Japan. John is the only native English speaker in the department of education. Moreover, there are no common syllabi for the classes that he teaches; each teacher is expected to design and plan their own courses, working individually. Even John's classroom materials are created in isolation, as he utilizes self-published textbooks, and he has created or adapted many of the supplementary activities. Thus, John felt the desire to hold his own methods up to scrutiny, and to observe the methods of colleagues and compare them, in order to refine his own methods. John was also concerned about finding ways to handle uncooperative students. Since starting to teach at the university in 2011, he had, at times, struggled to keep