Harnessing the Power of Videos to Support Teachers in Asynchronous Personalized Learning

• In Event: Innovations in Video-Intensive STEM Professional Development in Online and Blended Environments

Abstract

The Invigorating Statistics Teacher Education Through Professional Online Learning (InSTEP) project aims to design an innovative personalized online learning platform to allow teachers to develop their expertise in teaching statistics and data science. InSTEP builds from research on design and implementation of online professional development for teachers, broadly and specifically in statistics teacher education. The InSTEP environment is designed to support teachers in engaging in primarily asynchronous ways at their own pace, but with opportunities for community building and networking. One major element in our design is to effectively engage teachers with a wide-ranging use of video.

In online courses, Guo, Kim, and Rubin (2014) found that: shorter videos are much more engaging; videos that intersperse an instructor’s talking head with slides showing content are better than slides alone; and, videos where instructors speak at a faster rate with enthusiasm promote engagement. While such expository and instructional videos will be used in InSTEP, they will not be used in ways typically done in content-focused online courses where lecture style videos are followed by quizzes. Instead, we will primarily use videos that assist teachers in learning from experienced educators and classroom interactions while teachers and students are investigating data using technology tools. The use of classroom-based video in professional development has been an established best practice for at least two decades (e.g., Copeland & Decker, 1996; Amador, Keehr, Wallin, & Chilton, 2020). New animation tools allow for the creation of scenes with actors representing real classroom interactions (Chazan & Herbst, 2012, Laaser & Toloza, 2017). Such animations have been shown to be an effective way to include artifacts of practice in mathematics teacher education materials (e.g., Herbst, et al., 2011; Chazan, et al., 2018). In a prior study on online professional development in teaching statistics, Authors (2020) found that expert video discussions about issues in teaching statistics and videos of students engaged in statistics (real and animated) served as major triggers for changing teachers’ perspectives to include a more robust vision of statistical thinking and teaching strategies for data investigations. InSTEP professional learning will capitalize on this finding and create purposeful opportunities for teachers to engage in critical analysis, reflection, discussion and connections to their teaching practices through video.

The poster will highlight different types of videos and their purposes, including:

● Brief explanatory videos with visuals to assist teachers in learning specific statistics content and better understand pedagogical approaches;

● Screencasts of specific data tools to assist teachers in developing their own technological expertise with powerful data analysis techniques;

● Videos from third-party sites used to contextualize datasets and investigations;

● Expert discussion videos for learning from experienced educators talking about issues in statistics and data science education; and,

● Classroom-based videos (real and animated depictions) for analyzing teacher moves, student-teacher interactions, students’ thinking, and students’ discussions and use of technology to engage with data.

We will also illustrate ways we frame videos in the platform, embed interactive components, and connect discussions that can support teachers’ learning from and with videos.

Authors

• Hollylynne Stohl Lee, North Carolina State University

• Gemma Foust Mojica, North Carolina State University

• Alex Dreier, North Carolina State University

• Emily Thrasher, North Carolina State University

• Zachary Vaskalis, North Carolina State University