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Purpose – This chapter provides the reader with an overview of a reflective video pedagogy for use within a literacy center or within professional development contexts. The conceptual overview is followed by two-case examples that reveal how literacy centers can serve as rich, productive research sites for the use and study of reflective video pedagogy.

Methodology/approach – The authors describe their ongoing work to develop and integrate a reflective video pedagogy within a literacy center during a 15-week practicum for literacy-specialists-in-training. The reflective video pedagogy is not only used by the clinicians who work with struggling readers twice a week, but it is also used by the researchers at the literacy center who study the reflective video pedagogy through the same video the clinicians use.

Practical implications – Literacy centers are dynamic sites where children, families, pre/in-service teachers, and teacher educators work together around literacy development. Reflective video pedagogies can be used to closely examine learning and teaching for adult students (i.e., clinicians) and for youth (i.e., children in elementary, middle, and high school) and also for parents who want their children to find success with literacy.

Research implications – In recent years “scaling up” and “scientific research” have come to dominate much of the literacy research landscape. While we see the value and necessity of large-scale experimental studies, we also posit that literacy centers have a unique role to play. Given that resources are scarce, literacy scholars must maximize the affordances of literacy centers as rich, productive research sites for the use and study of a reflective video pedagogy.

To provide a video reflection model based on interactivity for teachers to facilitate disciplinary literacy and a culturally responsive pedagogy during video reflection. The model presents multiplicity of voices within the context of classroom activity crossing boundaries to expand teachers beyond their zone of proximal development for enhanced pedagogical practices.

Expansive learning as model of learning originates from the Cultural Historic Activity Theory framework. It enables viewing learner–teacher–technology interactions embedded within classroom walls that embrace diverse socio-cultural-historical practices. Given its connectedness to a responsive teaching-learning approach the model is adapted with the tenets of interactivity to help teachers with a professional learning tool to include, promote, and expedite pedagogical practices that reflect learner background through video reflection.

The video reflective model using four central question and five principles of the expansive learning matrix examines the various interactivities during a science class period to embrace and enhance a disciplinary literacy approach to teaching. The chapter provides details of opportunities on how the teacher uses this model to adopt a disciplinary literacy and responsive pedagogy approach. It provides directions on how to improve learner–technology interactivity and assist teachers to orchestrate other classroom technologies along with videos as teaching and learning artifacts.

Knowledge construction occurs in spaces that are hard to identify, that is to say that it is difficult to measure when, why, and how knowledge construction happens. By identifying, drawing connections, and making interconnections of the various activities and interactivities from their classroom worlds to lived practices through the tenets in our proposed reflective model the teacher will initiate, facilitate, and eventuate expansive learning and teaching processes. Thereby videos can highlight teacher’s motivations and contradictions when paired with this model and promote the examination of one’s practices to cross-boundaries that embrace the dynamics of learning and knowledge construction as and when it occurs.

The purpose of this chapter is to identify the pedagogical approaches that foster critical reflection using video among the pre-service teachers during tutorials.

The research is situated in a school-based teaching programme in which pairs of pre-service teachers taught small groups of primary aged children over a period of seven weeks. Volunteer pre-service teachers videotaped their lessons and selected video excerpts to share with their peers in the tutorial. The educator guided the pre-service teachers’ reflection using the video. A case study drawing on interviews with pre-service teachers and audio recordings of tutorials, charted the development of pedagogical decisions made by the educators to promote reflection.

The pre-service teachers had difficulties undertaking deep reflection of their own and peers’ teaching practice. The response by educators was to promote collaboration among pre-service teachers by discussing specific aspects of the teaching in small groups and to use a jigsaw approach. This enabled a deeper analysis of particular elements of the lesson that were then integrated to produce a more holistic understanding of the teaching. The video data are most suitable for reflection and provide valuable evidence for pre-service teachers to develop their practice.

For pre-service teachers to develop effective skills to analyse their own practice they need to experience teaching in a safe but challenging environment, over a sustained period; have opportunities to develop a shared understanding of what constitutes quality teaching; have opportunities to critically analyse their teaching in discussion with peers and educators and be able to be guided by a framework of reflective strategies.

Our purpose in this chapter is to provide researchers and educators with a model of how the Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) can be used with inservice and preservice teachers for professional development when teachers engage in reflective processes through the use of video reflection.

In this chapter we provide a brief review of the literature related to video as a learning tool for reflection and a discussion of the Gradual Release of Responsibility and emphasize the role of a teacher educator or more knowledgeable other who scaffolds inservice and preservice teacher reflection across various contexts. Several versions of the GRR model are included. We introduce and explain examples from two class sessions where a combination of inservice and preservice teachers engaged in reflection through video with support from a teacher educator.

We demonstrate that the teacher educator followed the GRR model as she guided preservice and inservice teachers to reflect on video. Through a contrastive analysis of two different class sessions, we show how the instructor released responsibility to the students and how students began to take up this responsibility to reflect more deeply on their own teaching practices.

The examples within this chapter are from a graduate level teacher education course affiliated with a university literacy center. The course was comprised of both preservice and inservice teachers. The model is applicable in a variety of settings and for teachers who are novices as well as those who are experienced teachers.

This is a valuable model for teacher educators and others in professional development to use with teachers. Many teachers are familiar with the use of the GRR model in considering how to guide children’s literacy practices, and the GRR can easily be introduced to teachers to assist them in video reflection on their own teaching.

This chapter provides significant research-based examples of the GRR model and foregrounds the role of a teacher educator in video reflection. The chapter provides a unique framing for research and teaching related to video reflection. The chapter explicitly links the GRR to teacher reflection and video in contexts of professional development or teacher education.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explain the importance of thinking flexibly about the gradual release of responsibility (GRR) during the implementation of an explicit strategy instruction model, Critical Elements of Strategy Instruction (CESI). When the GRR model is typically used to inform teachers’ pedagogical practices, each phase of the scaffolding in the gradual release is usually represented as being a straight line of progression from modeling to guided practice, and then to independence. Scaffolding is often viewed as being a more static progression needed by all students. The authors explore the ebb and flow of scaffolding necessary in the GRR model when teaching the CESI framework to elementary aged students who demonstrated different degrees of competence in applying reading strategies.

Design/Methodology – The findings presented are the result of a two-year longitudinal professional development study with nine in-service elementary school teachers (one male and eight female), with masters’ degrees who ranged in experience from six to 18 years. The teachers used the Pedagogy of Video Reflection (Shanahan et al., 2013) to reflect on their implementation of the CESI, which draws upon the GRR model.

Findings – The authors use examples from their two-year explicit strategy instruction research to illustrate how their experienced in-service teachers learned to think more flexibly about scaffolding in the GRR model. Teachers explored their misconceptions about explicit strategy instruction and the gradual release. Two major shifts in their thinking were the GRR model was not the static model they interpreted it to be and they also realized that they had to use a gradual release when teaching readers the conditional knowledge so readers could use strategies independently.

Research Limitations/Implications – A two-dimensional representation of a complex concept, like the GRR can result in a less nuanced understanding of a complex concept, even when many of these issues are previously discussed in research and practitioner publications.

Practical Implications – Classroom teachers are provided with a more complex understanding of GRR model, where they need to interpret student responses to know when to and not release learners.

Originality/Value of Chapter – This chapter captures in-service teachers’ perspectives of the GRR model as being flexible instead of static and also reveals how student responses can be used to gauge how to make adaptations to ­scaffolding.

To present a cross-case analysis of two pre-service teachers who studied their own teaching using video within a teacher inquiry project (TIP) – a teacher education pedagogy we are calling video-mediated teacher inquiry.

Activity theory is used to examine how inquiry groups collaboratively used video to mediate shifts in goals and tool use for the two pre-service teachers presented in the study. This chapter addresses the question of how video-mediated teacher inquiry supports the appropriation of teaching tools (i.e., classroom discussion) in a teacher education program.

The findings indicate that shifts in goals and tool use made during the TIP suggest greater appropriation of the pedagogical tool of classroom discussion. We also consider how these shifts may be bound by the inquiry project.

The use of video cases of teachers’ own teaching is an emergent pedagogy that combines elements of both case study methods and practitioner inquiry. We argue that this pedagogy supports tool appropriation among pre-service teachers in ways that may help them develop as reflective practitioners.

To explain how digital video editing can help foster reflective pedagogical thinking for pre-service teachers (PSTs).

PST education has emphasized reflective thinking, particularly through the use of video as a means to view teaching vignettes. As the process of editing videos involves recursive viewings and numerous multimodal choices in representing the raw footage, this chapter outlines two disciplinary PST courses (English and science) where they used digital video editing to create narratives of and reflect on their teaching lesson.

PSTs who edited their teaching promoted reflexive thinking about their content learning, provided a means to critique their teaching context, pedagogy, and assessment, and served to shift their attention from PST as learner to student as learner.

Using digital video allows teachers, through the recursive process of editing their footage, to emphasize reflection on content area learning, planned and enacted pedagogy, and context-based and learner-centered approaches to teaching.

This study explored the impact of integrating digital tools on professional preparation in literacy, specifically an online digital video portal for teachers’ self-observation of instructional practice.

As a design experiment (Bradley & Reinking, 2011), a graduate-level Reading Education course was revisioned for blended learning to accommodate the professional development of practicing teachers in a rural, remote context. This chapter focuses on understanding how teachers experience video as a platform for reflection on and improvement of practice, with implications for those who seek to incorporate digital video into literacy professional development.

Through video analysis mediated by the use of a self-evaluation guide and a collaborative, online community, teacher-learners reflected on their own and their peers’ pedagogy and language interactions with students. After overcoming initial struggle with watching themselves on the video, the close analysis of clips became a powerful catalyst for professional growth. Teachers’ reflections shifted from outward-directed to inner-directed.

To successfully integrate video analysis in Reading Education practicums and professional development for in-service teachers, consideration should be given to technical as well as pedagogical components. Purposefully building in various scaffolds, for example, technical tutorials, prompts to focus video analysis, and safe platforms for sharing and collaboration, proved to be beneficial for teacher-learners in our courses.

This critical analysis investigates 23 studies on the use of video in pre-service literacy teacher preparation to gain a better understanding of the potential of video-based pedagogy for supporting pre-service teachers’ development of the complex set of knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed for teaching literacy in today’s classrooms.

This study extends what has been learned from prior reviews to investigate research focused on the use of video in pre-service literacy teacher preparation with particular attention paid to the extent to which pre-service teachers’ work with video helps them examine literacy teaching and learning in relation to race, language, culture, and power.

Working with video has strong potential for engaging pre-service teachers in reflecting on their own teaching, deepening their understanding of the challenges of engaging in literacy practices, fostering expertise in systematically describing, reflecting on, and analyzing their teaching, providing multiple perspectives on instruction, analyzing and assessing student growth, and discussing developmentally appropriate instruction. Results were mixed regarding changing teachers’ knowledge and beliefs. Overall, the tasks pre-service teachers completed did not explicitly guide them to focus on the relationship between characteristics of the diverse learners featured in the videos and issues of teaching and learning.

Literacy teacher educators could do more to take advantage of the affordances of using video to work more explicitly toward goals of helping pre-service teachers develop a critical consciousness, an inquiring stance, and a sense of agency, along with examining teaching practices that represent culturally responsive teaching. Pre-service teachers need explicit guidance in what to observe for and more focused discussion regarding their developing knowledge and beliefs about student diversity.

The paper aims to present a methodology for analyzing the pedagogical content of video games and to present the findings of one such analysis.

The pedagogical analysis presented here consists of three parts – an introduction to the new media of video games, a method for analyzing video games, and lastly, the results of analyzing the pedagogical content of the video game Portal.

The analysis uncovered significant pedagogical content and useful methodologies used in the design of the video game Portal.

The pedagogies and design methods used in the game Portal can help librarians engage and educate students of the gaming generation in information literacy tasks.

This paper provides a model for pedagogical analysis of the video game medium and practical techniques taken from an excellent representative of that medium.