Abstract:

One of the most important aspects of Foreign Language Teacher Education is the means by which trainers can observe and give feedback to trainees’ developing performance. The opportunity to facilitate enhanced value for professional learning can be presented through the use of Mobile Technologies and, specifically, digital applications that can record class sessions while improving quality of formative feedback on practice from teacher trainer to trainees. The VEO (Video Enhanced Observation) App and system were created to improve Teachers’ Professional Development (Batlle, 2016; Haines & Miller, 2016; Miller, 2015), allowing teachers to be recorded and tag features of classroom practice to effortlessly review and reflect on what happened. The simplicity and flexibility of combining qualitative video evidence with quantitative tag data, means that the use of the VEO system is not restricted to Teachers Training courses. With focus on process and interaction, VEO may be deployed for any Teacher Professional Development activity, such as peer to peer observation within schools’ internal training and development.

Given the intended application of the system in developing pedagogy, the question of teachers’ reactions, adoption and use with regard to the system and its elements. These include the live-tagging app, “tag set frameworks”, uploading and sharing data to a professional-social portal whereby written comments and further tags can be left by peers, trainees or trainers to facilitate discussion around the recorded practice. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyze the beliefs and feelings of eight Spanish as a Foreign Language teachers using VEO for internal training based on peer observation. For this purpose, eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with the aim of understanding how they used the system, any benefits or recommendations to other users.

After being presented VEO as a tool to foster teachers’ pedagogical insight and to improve professional development in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning, this article will be unpick teachers’ perceptions of using the VEO system and its various features. On the whole, users perceive VEO as a powerful and innovative technology for supporting peer observation. Their positive insights were centered on the facility to focus on specific aspects of practice, enabling further comment from peers. Moreover, teachers underlined the convenience provided by pinpointing the specific moments within videos eliminating time wasted searching entire videos for learning points. As such, VEO’s unique combination of qualitative and quantitative data was seen to foster improved teacher quality in a time-efficient way.

References:
[1] Batlle, J. (2016). An interview with Paul Seedhouse on Video Enhanced Observation (VEO): A new tool for teacher training, professional development and classroom research. Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, 9(3), 90-97. Retrieived from: http://revistes.uab.cat/jtl3/article/view/v9-n3-battle
[2] Haines, J., & Miller, P. (2016). Video-Enhanced Observation: Developing a flexible and effective tool. In M. O’Leary (Ed.), Reclaiming Lesson Observation: Supporting Excellence in Teacher Learning (pp. 127-140): Routledge.
[3] Miller, P. (2015). Video-enhanced observation: a new way to develop teacher practice. Optimus Education, Retreived from: http://my.optimus-education.com/video-enhanced-observation-new-way-develop-teacher-practice

Keywords:

Classroom observation, teacher professional development, peer to peer observation, classroom interaction, foreign language teacher education.