Abstract:

With South African school learners scoring exceptionally poorly in both national and internationally benchmarked evaluations, and international research showing that teacher/teaching quality is a key determinant of learner achievement, attention has shifted to the state of teacher education in the country, and the extent to which new teachers are being provided with the required subject and pedagogical knowledge and skills to practice. There is growing consensus that much of what teachers need to learn must be learned in and from practice rather than in preparing for practice. The results of a large-scale survey, as part of the Teacher preparation project, of final year BEd students in 2013 indicated that Work Integrated Learning was inadequate, characterised by limited and skewed exposure to prevailing school practices and conditions, insufficient and inexpert supervision and inconsistencies in the amount and quality of feedback and assessment.

Teacher education programmes are beginning to place an emphasis on performance assessments such as portfolios that collect evidence of preservice teachers actual instruction, through videotapes, curriculum plans, and samples of learner work and learning, along with preservice teachers commentaries explaining the basis for their decisions about what and how they taught, in light of their curriculum goals and learner needs, an how they assessed learning and gave feedback to individual learners. Feedback is the cornerstone of effective teaching practice. Without feedback, good practice is not reinforced, poor performance is not corrected, and the path to improvement not identified. Though mentor teachers and lecturers believe they give regular and sufficient feedback, often this is not how it is perceived by teacher candidates.

The purpose of this presentation is to report on a pilot project where multi-modal feedback (i.e., video, audio and text) is provided to teacher candidates (on campus and distance) via screen capture software (OBS-Studio for Windows, Capture for Apple products and AZ Screen Recorder for Android) with the intention of narrowing the gap between actual and desired performance.

Keywords:

Multi-modal feedback, Teacher Education.